You do not currently have permission to view the full text for this document. Please sign in to an account with an active subscription or contact support.
This memorable book is one of the most interesting Freud ever wrote. It is further remarkable in that, while even his nearest friends and followers are likely to find things in it—including perhaps the central theme itself—from which they may dissent, no one with any imagination can fail to be kindled by the continuous sparkle of brilliant and enlightening ideas it displays.
Someone has suggested that Freud's works, rather like Beethoven's symphonies, tended to alternate in their attitude towards his audience. In one type, of which Beyond the Pleasure Principle is a good example, he seems to be writing essentially for himself, to be thinking aloud, as it were; the audience must be content to extract what they can from the impressive process going on and be grateful for the remarkable privilege so vouchsafed them. In such a case what the reader gets out of the experience is proportional to the effort he puts into it; he has not the feeling that he is being helped by a sympathetic teacher and he has to struggle hard himself. In the other type, of which the Introductory Lectures is the supreme example, Freud displays himself as a superb teacher, anticipating, divining and resolving his reader's difficulties with a skilful helpfulness that in itself wins admiration by its genius.
There can be little doubt that the present work falls into the former category. The irregular arrangement itself of the book, with its repetitions, lack of continuous development in the argument and its three prefaces in the middle, is something for which we are not in the least prepared when opening a book by Freud, whose skill in just such matters was of a superlative order, and he makes it plain that it seriously offended against his own artistic canons. One does not feel that the author, any more than the reader, is convinced by the excuse put forward about the conditions under which the book was written. Nor would this account for the signs of restlessness in the details of the argume