Introductory Lectures ...

by
Sigmund Freud

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Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis

by Sigmund Freud

3.81 of 5 stars 3.81 · rating details · 2,061 ratings · 40 reviews

These lectures were delivered by Freud during World War I. Never before, in the course of 30 years of lecturing at the University of Vienna, had he deliberately set down, with a view to publication, the full range of his theories and observations. This series, therefore, represents a stock-taking of psychoanalysis as it stood after the secession of Adler and Jung.

Published (first published 1917)

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Jan 13, 2013 Nathan "N.R." Gaddis rated it 5 of 5 stars · review of another edition

“What it’s like to be a fucking human being” is a phrase we know to be DFW’s characterization of the kind of fiction he was intent on creating. The sentiment has a long tradition of compelling the creation of great books, back through Barth and Pynchon, Joyce and Proust, Dostoevsky and Tolstoy, Shakespeare and Rabelais, Homer and Socrates. Add to the series the name “Freud,” who along with Marx and Nietzsche, these three masters of suspicion, turned our attention to an element of being human fro...more “What it’s like to be a fucking human being” is a phrase we know to be DFW’s characterization of the kind of fiction he was intent on creating. The sentiment has a long tradition of compelling the creation of great books, back through Barth and Pynchon, Joyce and Proust, Dostoevsky and Tolstoy, Shakespeare and Rabelais, Homer and Socrates. Add to the series the name “Freud,” who along with Marx and Nietzsche, these three masters of suspicion, turned our attention to an element of being human from which it was always happier to turn away. These three masters of suspicion developed an analysis and criticism which showed that there was more to being human than can be had by the mere assumption of the self’s transparency to itself. With Marx, the human being is subject to an ideology which functions behind the scenes; with Nietzsche, the exercise of Power is discovered even within the attempts of our most altruistic practices; and with Freud the Copernican revolution is completed with the discovery of a psychic territory known as the unconscious, that territory which mythology had populated with devils and demons, which Paul found as “sin living within me” when he finds that that which he desired to do he could not do and that which he despised was that which he did do.

Freud’s Introductory Lectures on Psycho-Analysis, a series of public lectures delivered over the course of two academic terms, 1915-16 and 1916-17, in Vienna, shows Freud at his most popularizing, developing the mode of investigation which is psycho-analysis, then still a young science, to an audience at once curious and skeptical. As such, these lectures are to be highly commended to the curious reader today in so far as we all know already what Freud’s up to and why he is long ago discredited, his theories disproven, his thinking mired in Victorian morality and misogyny, his system unscientific, himself excessively obsessed with sexuality, etc etc. All of which common places about Freud, all such know-betterisms are laid to rest in these lectures as Freud listens to and responds to all the common objections to this work, the same then as now. His mode of presentation is dialogic, engaged in a conversation with his audience. His thinking hesitates, he feels out the limits of what psycho-analysis has accomplished, what is still unknown, where he has had success and how he has failed, in which direction he has had to change his mind, together with the editor’s footnotes which connect various passages of the lectures with Freud’s other writings, indicating where and when and how Freud’s thinking changed and developed, we get the impression of a massive undertaking which cannot exist in any dogmatic framework.

These lectures are divided into three sections functioning to bring the audience step-wise into the methods of interpretation which is psycho-analysis, the discovery of meaning within apparently meaningless activities of the human being. First is the discussion of parapraxes, the infamous “Freudian slip” of the tongue. This is followed by a relatively compact discussion of the interpretation of dreams which is more fully developed in his famous The Interpretation of Dreams. If I may digress on this just a moment, the kernel of this interpretation of dreams is not so much about turning the manifest dream content into a “true” meaning found in its latent content, what it is “really about,” but rather to understand the dream work itself, the contortion and displacement of the latent into the manifest content, what it is that is functioning here that disallows the “true meaning” itself to show itself directly but only in a perverted form which we do experience as dream. But enough. The third section of the lectures takes us then into psycho-analysis proper, the understanding of the neuroses. As is the nature of such pedagogical steppings deeper into a given matter, here Freud’s thinking and presentation become more dense and subject to greater misunderstanding. A discussion of the neuroses is beyond the capacity of this review and indeed of this reviewer. Nevertheless, careful reading of this third portion of lectures provides a great deal of insight into Freud’s concerns and methodologies.

