The Essentials of Psycho-analysis

In this selection of her father’s writings Anna Freud has defined and included, in a single volume, the essential, irreducible elements of psychoanalysis. 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, defense mechanisms, and symptom-formation. The result, with her own lucid commentaries supplementing her father’s writing in the authorized translations by James Strachey, is a coherent, manageable, and authoritative guide to the principal themes and concepts of psycho-analysis.