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When Freud brought psychoanalysis to the United States in 1909, he came bearing not only disagreeable content but a novel form. To that point, psychoanalysis had been taught and learned by correspondence, publications, and personal analysis, but the talks that would soon become Five Lectures on Psychoanalysis are some of the first psychoanalytic lectures. Robert Mendelsohn's book is timely, not only because it lectures about the plague of psychoanalysis during the plague of COVID-19, but also because it calls attention to the forms we rely on for the dissemination of psychoanalytic theory and practice. The 11 lectures on Freudian thought collected here grant readers access to “The Freudian Legacy,” a semester-long introductory seminar for psychology doctoral students that Mendelsohn has taught for decades at Adelphi University. Contemporary clinicians stand to benefit from the book whether they are currently learning, re-learning, or teaching Freud's work, but this framing understates the volume's contribution. Mendelsohn's lectures record not only an esteemed clinician's deft handling of psychoanalytic concepts, but also an instructive practice of psychoanalytic pedagogy.
Mendelsohn's lectures are highly readable and user-friendly. They assume little prior knowledge of psychoanalysis specifically but are pitched to a psychologically minded audience. In this way, they help fill a wide gap between mass-market introductions to Freud and scholarly work that targets a specialized audience. The Mendelsohn lecture works by accumulation; it is in some sense a well-placed counterpart to the reverse movement of Freud's archaeology and its layer-by-layer uncovering. After introducing and explaining a concept, Mendelsohn describes its role and place in Freud's thought over the course of his career before linking it to the next rung on the conceptual ladder. By beginning the lecture series with the concept of neurosis, Mendelsohn can then introduce the Unconscious as something F