[Written originally in German under the title Versuch einer Darstellung der psychoanalytischen Theorie and translated (by Dr. and Mrs. M. D. Eder and Miss Mary Moltzer) for delivery as a series of lectures under the present title at the medical school of Fordham University, New York, in September 1912. The German text was published in the Jahrbuch für psychoanalytische und psychopathologische Forschungen (Vienna and Leipzig), V (1913; reprinted as a book the same year); the English, in five issues of the Psychoanalytic Review (New York): I (1913/14) : 1–4 and II (1915) : 1. The latter was then republished in the Nervous and Mental Disease Monograph Series, No. 19 (New York, 1915). The analysis of a child in the last chapter had been previously presented as “Über Psychoanalyse beim Kinde” at the First International Congress of Pedagogy, Brussels, August 1911, and printed in the proceedings of the Congress (Brussels, 1912), II, 332–43.
[A second edition of the German text, with no essential alterations, was published in 1955 (Zurich). The present translation is made from this edition in consultation with the previous English version.
[The text of the 1913 and 1955 editions in German is uninterrupted by headings, but at the author’s request the original division into nine lectures (ascertained from an examination of the manuscript) has here been preserved. This arrangement differs from that of the previous English version, which is divided into ten lectures; the chapter and section headings there introduced have in general been retained, with some modifications. A number of critical passages inserted at a later stage into the original manuscript and included in the German editions were omitted from the previous English version, together with the footnotes. In the present version these passages are given in pointed brackets ().—EDITORS.]