Freud, Sigmund

Vorlesungen zur Einführung in die Psychoanalyse [A General Introduction to Psychoanalysis]

Price: $15,000.00

Hard Cover. Berlin: Gustav Kiepenheuer Verlag, 1933. Later German Edition. Near Fine.

Later German edition. Signed and dated by Sigmund Freud on front free endpaper: "Sigm. Freud / 1936". Publisher's blue cloth, with front board margins ruled in dark blue, and spine lettered in dark blue. Near fine, with some toning and soiling to spine, light rubbing to foot of spine, small black mark to bottom edge of text block, bright and clean boards and pages, and a touch of rippling to fore edges of some pages. Overall, a scarce edition of this work, boldly signed. A General Introduction to Psychoanalysis consists of three separate sets of lectures (28 lectures total), given by Freud at the University of Vienna in the two winters between 1915 to 1917. The first set of lectures explores what is now known as "Freudian slips," the second the meaning of dreams, and the last Freud's general theory of neuroses. The book was important for laying out Freud's general theories in an accessible way, though Freud himself downplayed the work, calling it a "coarse work, intended for the multitude." In the preface to the 1920 American edition, G. Stanley Hall writes, "These twenty-eight lectures to laymen are elementary and almost conversational. Freud sets forth with a frankness almost startling the difficulties and limitations of psychoanalysis, and also describes its main methods and results as only a master and originator of a new school of thought can do. These discourses are at the same time simple and almost confidential, and they trace and sum up the results of thirty years of devoted and painstaking research." This German edition of A General Introduction to Psychology was signed by Freud in 1936, just two years before he escaped Vienna. Many of Freud's books were targeted and burned by the Nazis, which led Freud to famously comment, "What progress we are making. In the Middle Ages they would have burned me. Now they are content with burning my books." Living in Vienna through the rise of the Nazi party, he finally decided to leave the country after his daughter Anna was interrogated by the Gestapo in March of 1938. Freud passed away in London on September 23, 1939 after a sixteen-year battle with oral cancer. Regarded as the father of psychoanalysis, Sigmund Freud (1856-1939) introduced and popularized many concepts that have had a profound impact on our understanding of the human mind, such as the unconscious, dream analysis, the id, ego, superego, and defense mechanisms. Some of his most influential works include The Interpretation of Dreams (1899), The Psychopathology of Everyday Life (1901), and Civilization and its Discontents (1930). Item #SF005