Common as Freud’s thought is, it is still baffling to me how little of this thinking is actually understood in proportion to the ubiquity of his name upon the western person’s tongue. He is the subject of too easy jokes, but has written a bit on jokes which should be of interest to anyone who enjoys a good joke at Sigmund’s expense, The Joke and Its Relation to the Unconscious. Also of interest, I’m sure, to the average person desirous of avenging themself upon Freud would be his The Psychopathology of Everyday Life. The volume of our present attention should also be paired with the later New Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis, published in 1933.

Discussing resistance to Freud is a slippery proposition. There are certainly objections to be made, clarifications to be asked for, some things to be rejected, items which must be more fully developed, etc, etc. But what is most dangerous perhaps, and even disingenuous, as Freud himself would acknowledge, is to treat this resistance as a symptom of a neurosis which can only be resolved by analysis. But analysis belongs on the couch, not in public conversation and discussion about a scientific methodology.

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Nov 21, 2012 Scribble Orca rated it 1 of 5 stars · review of another edition Recommends it for: anyone looking for an excuse to continue Freud's fraud

Recommended to Scribble by: fortunately no-one

Male chauvinist. Nothing closet about him at all. The wonder is that he is still given any credence. If ever there was advice to be applied to the "teacher", it would be this:

Physician, heal thyself.

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Apr 24, 2013 Voldemort rated it 1 of 5 stars · review of another edition Recommends it for: NO-FUCKING-ONE

After my long agonizing exodus of reading this book (3 volumes translated in my place), I wished one thing: strangling Freud’s dead body and killing him once again.
But then, I thought.
What if my throttling him, it’s subconsciously related to one simple sexual act, the fulfilling action of a hand job? My fingers wrapped around his neck causing satisfying pressure.
This means I wanna kill somebody’s dick.
And that is wrong, very wrong.
Thus, I thought again.
Maybe me suffocating him in reality, i...more

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Apr 14, 2013 Billie Pritchett rated it 3 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Few people have had such an influence on 20th century thinking and beyond as Sigmund Freud has had. People routinely speak of others as being narcissistic, anal or anal-retentive, or are quick to point out a 'Freudian slip.' Freud's Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis outlines his conception of psychoanalysis, which he takes to be built around a couple of major theses: (1) most of our thoughts are not conscious and (2) our sexual desires are a primary cause for mental diseases and personalit...more Few people have had such an influence on 20th century thinking and beyond as Sigmund Freud has had. People routinely speak of others as being narcissistic, anal or anal-retentive, or are quick to point out a 'Freudian slip.' Freud's Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis outlines his conception of psychoanalysis, which he takes to be built around a couple of major theses: (1) most of our thoughts are not conscious and (2) our sexual desires are a primary cause for mental diseases and personality disorders.

He then shows how psychoanalysis frames slips of the tongue, discrepancies between a person's intentions and actions, dreams, and neurotic behaviors or thought patterns. In short, Freud thinks that slips of the tongue are often caused by non-conscious thoughts released through some sort of mental mechanism from the 'unconscious,' where the thought is supposed to be suppressed. So too, according to Freud, is the discrepancy between what a person claims to want and doing a matter of non-conscious thoughts. For instance, today I really had to do my taxes at the office but I was also supposed to spend time with my girlfriend and her sister in a neighboring town. Still I do not know if I could have done the taxes more quickly or set them aside entirely had I really wanted to go. This was contrary, mind you, to my expressed intention, to myself, my girlfriend, and my girlfriend's sister, that I wanted to go and spend the day with them. Freud might regard this as a case where my actions reflected what I really wanted to do deep down in my 'unconscious.'

I keep putting 'unconscious' in scare quotes for the following reason: I think Freud's identification of a space or thing called the 'unconscious' is a kind of category mistake. To say that most of our thoughts are not conscious is not necessarily to say that most of our thoughts reside in the 'unconscious.' No one need a some that there is such a place as the 'unconscious' to believe that we do not know the deep reasons why we do most of our actions. I think the history of psychology has not borne out Freud's claims that the 'unconscious' is a kind of thing, but it has borne him out in claiming that most thoughts, perhaps all thoughts, are non-conscious. Neuroscientist Christof Koch, for example, identifies thoughts as manipulators of symbolic and sensory data that are non-conscious; rather, they are like little computers or little agents or actors. According to Koch, what appears to be the steady steam of conscious thoughts, what we experience as the interior monologue, is actually a kind of representation of the underlying thoughts but not the thoughts themselves.

