The Penguin Freud Reader

Here are the essential ideas of psychoanalytic theory, including Freud s explanations of such concepts as the Id, Ego and Super-Ego, the Death Instinct and Pleasure Principle, along with classic case studies like that of the Wolf Man. Adam Phillips s marvellous selection provides an ideal overview of Freud s thought in all its extraordinary ambition and variety. Psychoanalysis may be known as the talking cure , yet it is also and profoundly, a way of reading. Here we can see Freud s writings as readings and listenings, deciphering the secrets of the mind, finding words for desires that have never found expression. Much more than this, however, The Penguin Freud Reader presents a compelling reading of life as we experience it today, and a way in to the work of one of the most haunting writers of the modern age.