The Basic Writings of Sigmund Freud

by Freud, Sigmund; Brill, A.A.

• ISBN13: 9780679601661
• ISBN10: 067960166X
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 1995-07-10
• Publisher: Modern Library

Summary

A series of letters to a writer seeking guidance revealing the thoughts and feelings of one of the greatest poets and most distinctive sensibilites of the 20th century.

Author Biography

Sigmund Freud was born in 1856 in Moravia, Austrian Empire (now the Czech Republic). Between the ages of four and eighty-two his home was in Vienna; in 1938 Hitler's invasion of Austria forced him to seek asylum in London, where he died in the following year.His career began with several years of brilliant work on the anatomy and physiology of the nervous system. He was almost thirty when, after a period of study under Charcot in Paris, his interests first turned to psychology, and another ten years of clinical work in Vienna (at first in collaboration with Breuer, an older colleague) saw the birth of his creation, psychoanalysis. This began simply as a method of treating neurotic patients by investigating their minds, but it quickly grew into an accumulation of knowledge about the workings of the mind in general, whether sick or healthy. Freud was thus able to demonstrate 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 life was uneventful, but his ideas have shaped not only many specialist disciplines, but the whole intellectual climate of the last half century.

A. A. Brill (1874–1948) was the standard-bearer of Freudian theories in America for almost forty years.

Table of Contents

BOOK I. PSYCHOPATHOLOGY OF EVERYDAY LIFE
Forgetting of Proper Names	3	(3)
Forgetting of Foreign Words	6	(8)
Forgetting of Names and Order of Words	14	(16)
Childhood and Concealing Memories	30	(7)
Mistakes in Speech	37	(18)
Mistakes in Reading and Writing	55	(8)
Forgetting of Impressions and Resolutions	63	(18)
Erroneously Carried-Out Actions	81	(16)
Symptomatic and Chance Actions	97	(12)
Errors	109	(6)
Combined Faulty Acts	115	(3)
Determinism Chance-and Superstitious Beliefs	118	(33)
BOOK II. THE INTERPRETATION OF DREAMS
Foreword to the Third English Edition	149	(2)
The Scientific Literature of Dream Problems (Up to 1900)	151	(5)
The Method of Dream-Interpretation	156	(20)
The Dream as wish-fulfilment	176	(9)
Distortion in Dreams	185	(21)
The Material and Sources of Dreams	206	(81)
The Dream-Work	287	(149)
The Psychology of the Dream-Processes	436	(85)
BOOK III. THREE CONTRIBUTIONS TO THE THEORY OF SEX
The Sexual Aberrations	521	(27)
Infantile Sexuality	548	(24)
The Transformations of Puberty	572	(29)
BOOK IV. WIT AND ITS RELATION TO THE UNCONSCIOUS
Analysis
Introduction	601	(6)
The Technique of Wit	607	(49)
The Tendencies of Wit	656	(23)
Synthesis
The Pleasure Mechanism and the Psychogenesis of Wit	679	(17)
The Motives of Wit and Wit as A Social Process	696	(17)
Theoretical Part
The Relation of Wit to Dreams and to the Unconscious	713	(17)
Wit and the Various Forms of the Comic	730	(45)
BOOK V. TOTEM AND TABOO
The Savage's Dread of Incest	775	(14)
Taboo and the Ambivalence of Emotions	789	(44)
Animism, Magic and The Omnipotence of Thought	833	(19)
The Infantile Recurrence of Totemism	852	(47)
BOOK VI. THE HISTORY OF THE PSYCHOANALYTIC MOVEMENT	899	(50)
Index	949