
Sigmund Freud was born in 1856 in Moravia; from 1860 until Hitler's invasion of Austria in 1938 he lived in Vienna. He was then forced to seek asylum in London, where he died the following year. He began his career as a doctor, specialising in work on the anatomy and physiology of the nervous system. He was almost thirty when his interests first turned to psychology, and during ten years of clinical work in Vienna he developed the practice of what he called ""psychoanalysis"". This began simply as a method of treating neurotic patients by investigating their minds, but it quickly grew into an investigation of the workings of the mind in general, both ill or healthy. Freud demonstrated the normal development of the sexual instinct in childhood and, largely on the basis of an examination of dreams, arrived at his fundamental discovery of the unconscious forces that influence our everyday thoughts and actions. Freud's ideas have shaped not only many specialist disciplines, but have also influenced the entire intellectual climate of the last century.
330 pages. (more)
This groundbreaking new translation of The Interpretation of Dreams is the first to be based on the original text published in November 1899. It restores Freud's original argument, unmodified by... (more)
Widely acknowledged to be one of Freud's greatest cultural works, when "Totem and Taboo" was first published in 1913, it caused outrage. Thorough and thought-provoking, the study remains the fullest... (more)
In what remains one of his most seminal papers, Freud considers the incompatibility of civilisation and individual happiness, and the tensions between the claims of society and the individual. We all... (more)
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... (more)
Key articles on Psychoanalysis, including 'On Dreams' and 'Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality'. (more)
The complete letters between Freud and Jung, discussing colleagues, strategies for advancing psychoanalysis, and their ultimate split.