Freud analyzes dreams and neurotic behaviors and thoughts also in terms of being caused by non-conscious thoughts, only this time he more boldly identifies the thoughts, for normal and abnormal people alike, as being mainly the result of sexual desires that have somehow been suppressed. The reader, I think, will find that most of the assumptions that the major cause for dissatisfaction with 'neurotics' and semi-neurotics is a lack of unfulfilled sexual desire probably has more to do with the sexual repression of Freud's era than with psychological mechanisms of repression in general, and in some cases seem to be the result of Freud's own idiosyncratic thoughts. For example, here's a gem I've never heard or thought before.

From the very outset children unit in thinking that the birth of the child takes place through the anus; that the child therefore appears as a ball of feces.

Frankly, I think a lot of what passed for psychoanalysis in Freud's day was something like convincing someone, the patient say, of a confabulation that he or she would be willing to adopt as part of his or her own personal narrative, and this passed, as for as the patient was concerned for really revealing to himself or herself one's true inner nature, and as such really passed for treatment. I think it is important for therapy to bring about a patient's hitherto undiscovered non-conscious thoughts and desires but only insofar as they can be discovered and in instances when they cannot it is important for a therapist, it seems to me, that while he or she, the therapist, cannot find the psychological cause, not quite possibly could it ever be found, that there are nonetheless various mechanisms for coping with one's neuroses and other problems.

Apologies. This has been more than a review.(less)

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Dec 12, 2012 Megan rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: nonfiction, psychology

I read this book for an undergraduate Psychology of Personality course. I will say at the outset that I believe firmly that there is value in this book even for those who consider Freudian theory to be a load of crap.

Freud is, like it or not, the father of the discipline of psychology, and I think a good grounding in the history of psychology helps students to understand the progression toward where the discipline is now. I also believe that despite what some anti-Freud professors have said poi...more

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Aug 22, 2010 Matt rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

I'm sort of guessing that this is the same book I read; mine was volume 16 of the collected writings, but I certainly haven't read the other 29 volumes or whatever it is, so it felt silly to claim that on goodreads. Hell, I haven't even read all three of the lectures collected here (which is to say, three lecture series-- my book had something like twenty five chapters, each of which is itself a lecture). But after reading Psychopathology of Everyday Life, which I felt was really good at outlini...more I'm sort of guessing that this is the same book I read; mine was volume 16 of the collected writings, but I certainly haven't read the other 29 volumes or whatever it is, so it felt silly to claim that on goodreads. Hell, I haven't even read all three of the lectures collected here (which is to say, three lecture series-- my book had something like twenty five chapters, each of which is itself a lecture). But after reading Psychopathology of Everyday Life, which I felt was really good at outlining what psychoanalysts were looking at, I thought I needed a better understanding of treatment, and the theory behind it, and this volume provided that-- it includes a lot more theory than the other book, and many fewer examples or case studies, but it's still a pretty great read-- the hard thing to accept or explain is that Freud is just interesting, as a talker and a thinker, and I find his way of approaching problems really elegant and insightful. I'm not sure why that is, but it's true-- I trust him in his approach, and am always tickled at the way he parses problems, even when, as is often the case, I think his conclusions, even his methods, are sort of nutty. I just like watching him work.

I do wonder how much Freud I can read before more of my resistances are overcome-- this is the second book I've read, and I am considerably more enamored than I was before reading them. But I still find myself in the position of wanting something different from Freud-- here, he makes some pretty shocking claims about homosexuals that I think, with effort, you could defend, in the sense that Freud later goes back and explains what he means about perversion, and how it's more a continuum than an absolute designation. But it's still a struggle to make those excuses, and you'd rather not have to. Some of the same things can be said about the Elektra complex, I think you'd call it, though it doesn't get called that here, and some elements of the Oedipus complex also seem odd, or underdeveloped.

