3 Review(s)

In this selection of her father’s writings Anna Freud has defined and included, in a single volume, the essential, irreducible elements of psycho-analysis. She begins with the most appropriate of Freud’s own introductory essays, The Question of Lay Analysis, and follows the sequence of themes that he adopted in that work: The meaning of dreams, the concept of the unconscious, instinctual and sexual life, the structure of the personality, defence mechanisms and symptom-formation. The result, with her own lucid commentaries supplementing her father’s writing in the authorised translations by James Strachey, is a coherent, manageable and authoritative guide to the principal themes and concepts of psycho-analysis.