Sigmund Freud

Though it has now fallen out of favor among many practitioners and scholars, Freud's concept of psychoanalysis -- an approach that focuses primarily on adverse events in early childhood and irrational drives that are overcome via extended talk therapy -- was and continues to be enormously influential, not only in the realm of psychology, but...

Remembered for having developed and popularized the field of psychoanalysis virtually singlehandedly, Austrian neurologist Sigmund Freud is regarded as one of the most significant thinkers of the early twentieth century. Psychosexual development is a key area of Freud's body of work. This volume brings together in-depth discussions of three of...

Building on the crucial insight that jokes use many of the same mechanisms he had already discovered in dreams, Freud developed one of the richest and most comprehensive theories of humour that has ever been produced. Jokes, he argues, provide immense pleasure by allowing us to express many of our deepest sexual, aggressive and cynical thoughts...

One of Freud's central achievements was to demonstrate how unacceptable thoughts and feelings are repressed into the unconscious, from where they continue to exert a decisive influence over our lives. This volume contains a key statement about evidence for the unconscious, and how it works, as well as major essays on all the fundamentals of mental...

Sigmund Freud founded the psychoanalytic school of psychology and was particularly well known for his focus on the unconscious mind. Freud believed that the interpretation of dreams were sources of insight in unconscious desires and the unconscious mind. In "Dream Psychology" we have an exploration of Freud's theories on the interpretation of...

There exist, of course, few more famous figures in the field of psychology than Sigmund Freud. As the founding father of psychoanalysis, or the clinical method for treating psychopathology through dialogue between a patient and a psychoanalyst, his impact on the field of psychology cannot be understated. This short work "Five Lectures on...

In this brilliant exploratory attempt (written in 1912–1913) to extend the analysis of the individual psyche to society and culture, Freud laid the lines for much of his later thought, and made a major contribution to the psychology of religion. Primitive societies and the individual, he found, mutually illuminate each other, and the...

This investigation of religion by greatest psychoanalyst of the twentieth-century explores the role faith can take in the life of man, what it can mean to us and why as a species we are inclined towards it. Throughout history, some books have changed the world. They have transformed the way we see ourselves – and each other. They have inspired...

Freud's religious unbeliefs are too easily dismissed as the standard scientific rationalism of the twentieth-century intellectual, yet he scorned the high-minded humanism of his contemporaries. In Mass Psychology and Analysis of the 'I' he explores the notion of 'mass-psychology' - his findings would prove all too prophetic in the years that...

The Schreber Case is distinctive from the other case histories in that it's based on the memoirs of a conjectural patient. Schreber was a judge and doctor of law who lived according to a strict set of principles. His nervous illness first manifested itself as hypochondria and insomnia - which he put down to his excessive workload - but gradually...