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The publication of lectures originally intended for a wider audience of some kind, be it the general public or specialists from related disciplines, scientific or cultural, has a distinguished history in psychoanalysis. Freud gave his 'Five Lectures on Psycho-Analysis' on successive weekday evenings in the Autumn of 1909 at Clark University, Worcester, Massachusetts. On that, his first, visit to the USA, Freud met James Jackson Putnam, the neurologist, and William James, the psychologist and philosopher. In An Autobiographical Study Freud wrote:
In Europe I felt as though I were despised; but over there I found myself received by the foremost men as an equal. As I stepped on to the platform at Worcester to deliver my Five Lectures on Psycho-Analysis it seemed like the realisation of some incredible day-dream: psycho-analysis was no longer a product of a delusion, it had become a valuable part of reality (Freud, 1925, p. 52).
As far as publication of these lectures went, Freud (1910) wrote them out from memory two months later!
The function of these lectures was to mark public recognition for Freud and for the body of knowledge he had created, as well as to disseminate psychoanalytic ideas in the new world. For speaker and audience, public lectures have pronounced elements of occasion and rite. However, as we see from Freud's comments, the public acceptance of knowledge can be a way of modifying anxieties we can all have about the truth and usefulness of new discoveries. The subsequent publication of lectures is an attempt to consolidate a coming of age, or rite of passage, to mark the social acceptance of knowledge, or is sometimes part of a struggle to achieve acceptance.
Another example was Melanie Klein's visit to London in 1925 to give six lectures on child analysis. This was a turning point in her own life as well as largely determining the way in which psychoanalysis developed in Britain. The lectures given to those 53 members, associates and guests of t