SCHWIND, The Dream of the Prisoner
See page 109 for analysis
A General Introduction
to
Psychoanalysis
BY
PROF. SIGMUND FREUD, LL.D.
AUTHORIZED TRANSLATION
WITH A PREFACE
BY
G. STANLEY HALL
PRESIDENT, CLARK UNIVERSITY
HORACE LIVERIGHT
PUBLISHER NEW YORK
Published, 1920, by
Horace Liveright, Inc.
Printed in the United States of America
Copyright, 1920, by Edward L. Bernays
PREFACE
Few, especially in this country, realize that while Freudian themes haverarely found a place on the programs of the American PsychologicalAssociation, they have attracted great and growing attention and foundfrequent elaboration by students of literature, history, biography,sociology, morals and aesthetics, anthropology, education, and religion.They have given the world a new conception of both infancy andadolescence, and shed much new light upon characterology; given us a newand clearer view of sleep, dreams, reveries, and revealed hithertounknown mental mechanisms common to normal and pathological states andprocesses, showing that the law of causation extends to the mostincoherent acts and even verbigerations in insanity; gone far to clearup the terra incognita of hysteria; taught us to recognize morbidsymptoms, often neurotic and psychotic in their germ; revealed theoperations of the primitive mind so overlaid and repressed that we hadalmost lost sight of them; fashioned and used the key of symbolism tounlock many mysticisms of the past; and in addition to all this,affected thousands of cures, established a new prophylaxis, andsuggested new tests for character, disposition, and ability, in allcombining the practical and theoretic to a degree salutary as it israre.
These twenty-eight lectures to laymen are elementary and almostconversational. Freud sets forth with a frankness almost startling thedifficulties and limitations of psychoanalysis, and also describes itsmain methods and results as only a master and originator of a new schoolof thought can do. These discourses are at the same time simple andalmost confidential, and they trace and sum up the results of thirtyyears of devoted and painstaking research. While they are not at allcontroversial, we incidentally see in a clearer light the distinctionsbetween the master and some of his distinguished pupils. A text likethis is the most opportune and will naturally more or less supersede allother introductions to the general subject of psychoanalysis. Itpresents the author in a new light, as an effective and successfulpopularizer, and is certain to be welcomed not only by the large andgrowing number of students of psychoanalysis in this country b