In other words, there are problems with this book, reading it as a modern reader, and it's important for me to keep those in mind, even when I am more than a little seduced by Freud's presentational style.(less)

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Jul 28, 2011 Phil rated it 3 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: theory-non-fiction

Although this is more comprehensive than Freud's other works I've read, it also seems somewhat more scattered. Of course, in his direct adresses to the audience/class Freud reveals more about himself than about psychoanalysis, but that's true of all his works to some degree. There are some lectures where he doesn't even really address himself to the topic, but focuses on the audience's expectations for that topic, which isn't particularly helpful since my expectations are different than what Fre...more

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Mar 22, 2010 Chris rated it 3 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Let me preface my review of Freud's introductory lectures by appending an excerpt from my review of The Communist Manifesto:

Having recently read the introductory lectures of Sigmund Freud preceding my reading of The Communist Manifesto, I realize that Marx has most probably suffered the same fate as Freud in the modern age: they are both dismissed as radical idealists who expired in the infancy of their sociological/psychological breakthroughs. This faulty appraisal is reinforced by most people'...more Let me preface my review of Freud's introductory lectures by appending an excerpt from my review of The Communist Manifesto:

Having recently read the introductory lectures of Sigmund Freud preceding my reading of The Communist Manifesto, I realize that Marx has most probably suffered the same fate as Freud in the modern age: they are both dismissed as radical idealists who expired in the infancy of their sociological/psychological breakthroughs. This faulty appraisal is reinforced by most people's ignorance of what these two thinkers really had to say, or by the extrapolation of their most abrasive phrasing of, much of which is, an otherwise palatable, and now rather commonplace and applied, revelation. I realize that along with most people, I know very little about thinkers like Freud and Marx; I have mostly known only what people say about them, or crumb-quotes from them that float past in the raging current of money-bearing, status-enhancing information that poisons much of academia.
That being said I must say that I thoroughly enjoyed reading Freud's lectures. Without agreeing with his every word, I must admit that I settled on the opinion that the man was a genius. He was also very brave, for he resisted the tide of conventional 'safe-think' and dared to offer revolutionary explanations for neuroses. For some, Freud underpinned the Darwinian 'dethronement' of humanity as the pinnacle of the created order, and some view his ideas as completely reductionist in a portrayal of man as a mere beast with completely vulgar tendencies. Freud would not deny that, like the Copernican revolution, his ideas would lower mankind's opinion of himself as the center of the universe, but what many do not realize is that Freud actually contended with the 'other' forerunners of psychology beginning in the 19th century (i.e. the structuralists and behaviorists) that sought to reduce mankind to a hardwired machine or a salivating dog. He also sought to keep in check the exaggerated claims of psychiatry in his day which went so far as to consider neurotics as ‘degenerates’ whose illnesses were viewed as incoherent malfunctions of the psyche with no experiential significance. In a sense, Freud resisted reductionist theories, and attempted to plant his theories an equally safe distance from the extremes of religious fundamentalism, and, on the other hand, scientific materialism.
Freud pioneered objective dream interpretation, and I was quite impressed with his deconstruction of dream-work. As a result of reading his ideas on dreams, I came away with a greater capacity for understanding the development of what Freud calls ‘latent dream thoughts’ into what becomes the ‘manifest dream’. Working backwards one can interpret the original thought or ‘wish’ of the dream by unraveling the effects of ‘second-revisions’, ‘imagery’, ‘displacement’, and ‘condensation’ that distorts the original intent of the dream. This is not a naïve exploration of dream mystique, but a serious, analytical dissection of the mental processes that produce dreams.
Some of the most misunderstood and underappreciated facets of Freudian theory are his ideas on sexuality. There are SO many people who don’t understand but rashly judge on this issue, so I’ll make a few cursory attempts to bring clarification, and debunk some of the objections that might be raised against taking Freud seriously.
1) The Oedipus/Electra complexes are, along with most of the neuroses, really parental attachment issues in general and not necessarily conscious wishes to always have sex with a parent.
2) Idea’s such as female ‘penis-envy’ and male fear of castration may have been a cultural symptom of the sway of patriarchal power within society, and thus Freud’s analysis of his therapeutic experiences with neurotics may have been heavily influenced by the desire/fear of masculinity within society that could open or preclude someone from being accepted or rejected. In other words, it might have been more desirable in his day, even in all past history, to become a dominant male. How could that not find its way into psychological theories?
3) Freud believed that children were ‘polymorphously perverse’ and mostly unconscious. He believed their sexual gratification, especially in the pre-phallic stage, would take many different kinds of unconscious, perverse (unnatural) forms before it discovered pathways that were safe and purposeful in terms of fulfillment. In other words, children’s desires were going to be all over the place, and only our super-ego’s censure of ‘immoral thoughts’ keep us from suspecting that children’s sexuality might actually be a bit ‘crooked’ even in normal development. We largely believe children to be asexual, and Freud delights in scoffing at the obvious censoring of unacceptable theories that society deems ‘dangerous’.
4) Freud speculated, rightly in my mind, that his theories were going to be unpopular with mainstream society because Law would always represent the repression and denial of natural instincts that may upset the peace it has worked so hard to establish. “Society believes that no greater threat to its civilization could arise than if the sexual instincts were to be liberated and returned to their original aims. For this reason society does not wish to be reminded of this precarious portion of its foundations.” But in the repression (not guidance) of those instincts, the forceful current remains hidden underground that may one day erupt and swallow all of civilization’s finest work in a moment of instinctual upheaval.
5) It is well-known that Freud opposed religion in almost any form, but what he mostly repelled was any attempt, in science or religion, to craft a Weltanschaunng, or an absolute ‘theory of everything’. He knew too well that we are mentally prone to try and find an easy answer to salve our loneliness and fear, but we are too easily duped into ‘fixating’ on a pleasing concept that blinds us to our true condition, and offers us a promise of reward with little work, and little pain. Religion, in his mind, is an easy, one-stroke solution for a current complexity, and invariably ‘bears the imprint of the times [and conditions:] in which they arose’. It is copout, an avoidance of real problems and real pain. He mentions that religion may be significant in some stages of maturation, but ultimately needs to be outgrown. And, for much of the religion that Freud was familiar with, his estimate of religion may not have been far off point.
There’s more, much more. Freud was brazen in his exploration of the psyche, and lifted up his voice to boldly assert his ideas that he knew would be suppressed by the majority of people that heard him. But if there was anything Freud understood, it was that people naturally repress forces and ideas that threaten them to which they have no ready defense. Freud had reached into the mind and purposes of mankind and, in the words of W.H. Auden, put his “finger on the flesh that has been skinned”. There’s nothing to be afraid of here, except the realization that one might be found. And Freud did a great job of finding where it is that people are lurking, and what it is they are secretly clutching behind their own consciousness.

