Psychoanalysis has had an immense impact upon contemporary theoretical debates, but its meanings and different traditions can be hard to grasp. This introduction to psychoanalysis ranges widely across the major traditions of psychoanalysis and reviews the work of key psychoanalytic thinkers such as Freud, Klein, Winnicott, Kohut and Lacan. It is designed to provide a useful starting-point for any exploration of the contribution of psychoanalysis to contemporary theory.