I was daunted by the size of some of the books and, initially at least, I had to read most of them with a dictionary open beside me. When I started raiding Grandpa's bookshelves I must have been about nine years old and in the following ten years I read pretty much every book he owned.
All of which is a long-winded introduction to the short post I was going to write noting that the first "serious" book I ever read was Sigmund Freud's "The Question of Lay Analysis" - I just came across it on my bookshelf while looking for something else.
From the sleeve notes:-
It may well be that this book which has not been published before in England, will be mainly valued as a most masterly and attractive introduction to psycho-analytical knowledge; and as the best answer to the question so often asked, "What shall I read of Freud?"What made me choose that book in my first foray into Grandpa's book collection? Simple answer: It was the thinnest one there.
I haven't read it since, though I've read some of Freud's other works. However, having come across it again, I'm going to have to reread it. I'm intrigued to know what, if any, effect it had on me and what I took from it. Looking back, I can't imagine I understood much of what I was reading.
The difficulty, of course, is that I can't read it as I did when I was nine - open-minded and fresh to Freud's ideas - I've accumulated forty year's of intellectual baggage since then. I get the feeling that, in contrast to my younger self, I've become closed-minded and dismissive of ideas whose value is not immediately apparent to me. It's hubris, I know, but I regard my opinions as fully formed now. And when I read these days, with half a lifetime of experience under my belt, I worry that I've come to prefer reading things I agree with and which confirm my opinions rather than stuff that offers new perspectives and which challenges me to think.
So, I've started rereading "The Question of Lay Analysis". I'll let you know how I get on.
