A General Introduction to Psychoanalysis
by Sigmund Freud
Psychoanalysis was never just a method of treatment, it was a vision of the condition of a person who continued to fascinate and provoke even long after the death of his compiler. His basic hypothesis that we live in conflict with ourselves and try to solve the problem by moving away from reality emerged not from empirical science, but from the opportunities for self-examination and unique observation offered by psychoanalytic technology, especially the confessions produced by the "free association" in Freud's counseling room. The General Introduction to Psychoanalysis, written during the upheavals of World War I, was removed from a series of lectures given at the University of Vienna, but had to wait until the end of the war before it was presented to the English-speaking world.
