A General Introduction to Psychoanalysis

Freud gave these lectures at the University of Vienna between 1915 and 1917 to an audience of doctors and laypeople, and they remain the clearest introduction to his ideas in his own words. He begins with everyday slips of the tongue, forgotten names and mislaid objects, shows how they reveal hidden wishes, moves to dreams and their disguises, and ends with the theory of the neuroses, the unconscious, repression and the development of sexuality from childhood.

The tone is that of a patient teacher who anticipates objections and answers them. This translation, of 1920, is by G. Stanley Hall, the American psychologist who had invited Freud to lecture at Clark University in 1909. If you want to understand what psychoanalysis claims before deciding what you think of it, start here, then go on to The Interpretation of Dreams.

Sigmund Freud (1856–1939) grew up in Vienna in a Jewish family and trained as a neurologist. After studying hypnosis with the famous Charcot in Paris, he began listening to his patients talk freely about their dreams and memories, and developed from this practice a new theory of the mind and a new kind of treatment: psychoanalysis.

From his consulting room at Berggasse 19 he published The Interpretation of Dreams and a stream of books that changed psychology, literature and everyday language. In 1938, after the Nazis took over Austria, he fled to London, where he died the following year. A General Introduction to Psychoanalysis is the best place to begin.