Customer Reviews

The Origin and Development of Psychoanalysis

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This is a delightful little book that succintly explains and describes the origins and development of psychoanalysis. The book is designed for the novice with an interest in learning some basic on the ideas and thoughts of Sigmund Freud.

The book is well written and is easy to follow and understand. The book consists of five lectures delivered by Freud in 1910 which helps you understand the basic ideas about Freudian psychology. Read this book to get a historical background to the genius and early formulation of psychoanalysis theory.

Taken from Freud's lectures when he made his famous American visit in 1909 to Clark University in Worcester, Massachusetts; this book presents the great man's ideas straight forward and with brevity. Dr. Freud distills the basics of his system of personality in understandable fashion. Great primary source for a high school psychology class or a psychology enthusiast who hasn't time to muddle through Freud's deeper works.

These five lectures (also published in English as "The History of the Psychoanalytic Movement") were given (extemporaneously, and then written down immediately afterward) at Clark University in 1910. It constitutes a much briefer introduction to his thought than his Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis or New Introductory Lectures on Psycho-Analysis (The Standard Edition) (Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud).

Here are some representative quotations from the book:

"Our hysterical patients suffer from reminiscences. Their symptoms are the remnants and the memory symbols of certain (traumatic) experiences."
"So we are forced to the conclusion that the patient fell ill because the emotion developed in the pathogenic situation was prevented from escaping normally, and that the essence of the sickness lies in the fact that these 'imprisoned' emotions undergo a series of abnormal changes."
"Psychoanalysis will bring the repressed in mental life to conscious acknowledgement, and everyone who judges it is himself a man who has such repressions, perhaps maintained only with difficulty. It will consequently call forth the same resistances from him as from the patient..."
"We arrive here at the same conclusion as in the investigation of dreams---that it is the incompatible, repressed wishes of childhood which lend their power to the creation of symptoms."
"If you like, you may regard the psychoanalytic treatment only as a continued education for the overcoming of childhood-remnants."