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Books to read if you’re considering psychotherapy

Civilization and Its Discontents

Freud's epoch-making insights revolutionized our perception of who we are, forming the foundation for psychoanalysis. In Civilization and its Discontents he considers the incompatibility of civilization and individual happiness. Focusing on what he perceives to be one of society's greatest dangers; 'civilized' sexual morality, he asks, does repression compromise our chances of happiness? 
 
Sigmund Freud was born in 1856 and died in exile in London in 1939. As a writer and doctor he remains one of the informing voices of the twentieth century.

Sigmund Freud was born in 1856 and died in exile in London in 1939. As a writer and doctor he remains one of the informing voices of the twentieth century.

The 'Wolfman'

Sigmund Freud (1856-1939), "the father of psychoanalysis", had an overwhelming impact on fields as diverse as literature, film, Marxist and feminist theories, literary criticism, philosophy and psychology.

This is Freud's groundbreaking study of a wealthy young Russian man, subject to psychotic episodes and neuroses. Through the patient's dream of childhood wolves, Freud was able to determine his real problem - that of infantile neurosis brought about by a sexual complex and an Oedipal fixation. 
 
GREAT IDEAS. Throughout history, some books have changed the world. They have transformed the way we see ourselves - and each other. They have inspired debate, dissent, war and revolution. They have enlightened, outraged, provoked and comforted. They have enriched lives - and destroyed them. Now Penguin brings you the works of the great thinkers, pioneers, radicals and visionaries whose ideas shook civilization and helped make us who we are.

The Future of an Illusion

'Religion is the universal neurosis'  Sigmund Freud

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 &ndash; and each other. They have inspired debate, dissent, war and revolution. They have enlightened, outraged, provoked and comforted. They have enriched lives &ndash; and destroyed them. Now Penguin brings you the works of the great thinkers, pioneers, radicals and visionaries whose ideas shook civilization and helped make us who we are.

The Essentials of Psycho-Analysis

The definitive collection of writing from the great founder of psycho-analysis.

He was possessed of exceptional literary gifts. There can be no question that he was a great writer: to read him is to be beguiled by him... his influence on all of us was enormous, and it would be as impossible to return to a pre-Freudian way of thinking as to return to a pre-heliocentric theory of the solar system

Sigmund Freud (1856-1939) was born in Moravia; 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. Freud's life was uneventful, but his ideas have shaped not only many specialist disciplines, but the whole intellectual climate of the twentieth century. 
 
Anna Freud (1895-1982), the youngest daughter of Sigmund Freud, not only became a leading authority on child analysis, in both its theoretical and clinical aspects, but also a principle exponent of her father's work. During her lifetime she gained a worldwide reputation for her scientific leadership in the continuing exploration and extension of his discoveries.

The Essentials of Psycho-analysis is the definitive collection of Sigmund Freud's writing. It covers the themes that Freud explored in his work from the meaning of dreams and the concept of the unconscious, instinctual and sexual life to the structure of the personality. Beautifully written and endlessly fascinating, the pieces collected here are the perfect guide to the principle concepts of psycho-analysis.

Deviant Love

Sigmund Freud (1856-1939), &quot;the father of psychoanalysis&quot;, helped popularise such notions as the unconscious, defense mechanisms, Freudian slips and dream symbolism - while also making a long-lasting impact on fields as diverse as literature, film, Marxist and feminist theories, literary criticism, philosophy and psychology.

Sigmund Freud, the founder of modern psychoanalysis, remade our view of the human mind by exploring the unconscious forces that drive us. This collection of his groundbreaking writings on the psychology of love examines the nature of desire, transgression, fantasy and erotic taboo. 
 
United by the theme of love, the writings in the Great Loves series span over two thousand years and vastly different worlds. Readers will be transported to different places and introduced to love&rsquo;s endlessly fascinating possibilities and varied forms: romantic love, platonic love, erotic love, gay love, virginal love, adulterous love, parental love, filial love, nostalgic love, unrequited love, illicit love, not to mention lost love, twisted and obsessional love&hellip;

Interpreting Dreams

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Freud's most famous work and one of the most famous books in modern European history, published for the first time as a Penguin Modern Classic.

Sigmund Freud was born in 1856 and died in exile in London in 1939. As a writer and doctor he remains one of the great voices of the twentieth century.

