Introductory Lectures on Psycho-Analysis: A Course of Twenty-Eight Lectures Delivered at the University of Vienna

Freud wanted to be understood. That's the driving force behind these 28 lectures, delivered to a public audience at the University of Vienna in the 1930s. Here is the father of psychoanalysis, at once brilliant and controversial, attempting to explain his revolutionary ideas to people who had never heard them before. The lectures move from the seemingly trivial to the profoundly disturbing: slips of the tongue, forgotten names, misplaced objects are not random failures but windows into unconscious mental processes. Then comes the analysis of dreams, that royal road to the unconscious, before tackling neuroses and the sexual origins of psychological suffering. Freud is persuasive, certain, and sometimes warning his audience about what they're about to encounter. This remains essential reading for anyone seeking to understand the birth of modern psychology and how we came to think about the mind itself. It endures because it captures Freud at his most pedagogical, making the case for a science that still provokes and shapes how we understand ourselves.