Selected Papers on Hysteria and Other Psychoneuroses

The chapters contained in this book have been taken from three different volumes of Freud's works. Although the first four chapters appear in the "Studien uber Hysterie" which was published by Breuer and Freud, still only the first chapter, "The Psychic Mechanism of Hysterical Phenomena," was written conjointly by both authors. The authorship of the other three chapters belongs exclusively to Freud. The remaining six chapters of the book were taken from Freud's Collection of short papers. It was by no means an easy task to compile in a single limited volume Freud's theories of the actual- and psychoneuroses. Freud's views were not only at the time new and revolutionary, being based on an entirely new psychology, but unless one is thoroughly familiar with their development one is apt to misunderstand them. To obviate this it was thought best to collect those chapters from the author's works which fully illustrate his theories and at the same time show the gradual evolution of his psychology.