By a detailed investigation of the universal phenomenon of dreaming, Freud discovered a radical new way of exploring the unconscious and recognized that dreams are a conflict and compromise between conscious and unconscious impulses. Through his insights about dreams, Freud was able to revise his methods of treatment for neurotic patients and develop, largely through this remarkable work, his revolutionary theories of the Oedipus Complex and of the profound importance of infantile life and sexuality for the development of adults.

The Psychology of Love

One of fifteen new translations of Freud's key writings, this project, under the general editorship of celebrated psychoanalyst Adam Phillips, reimagines one the modern era's greatest writers

This volume brings together Freud's main contributions to the psychology of love. His illuminating discussions of the ways in which sexuality is always psychosexuality - that there is no sexuality without fantasy, conscious or unconscious - have changed the ways we think about erotic life. In these papers Freud develops his now famous theories about the sexuality of childhood and the transgressive nature of human desire. 
 
In the famous case study of the eighteen-year-old 'Dora', we see Freud at work, both putting into practice and testing his sexual theories that were to change the modern world.

The Penguin Freud Reader

This major new collection brings together the key writings from every stage of Freud's career to offer the perfect introduction to his life and work.

Sigmund Freud was born in 1856 and died in exile in London in 1939. As a writer and doctor he remains one of the informing voices of the twentieth century. 
 
 
Adam Phillips was formerly Child Psychotherapist at Charing Cross Hospital in London. He is the author of several books on psychoanalysis including On Kissing, Tickling and Being Bored, Darwin's Worms, Promises, Promises, Houdini's Box and, most recently, Going Sane.

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.

On Murder, Mourning and Melancholia

One of fifteen new translations of Freud's key writings, under the general editorship of celebrated psychoanalyst Adam Phillips, this project reimagines one the modern era's greatest writers

Sigmund Freud was born in 1856 and died in exile in London in 1939.  As a writer and doctor he remains one of the informing voices of the twentieth century.

These works were written against a background of war and racism. Freud sought the sources of conflict in the deepest memories of humankind, finding clear continuities between our 'primitive' past and 'civilized' modernity. In Totem and Taboo he explores institutions of tribal life, tracing analogies between the rites of hunter-gatherers and the obsessions of urban-dwellers, while Mourning and Melancholia sees a similarly self-destructive savagery underlying individual life in the modern age, which issues at times in self-harm and suicide. And Freud's extraordinary letter to Einstein, Why War? - rejecting what he saw as the physicist's naïve pacifism - sums up his unsparing view of history in a few profoundly pessimistic, yet grimly persuasive pages.

Penguin Classics

The Unconscious

One of fifteen new translations of Freud's key writings, this project, under the general editorship of Adam Phillips, reimagines one of the modern era's greatest writers

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 functioning. Freud explores how we are torn between the pleasure principle and the reality principle, how we often find ways both to express and to deny what we most fear, and why certain men need fetishes for their sexual satisfaction. His study of our most basic drives, and how they are transformed, brilliantly illuminates the nature of sadism, masochism, exhibitionism and voyeurism.

Mass Psychology

One of fifteen new translations of Freud's key writings. This project, under the general editorship of celebrated psychoanalyst Adam Phillips, reimagines one the modern era's greatest writers.

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 followed. Writings such as A Religious Experience and The Future of an Illusion continue earlier work on the essential savagery of the civilized mind, and Moses the Man and Monotheistic Religion excavates the roots of religion and racism, which he concludes are inextricably intertwined. 
 
This remarkable collection reveals Freud not only at his most radically pessimistic, but also at his most personally courageous - engaging with his own adherences, his own antecedents, his own identity.

Civilization and its Discontents

You've had The Big Read, now here comes The Big Think.

Throughout history, some books have changed the world. They have transformed the way we see ourselves - and each other. They have inspired debate, dissent, war and revolution. They have enlightened, outraged, provoked and comforted. They have enriched lives - and destroyed them. Now Penguin brings you the works of the great thinkers, pioneers, radicals and visionaries whose ideas shook civilization, and helped make us who we are.

Studies in Hysteria

'A modernist ... playing with meaning, creating a new language for the idea of self' - Independent

The tormenting of the body by the troubled mind, hysteria is among the most pervasive of human disorders - yet at the same time it is the most elusive. Freud's recognition that hysteria stemmed from traumas in the patient's past transformed the way we think about sexuality. Studies in Hysteria is one of the founding texts of psychoanalysis, revolutionizing our understanding of love, desire and the human psyche.

