The Freud Reader

Features

• Cover Type: Paperback with 832 pages
• Published by: W. W. Norton & Company September 1995
• Written in: English
• ISBN 10 Number: 0393314030
• ISBN 13 Number: 978-0393314038
• Book Dimensions: 8 x 5 x 1.7 inches
• Weighs: 1.6 pounds

From Library Journal
Author of numerous books on Freud, including a highly regarded biography ( Freud, LJ 7/88), Gay offers the general reader a comprehensive survey of Freud's psychoanalytical, political, and philosophical writings. Preceded by a meaty introduction that emphasizes Freud's commitment to science and reason, this single-volume work includes some 50 of Freud's texts, organized chronologically with headnotes. The selections range from case studies and theoretical discussions about dreams, anxiety, and anal eroticism to essays on lay analysis and religion as humankind's obsessional neurosis. Read sequentially, they allow readers to trace Freud's conceptual shift from a topographic theory of the mind to his structural theory of drives. A scholarly work for students and those wanting more than a cursory look.
- Janice Arenofsky, formerly with Arizona State Lib., Phoenix
Copyright 1989 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

Reader Reviews
Sigmund Freud was the first clinical psychotherapist, the first to discover and investigate the possibilities of "a talking cure". His contributions have made possible effective psychotherapeutic treatments for ailments encompassing not only acute psychological symptoms, such as traumatic, dissociative, phobic, depressive, and conversion disorders. Psychoanalytic psychotherapy is also the treatment of choice for broader personality difficulties which often give rise to more generalized problems in living, for example, difficulties in love relationships, self-esteem, and work achievement. To summarize briefly Freud's views on how psychotherapy works is a daunting task. His psychoanalytic writings spanned some forty-three years, from 1895 to 1938, and fill twenty-three hefty volumes. As the first to enter this clinical and theoretical territory, he had nearly to invent de novo a model of the human mind. Based on observations from both in and outside the clinical setting, his model would include psychological development from earliest infancy, how one eventually arrives, or fails to arrive, at a relatively stable personality structure. Moreover, the Freudian model accounts for the human potential for resumed growth and change throughtout life. Psychoanalysis also seeks to understand the continuous process of mental function from moment to moment, as might be observed through intropsection or in a session of psychotherapy. Freud recognized that psychological life intrinsically is inseparable from relations with other people, "object relations", starting with an infant's relations to its mother, later continuing with the child's relations to both his parents and siblings, and ultimately to the wider surrounding community. We can fairly say that Freud, in his discovery and description of transference and countertransference in the therapeutic relationship, saw a "relational perspective" as essential to understanding the process of psychotherapy. Nevertheless, his clinical and theoretical work remained primarily focused on the inner life of the patient. From his fundamental model of the human mind and psychological life, he saw implications for broader human concerns, regarding morality, law, politics, the arts, culture, and society, as also explored for example in literature, religion, and philosophy . Most noteworthy about Freud's thought, in fact, is its evolution. Extraordinarily able to acknowledge his own errors and uncertainties, Freud saw, in the early 1920's, that his original formulations under "the topographic theory" had become a cul de sac, blocking further progress. Unable to account for certain anomolous phenomena, such as his discoveries of unconscious guilt and unconscious ego functions, he was able and willing himself to undertake the necessary, revolutionary shift in thought, leading from the topographic to what has become known as "the structural theory". Almost all schools of psychotherapy today, including those that see themselves as being opposed to Freudianism, in fact derive from psychoanalysis, as branches derive from a common root. Samuel T. Goldberg, M.D.