"AFTER ALL, IT IS ONLY A DREAM"

FREUD, Sigmund. New Introductory Lectures on Psycho-Analysis. London: Leonard and Virginia Woolf at the Hogarth Press, 1933. Octavo, original green cloth, original dust jacket. $2200.

First edition in English of Freud's important introductory lectures on psychoanalysis, published by Leonard and Virginia Woolf at their Hogarth Press, in original dust jacket.

"It was Freud's fate, as he observed not without pride, to 'agitate the sleep of mankind'" (Gay, Sigmund Freud: A Brief Life). "In March 1932 Freud decided to write a new series of introductory lectures to psychoanalysis, bringing up to date those he had published 15 years before… The new series consists of seven lectures, incorporating Freud's latest thoughts on dreams, female sexuality and Weltanschauung. The lectures were published on 6 December 1932" (Norman F139). "Freud was a brilliant apologist for his own ideas… At their best, his expository writings might be described as intellectual seductions… No other major modern intellectual—not Marx, not Darwin—rivals Freud as a popular advocate for his own views" (Stanford 1991, 69). The first edition was published in German in Vienna. This first edition in English, with the authorized translation of W.J.H. Sprott, is No. 24 in the International Psycho-Analytical Library, edited by Dr. Ernest Jones. Virginia and Leonard Woolf's Hogarth Press "took over responsibility for publication in English of the International Psycho-Analytical papers in 1924, when Virginia was 42… She took an active role in the Hogarth Press in which her interest was not sold until 1938. Her press was then the main source of Freud's ideas in England for 13 years" (Bennett, Virginia Woolf and Neuropsychiatry, 27). Grinstein 166.

Text fresh with only light foxing mainly to preliminaries, tiny bit of edge-wear with faintest soiling to cloth; light edge-wear, slight toning to spine of exceedingly scarce dust jacket. A handsome near-fine copy.