Beyond the Pleasure Principle

A collection of some of Freud's most famous essays, including ON THE INTRODUCTION OF NARCISSISM; REMEMBERING, REPEATING AND WORKING THROUGH; BEYOND THE PLEASURE PRINCIPLE; THE EGO AND THE ID and INHIBITION, SYMPTOM AND FEAR.

An Outline of Psychoanalysis

One of fifteen volumes in the new Freud series commissioned for Penguin by series editor Adam Phillips. Part of a plan to generate a new, non-specialist Freud for a wide readership, which goes way beyond the institutional/clinical market and presents material to the reader in a new way. 
This volume will contain NEW INTRODUCTORY LECTURES IN PSYCHOANALYSIS and AN OUTLINE OF PSYCHOANALYSIS.

The Uncanny

Translated by David McLintock and introduced by Hugh Haughton.

An extraordinary collection of thematically linked essays, including THE UNCANNY, SCREEN MEMORIES and FAMILY ROMANCES. 
 
Leonardo da Vinci fascinated Freud primarily because he was keen to know why his personality was so incomprehensible to his contemporaries. In this probing biographical essay he deconstructs both da Vinci's character and the nature of his genius. As ever, many of his exploratory avenues lead to the subject's sexuality - why did da Vinci depict the naked human body the way hedid? What of his tendency to surround himself with handsome young boys that he took on as his pupils? Intriguing, thought-provoking and often contentious, this volume contains some of Freud's best writing.

The Joke and Its Relation to the Unconscious

Series edited by celebrated psychoanalyst Adam Philips

Sigmund Freud was born in 1856 and died in exile in London in 1939.  As a writer and doctor he remains one of the great voices of the modern era.

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 and feelings which would otherwise remain repressed. In elaborating this central thesis, he brings together a dazzling set of puns, anecdotes, snappyone-liners, spoonerisms and beloved stories of Jewish beggars and marriage-brokers. Many remain highly amusing, while others throw a vivid light on the lost world of early twentieth-century Vienna.

The 'Wolfman' and Other Cases

The new Penguin Freud, under Adam Phillips' general editorship, offers a fantastic opportunity to see Freud in a fresh light. 
 
This endlessly beguiling, suggestive, thought-provoking writer can be appreciated nowhere more vividly than in The Case Histories: 'Little Hans', 'The Rat Man', 'The Wolf Man' and 'Some Character Types Met within Psychoanalytic Work.'

Wild Analysis

'Psychoanalytic treatment utilised the patient's capacity to love and desire as a means to an end.   The stuff of romance became the stuff of cure.  When Freud is writing about technique in psychoanalysis - and these papers [in Wild Analysis] represent his most significant contributions to the subject over three decades of work - it is important to remember that he is talking about what a couple, an analyst and a so-called patient, can do in a room together.  For better or worse.'  Adam Phillips

The Psychopathology of Everyday Life

This collection of writings is famous for giving us the phrase 'Freudian slip'. It also builds up a strong social history of Vienna and the middle-class social milieu of Freud and his patients. Through a series of case histories, some no longer than a few lines long, Freud explores how it is that normal people make slips of speech, writing, reading and remembering in their everyday life, and reveals what it is that they betray about the existence of a sub-text or subliminal motive to our conscious actions. As he explains, most of these slips tend of be of a relatively anodyne nature, but some are a little more sinister, particularly those where pride or thwarted love are concerned...

Sigmund Freud

Vintage Minis

VINTAGE MINIS: GREAT MINDS. BIG IDEAS. LITTLE BOOKS. 
 
Have you ever dreamt you were naked on stage, or woken having failed an exam? In these fascinating, pioneering essays, Sigmund Freud plunges into the recesses of our minds, and awakens the hidden meanings behind our most typical and surprising night-time fantasies. From dreams of violence and death, to the more prosaic moments in our dream-life, Freud shines a light on the darkness we are often happy left consigned to night. 
 
Selected from the books The Essentials of Psycho-Analysis and The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of the Sigmund Freud, Volume IV: The Interpretation of Dreams (First Part) by Sigmund Freud

Sigmund Freud

Books by Sigmund Freud

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Fascinating books about Psychology

Books to read if you’re considering psychotherapy

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