The first Hogarth Press edition of one of the most important texts in the evolution of Freudian psychoanalytic theory, complete with a near fine example of the rare dust jacket.
Originally published in German in 1926 under the title Hemmung, Symptom und Angst, the first English translation appeared in 1927, published by the Psychoanalytic Institute, Stamford under the supervision of Leon Pierce Clark, but was never issued in England and came to be surpassed by the Hogarth Press edition presented here. Inhibitions, Symptoms and Anxiety constitutes a crucial reformulation of Freud’s theory of anxiety in which repression is presented not as the cause, but rather the result of anxiety.
In 1924 Leonard Woolf paid £800 for the existing stock of the British Psychoanalytical Society’s library and the Hogarth Press became their official English publishers. The move was a huge risk for the Hogarth Press, both financially and in terms of the risk of prosecution for obscenity, and Virginia was ‘less sanguine than Leonard about the project. She wrote to Roger Fry that she was alarmed at the Press ‘having laid out £800 in the works of Freud.’ The stock arrived in July 1924 and was ‘dumped in a fortress the size of Windsor castle in ruins upon the floor’ in the basement at Tavistock Square.’ (Julia Briggs, Canvas Issue 18).
Grinstein, Sigmund Freud’s Writings: A Comprehensive Bibliography, 117.
