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.
This post is still being updated.
Primary Literature
- The Standard Edition
- Beyond the Pleasure Principle and Other Writings
- The Interpretation of Dreams
- The Uncanny
- Civilization and Its Discontents
- The Psychology of Love
- The Wolfman and Other Cases
- The Unconscious
- Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality
- The Psychopathology of Everyday Life
- ‘Studies on Hysteria’ by Breuer & Freud
- Totem and Taboo
- Moses and Monotheism
- Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis
- The Basic Writings
- A General Introduction to Psychoanalysis
- Analysis Terminable and Interminable
- The Future of an Illusion
Audiobooks
- ‘Civilization and Its Discontents’ & ‘Totem and Taboo’
- Civilization and Its Discontents
- The Interpretation of Dreams
- Group Psychology And The Analysis Of The Ego
- The Unconscious
Secondary Literature
- ‘Freud’ (Routledge Philosophers, Second Edition)
- ‘A Brief Introduction to Psychoanalytic Theory’ by Stephen Frosh
- ‘Understanding psychoanalysis’ by Matthew Sharpe & Joanne Faulkner
- ‘Love in a Time of Loneliness: Three Essays on Drives and Desires’ by Paul Verhaeghe
- ‘Why Todestrieb is a Philosophical Concept’ by Slavoj Žižek
- ‘On Being Normal and Other Disorders’ by Paul Verhaeghe
- ‘Oedipus: The Most Crucial Concept in Psychoanalysis’ by Juan-David Nasio
- ‘Unbehagen and the Subject’: An interview with Slavoj Žižek
- ‘Memoirs of My Nervous Illness’ by Daniel Paul Schreber
- ‘My Own Private Germany: Daniel Paul Schreber’s Secret History of Modernity’ by Eric L. Santner
- ‘Nation and Aesthetics: On Kant and Freud’ by Kojin Karatani
- ‘Does the Woman Exist? From Freud’s Hysteric to Lacan’s Feminine’ by Paul Verhaeghe
- ‘Freud, the Reluctant Philosopher’ by Alfred I. Tauber
- In Dora’s Case: Freud, Hysteria, Feminism
- ‘A Clinical Introduction to Freud’ by Bruce Fink
- Deconstructing Normativity? Re-reading Freud’s 1905 Three Essays
- ‘Lacan and Levi-Strauss or The Return to Freud (1951-1957)’ by Markos Zafiropoulos
- ‘Freud and the Sexual’ by Jean Laplanche
- ‘Becoming Freud: The Making of a Psychoanalyst’ by Adam Phillips
- Freud and Beyond: A History of Modern Psychoanalytic Thought
- ‘Freud and Philosophy: An Essay on Interpretation’ by Paul Ricœur
- On Freud’s “Analysis terminable and interminable” by Joseph Sandler
- ‘On Freud’s “The Future of an Illusion“’ by Mary Kay O’Neil & Salman Akhtar
