New Introductory Lectures on Psycho-AnalysisSigmund Freud

Freud wrote the New Introductory Lectures in 1932 and published them in 1933 as a sequel to the Introductory Lectures of 1915–17. He never delivered them as public lectures. Numbered XXIX through XXXV to continue the earlier series, they bring the system up to date after fifteen years of theoretical change.

Lecture XXIX revises the theory of dreams. Lecture XXX takes up dreams and occultism. Lecture XXXI, "The Dissection of the Psychical Personality," presents the structural model of id, ego, and super-ego that had replaced the older topographical scheme of unconscious, preconscious, and conscious. Lecture XXXII treats anxiety and instinctual life, including the dualism of life and death instincts. Lecture XXXIII, "Femininity," offers Freud's late and much contested account of female development. Lecture XXXIV surveys the progress and practical prospects of psychoanalysis. Lecture XXXV, "The Question of a Weltanschauung," denies that psychoanalysis supplies a total worldview and distinguishes it from religion, philosophy, and Marxism as a specialized science of the unconscious mind.

The New Introductory Lectures matter because they fix the late classical system in expository form. Readers who know only the early dream book meet here the ego psychology, the revised theory of anxiety, and the cultural polemics of Freud's last productive decade. The book maps where psychoanalysis had arrived by the early 1930s more than it introduces beginners to first principles.