Product Description

Here are the essential ideas of psychoanalytic theory, including Freud’s explanations of such concepts as the Id, Ego and Super-Ego, the Death Instinct and Pleasure Principle, along with classic case studies like that of the Wolf Man. Adam Phillips’s marvellous selection provides an ideal overview of Freud’s thought in all its extraordinary ambition and variety. Psychoanalysis may be known as the ‘talking cure’, yet it is also and profoundly, a way of reading. Here we can see Freud’s writings as readings and listenings, deciphering the secrets of the mind, finding words for desires that have never found expression. Much more than this, however, The Penguin Freud Reader presents a compelling reading of life as we experience it today, and a way in to the work of one of the most haunting writers of the modern age.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #78003 in Books
• Published on: 2006-01-26
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 592 pages

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. Adam Phillips was formerly Child Psychotherapist at Charing Cross Hospital in London. He is the author of several books on psychoanalysis including On Kissing, Tickling and Being Bored, Darwin's Worms, Promises, Promises, Houdini's Box and, most recently, Going Sane.

Customer Reviews

Less a review, than info on the contents...
It's a good overview of Freud's work, and as the information is nowhere to be found on the internet, I thought it might be useful to list the contents so people could see what was actually included in it:-

An Outline of Psychoanalysis
The Splitting of the Ego in Defence Processes
Letter to Romain Rolland (A Disturbance of Memory on the Acropolis)
Constructions in Analysis
Fetishism
Negation
Note on the 'Magic Notepad'
'Psychoanalysis' and 'Libido Theory'
Beyond the Pleasure Principle
From the History of an Infantile Neurosis (The 'Wolfman')
Mourning and Melancholia
Lapses
Observations on Love in Transference
On the Psychology of the Grammar-school boy
On the Introduction of Narcissism
Remembering, Repeating, and Working Through
from: Contributions to the Psychology of Erotic Life
Formulations on the Two Principles of Psychic Functioning
Family Romances
Hysterical Phantasies and their Relation to Bisexuality
Fragment of an Analysis of Hysteria (Dora)
Screen Memories
Humour

Freud as 'reader'
This is worthwhile purchase. As Adam Philips says in his introduction: 'it is the aim of 'The Penguin Freud Reader' not to introduce people to pychoanalysis as a therapy, which can only be done by trying it out; nor to provide a comprehensive selection of Freud's writing, which would merely reveal more about the selector than the selected; nor to take it for granted that a 'great writer' is here on show, when Freud himself had so much to tell us and did so much to ironize our wishes for greatness. It is, rather, the aim of this Reader to enable the curious, who are by definition not the converted, to discover what, if anything, is so haunting about Freud's writing.'