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Jan 15, 2009 James rated it 3 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: psychology, u-of-chicago

In 1916, some twenty years after coining the word psychoanalysis, Freud began a series of lectures entitled Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis. In it he describes his theories and techniques directed towards discovering and finding solutions to the mental problems observed in patients.
During the course of the twenty-eight extremely accessible essays, we discover that he came by the idea that there could be unconscious desires from the practice of hypnosis, in which wish suggestions are roo...more

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Aug 18, 2007 John Wiswell rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition Recommends it for: Psychology readers, science readers, people who have only heard of Freud but never read him

Psychoanalysis is a brilliant approach to the way we think and the potential meaning in dreams. In this book, its inventor introduces us to it and brings us through its nuances, trying to explain his notions of the forces at work in our minds (like the id, the base force, and the superego, the rational one that weighs the needs of others), and the processes that we can undergo (such as transference, which redirects our feelings for someone to someone else without us consciously trying to). He in...more

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Apr 24, 2013 Brenna rated it 3 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Read as part of my research into showgirl and cootch dancer costumes of the 1920s and 30s. Since this edition was popularly published in 1922 it gave me some insight into what some attitudes may have been, or more accurately what misperceptions of Freud might have justified or influenced attitudes about sex and sexuality. I only focused on the Introduction and the Neuroses sections, as they only applied to my research.

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Oct 07, 2012 Killthepopular rated it 2 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: non-fiction

Yet another difficult, convoluted and disappointing Freud book. I'm repeatedly drawn into reading freud books because of one or two really interesting ideas that i catch here and there, but for about 60% of any freud book, i have no idea what he's talking about.

This series of lectures, addressed to the layman, is slightly more comprehensible than some of his more famous books but still dabbles heavily in specialist language and in-depth analyses of highly academic ideas. Freud also seems to spe...more

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Dec 15, 2008 Aaron rated it 3 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: social-science, psychology

This is probably the best introduction Freud and to "classic" psychoanalysis I've found yet. Freud does himself justice speaking in his own words. These lectures were given rather early in his career, when he still had to make the case for psychoanalysis as even a topic worthy of discussion, to say nothing of its validity. Freud is very careful to make his points, using several clinical cases as evidence and cautiously defining and clarifying his terms so his audience will follow him.

