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The International Journal of Psychoanalysis 'can think of no more appropriate method of honoring the memory of Sigmund Freud than by presenting the readers with a translation of one of his few unpublished writings'. This work is a concise total summary of psychoanalysis. It is very regrettable that it had to remain a fragment. The precision of the presentation as well as the linguistic expressiveness are admirable. This last work of Freud again shows the well-known exceptional character of his classic works.
The intentional brevity naturally makes it inavoidable that the paper have rather a theoretical character and give no clinical examples. It states, as Freud says, 'the doctrines of psychoanalysis, as it were, dogmatically in the most concise form and in the most positive terms'. A reader not already acquainted with psychoanalysis would not be convinced by such a presentation, but 'to compel belief or to establish conviction' is not, Freud states, the intention of his paper. A person not well informed might get an incorrect picture of psychoanalysis in as much as he gets no insight into the long, manifold, patient clinical detailed work that necessarily preceded those formulations which now read so easily. It would also be possible for a beginner to misuse the 'dogmatic' formulations. But for analysts such a concise outline is immensely advantageous, and I am sure that many seminars in psychoanalytic institutes will use this outline as a basis for detailed discussions of all the important problems of psychoanalysis.
The paper consists of three parts. The first discusses The Nature of Mind, the second, The Practical Task of Psychoanalysis, the third, The Theoretical Yield.
The Nature of Mind (des Psychischen) is shown as a field of biological functions. The phenomena of mind cannot be understood by studying their somatic substratum. Instead it is necessary to hypostatize a psychic apparatus in which energic processes occur. The understanding of those pro