Product Description

Throughout history, some books have changed the world. They have transformed the way we see ourselves and each other. They have inspired debate, dissent, war and revolution. They have enlightened, outraged, provoked and comforted. They have enriched lives and destroyed them. Now Penguin brings you the works of the great thinkers, pioneers, radicals and visionaries whose ideas shook civilization, and helped make us who we are.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #22647 in Books
• Published on: 2004-09-02
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 112 pages

Synopsis
Throughout history, some books have changed the world. They have transformed the way we see ourselves and each other. They have inspired debate, dissent, war and revolution. They have enlightened, outraged, provoked and comforted. They have enriched lives and destroyed them. Now Penguin brings you the works of the great thinkers, pioneers, radicals and visionaries whose ideas shook civilization, and helped make us who we are.

About the Author
Sigmund Freud was born in 1856 and died in exile in London in 1939. As a writer and doctor he remains one of the informing voices of the twentieth century.

Customer Reviews

Freud as a philosopher ...
With his culture theoretical documents Freud had essentially share at the development of the philosophical self-determination of mankind. After the Christian conception of the world had shattered, and human beings lost their feeling of being in security, after philosophers like Kierkegaard told, that only the fight for a pure individuality (and no common religious feelings) would be a help in the future, after Immanuel Kant had recognized the one-sidedness nature of academic scientifical points of view - a Nietzsche became famous, hammering out, that the power of will and lust (like Dionysos) should be focused - since the contrary, the Apollonian world of law and order had surpressed too much of important emotional horizons. Freud delivered more details of this conflict between sex and aggression and - on the other hand - sublimation, the capability to listen to the routes of correctness: a "super-ego" (like an inner police, living in every human being) is fighting against an ego, wishing childishly to love or to fight, often in the wrong moment and at the very wrong place. While an Arthur Schopenhauer still constituted the will as driving force of the world, but assigned only a role of an onlooker to the intellect, Freud drilled in greater detail: The destruction strength of human beings, their desire to meet death, their lust of aggression is the core of all driving inner-forces (Freud's opinion). This driving energy arduously sublimes in good behaviour, but then often dumps in self aggression or in an outside aggression. It is Freud's contribution to have made us examine an anthropological basic constant: the perpetually endangering human aggression instinct. Freud is therefore completely congruent with Schopenhauer, concerning the pessimistic prevailing mood. So he does not share the naiveté and enthusiasm of the at that time current "life philosophy" or the optimism of the existentialism starting with Henri Bergson's "elan vital": It is not very astonishing: Sigmund Freud was powerlessly hemmed in between two World Wars. He suffered (emigrating to London) under the Nazi-oppression. Long before any Islamic fundamentalism ruled the daily news, he clearly analyzed how much efforts we need, to calm down the global attacks of a so-called "death instinct". Therefore his culture theoretical documents perhaps are still much more meaningfully than the gloomy approaching area of his sick individual person stories...

Two strong essays about happiness and sexuality
This book features two papers written in different times. The first one is from the 1930’s, and is a very mature analysis of the ways civilisations and individuals go in order to achieve happiness as it is. The second one, written in the 1900’s, is about ‘civilised’ sexuality and mental illnesses, and allows us to see how a whole new science emerged.
I would recommend it to anyone who has an interest in psychiatry and psychoanalysis, and especially in Freud. I read other works by this author, and I think this one keeps up with the overall quality of the others.