Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis

by Sigmund Freud

The study of these infantile neuroses keeps us from many dangerous misunderstandings of adult neuroses, just as the dreams of children similarly serve as the key to the understanding of the dreams

the authority of the nursery; in retrospect, however, they may be easily recognized later. They occur most frequently in the form of anxiety hysteria. What this implies we shall learn upon another occasion. When a neurosis breaks out in later life, analysis regularly shows that it is a direct continuation of that infantile malady which had perhaps developed only obscurely and incipiently.

skin over it. It is rather hard to throw out the suggestion that this skin calls up the memory of the mother's breast, which was once so intensely coveted. In the meantime, to be sure, the traumatic experience of weaning has intervened.

we must explain why the same phantasies are always created with the same content. I have an answer in readiness which I know you will think very far-fetched. I am of the opinion that these primal phantasies—so I should like to term these, and certainly some others also—are a phylogenetic possession. In them the individual reaches out beyond his own life, into the experiences of antiquity,

For there is a way back from imagination to reality and that is—art. The artist is an incipient introvert who is not far from being a neurotic. He is impelled by too powerful instinctive needs. He

psychoanalysis is found in the study of errors and the dream; the theory of neurosis is psychoanalysis itself.

phantasies which undergo conversion into symptoms are especially easy to detect in hysteria; compulsion neuroses are essentially dominated by the reactionary formations, or counter-seizures of the ego; what we designate as secondary elaboration in dreams dominates paranoia in the form of delusions,

A person begins to suffer from neurosis when his ego has lost the capacity of accommodating the libido. The stronger the ego, the easier the solution of the problem; a weakening of the ego from any cause whatsoever has the same effect as a superlative increase of the claims of the libido. There are other and more intimate relations between the ego and the libido which I shall

of their intimate connection with psychoneuroses we find this decidedly necessary. I shall tell you then that we distinguish three pure forms of true neuroses: neurasthenia, anxiety neurosis and hypochondria. Even this classification has not remained uncontradicted. The terms are

The symptom in the true neuroses is frequently the nucleus and incipient stage of development of the psychoneurotic symptom. Such a connection is most easily observed between neurasthenia and the transference neuroses, which are termed conversion hysteria, between anxiety

it is usual to confuse the words "nervous" and "anxious" as though they meant the same thing. That is unjustifiable; there are anxious people who are not nervous, and nervous people who suffer from many symptoms, but not from the tendency to anxiety.

real fear in contrast to neurotic fear. Real fear seems quite rational and comprehensible to us. We may testify that it is a reaction to the perception of external danger, viz., harm that is expected and foreseen. It is related

think that anxiety is used in connection with a condition regardless of any objective, while fear is essentially directed toward an object. Fright, on the other hand, seems really to possess a special meaning, which emphasizes the effects of a danger which

hemmed in by agoraphobia can be entirely free of pessimistic expectant fear.

The behavior of women whose sexual conduct is passive, viz., is determined by the treatment of the husband, contradicts this supposition. The more temperamental, that is, the more disposed toward sexual intercourse and capable of gratification is the woman, the more will she react to the impotence of the man, or to the coitus interruptus, by anxiety manifestations. In anaesthetic or only slightly libidinous women, such misuse will not carry such consequences. Sexual abstinence, recommended so warmly by

Fear in children is quite common and it is very hard to tell whether it is neurotic or real fear. Indeed, the value of this distinction is rendered questionable by the behavior of children. On the one hand we are not surprised that the child fears all strange persons, new situations and objects, and we explain this reaction very easily by his weakness and ignorance. We ascribe