This is no...more

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Mar 10, 2013 Marie rated it 3 of 5 stars · review of another edition

You will find some offensive comments in here, especially the chapter about sex and homosexuality; but still I believe this is a fairly good book to read and think about the topics on thinking and significations on how a human being works. Even if I don't agree with all.

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Jul 20, 2012 Jyothy Sreedhar rated it 5 of 5 stars · review of another edition

This was my first read of Freud. At first, as anyone else, I thought of him as an insane one. :P
But as I proceeded, Freud became the only sane and real thing for me. For a long time, i was addicted to this man!

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Mar 29, 2013 Carol rated it 3 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: kindle

Freud has many interesting concepts on the working of our subconscious. The biggest thing I came away with was the when Freud told us that we cannot analyze others until we have first analyzed ourselves.

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Jun 27, 2012 Artem Huletski rated it 3 of 5 stars · review of another edition

"Доктор Фрейд, покидаю Вас, // сумевшего (где-то вне нас) на глаз // над речкой души перекинуть мост, // соединяющий пах и мозг." (Иосиф Бродский)

Читать по лекции за раз.

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Feb 08, 2012 Arun Ramamurthy rated it 5 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Reading now.
As a first impression, this is reminescent of unabridged classics, written more to engage the time and attention of readers, than out of necessity to do justice for rightful elaboration demanded by the subject.

I have completed reading the book. This is definitely a must read for those interested in psycology. Although I am not a psycologist by profession, or a have had psycology as a subject in my study curriculum, I had doubt if none of the ideas expressed in this work has been dis...more

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May 04, 2012 Kila rated it 3 of 5 stars · review of another edition

I didn't read it all tbh, skipped the last section of the book but may go back to it another time. His section on alternate sexualities though really annoyed me

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Feb 03, 2010 Maxim Ananyev rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Clear and well-written introduction to psychoanalysis though I am not sure whether all these claims are virtually right from the scientific perspective.

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Jan 31, 2010 John Mathis rated it 3 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Although I am Jungian in my own system, the foundation was laid here for which we all should appreciate...even if he did enough cocaine to kill a horse.

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Sep 05, 2009 Elena Kocevska Kuzmanova rated it 3 of 5 stars · review of another edition

ne deka ne mu se dobri ideite ama pa deka sekoj problem vlece koren od detstvoto i e povrzan samo so nasata seksualnost malku tesko

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Aug 30, 2012 Arjun Ravichandran rated it 3 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Enagagingly written, but Freud's interpreters have done a better job of summarizing him than he himself could manage.

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Jan 04, 2013 Jacen Kemp rated it 2 of 5 stars · review of another edition

This is something else, friends. Skip right to Civilization... and save yourself the headaches.

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Sep 22, 2012 Jim rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

This is not exactly a beach read, but you will learn the essentials of Freud's psychoanalysis.

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Jul 29, 2011 Catherine Woodman rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Very accessible volume that chronicles Freud's speaking engagements--very good

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Mar 29, 2013 Kc rated it 5 of 5 stars · review of another edition

I read lectures on parapraxes and dreams for a course. Fascinating stuff and groundbreaking for its time.

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Jun 10, 2012 Adrian added it · review of another edition

Mind blowing!

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Mar 23, 2008 Nick Black rated it 2 of 5 stars · review of another edition

I'm not sure how much this sense this book made when I read it at the tender age of 12, but it at least left me able to appreciate some good ironies when I read Potek's The Chosen later that year.

Reading trash like this is what ruined my mom's brain, I'm pretty sure. When you have the choice between reading Freud and learning to divide, pick division every time. It'll save numerous shameful phone calls to your son, who's really quite too busy to explain remainders.

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Nov 07, 2012 Leo Zukimi rated it 3 of 5 stars · review of another edition

a really good book to start with ....

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About Sigmund Freud

Sigmund Freud, born Sigismund Schlomo Freud, was an Austrian neurologist and psychiatrist who founded the psychoanalytic school of psychology. Freud is best known for his theories of the unconscious mind and the defense mechanism of repression. He is also renowned for his redefinition of sexual desire as the primary motivational energy of human life which is directed toward a wide variety of objec...more

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