Freudian

Sigmund Freud was born on 6 May 1856 to Galician Jewish^[2] parents in Příbor (German: Freiberg in Mähren), Moravia, Austrian Empire, now Czech Republic. His father Jakob was 41, a wool merchant, and had two children by a previous marriage. His mother Amalié (née Nathansohn), the second wife of Jakob, was 21. He was the first of their eight children and owing to his precocious intellect, his parents favoured him over his siblings from the early stages of his childhood; and despite their poverty, they sacrificed everything to give him a proper education. Due to the economic crisis of 1857, father Freud lost his business, and the family moved first to Leipzig before settling in Vienna. In 1865, Sigmund entered the Leopoldstädter Kommunal-Realgymnasium, a prominent high school. Freud was an outstanding pupil and graduated the Matura in 1873 with honors.

After planning to study law, Freud joined the medical faculty at University of Vienna to study under Darwinist Prof. Karl Claus. At that time, eel life history was still unknown, and due to their mysterious origins and migrations, a racist association was often made between eels and Jews and Gypsies. In search for their male sex organs, Freud spent four weeks at the Austrian zoological research station in Trieste, dissecting hundreds of eels without finding more than his predecessors such as Simon von Syrski. In 1876, he published his first paper about "the testicles of eels" in the "Mitteilungen der österreichischen Akademie der Wissenschaften", conceding that he could not solve the matter either. Frustrated by the lack of success that would have gained him fame, Freud chose to change his course of study. Biographers like Siegfried Bernfeld wonder if and how this early episode was significant for his later work regarding hidden sexuality and frustrations.^[3]^[4]^[5]

Medical school

In 1874, the concept of "psychodynamics" was proposed with the publication of Lectures on Physiology by German physiologist Ernst Wilhelm von Brücke who, in coordination with physicist Hermann von Helmholtz, one of the formulators of the first law of thermodynamics (conservation of energy), supposed that all living organisms are energy-systems also governed by this principle. During this year, at the University of Vienna, Brücke served as supervisor for first-year medical student Sigmund Freud who adopted this new "dynamic" physiology. In his Lectures on Physiology, Brücke set forth the radical view that the living organism is a dynamic system to which the laws of chemistry and physics apply.^[6] This was the starting point for Freud's dynamic psychology of the mind and its relation to the unconscious.^[6] The origins of Freud’s basic model, based on the fundamentals of chemistry and physics, according to John Bowlby, stems from Brücke, Meynert, Breuer, Helmholtz, and Herbart.^[7] In 1879, Freud interrupted his studies to complete his one year of obligatory military service, and in 1881 he received his Dr. med. (M.D.) with the thesis Über das Rückenmark niederer Fischarten ("on the spinal cord of lower fish species").

Freud and psychoanalysis

In October 1885 Freud went to Paris on a travelling fellowship to study with Europe's most renowned neurologist, Jean Martin Charcot. He was later to remember the experience of this stay as catalytic in turning him toward the practice of medical psychopathology and away from a less financially promising career in research neurology^[8]. Charcot specialised in the study of hysteria and its susceptibility to hypnosis which he frequently demonstrated with patients on stage in front of an audience. Freud later turned away from hypnosis as a potential cure, favouring free association and dream analysis.^[9] Charcot himself questioned his own work on hysteria towards the end of his life.^[10]

After opening his own medical practice, specializing in neurology, Freud married Martha Bernays in 1886. Her father Berman was the son of Isaac Bernays chief rabbi in Hamburg. After experimenting with hypnosis on his neurotic patients, Freud abandoned this form of treatment as it proved ineffective for many, in favor of a treatment where the patient talked through his or her problems. This came to be known as the "talking cure", as the ultimate goal of this talking was to locate and release powerful emotional energy that had initially been rejected, and imprisoned in the unconscious mind. Freud called this denial of emotions "repression", and he believed that it was often damaging to the normal functioning of the psyche, and could also retard physical functioning as well, which he described as "psychosomatic" symptoms. (The term "talking cure" was initially coined by the patient Anna O. who was treated by Freud's colleague Josef Breuer.) The "talking cure" is widely seen as the basis of psychoanalysis.^[11]

There has long been dispute about the possibility that a romantic liaison blossomed between Freud and his sister-in-law, Minna Bernays, who had moved into Freud's apartment at 19 Berggasse in 1896. It has been suggested ^[12] that the affair resulted in a pregnancy and subsequently an abortion for Miss Bernays. A hotel log dated August 13, 1898 has been suggested to support the allegation of an affair.^[13]

In his 40s, Freud "had numerous psychosomatic disorders as well as exaggerated fears of dying and other phobias" (Corey 2001, p. 67). During this time Freud was involved in the task of exploring his own dreams, memories, and the dynamics of his personality development. During this self-analysis, he came to realize the hostility he felt towards his father (Jacob Freud), who had died in 1896,^[14] and "he also recalled his childhood sexual feelings for his mother (Amalia Freud), who was attractive, warm, and protective" (Corey 2001, p. 67). Corey (2001) considers this time of emotional difficulty to be the most creative time in Freud's life.

After the publication of Freud's books in 1900 and 1902, interest in his theories began to grow, and a circle of supporters developed in the following period. Freud often chose to disregard the criticisms of those who were skeptical of his theories, however, which earned him the animosity of a number of individuals,^{citation needed} the most famous being Carl Jung, who originally supported Freud's ideas. Part of the reason for their fallout was due to Jung's growing commitment to religion and mysticism, which conflicted with Freud's atheism.^[15]

Last years

In 1930, Freud received the Goethe Prize in appreciation of his contribution to psychology and to German literary culture. Three years later the Nazis took control of Germany and Freud's books featured prominently among those burned and destroyed by the Nazis. In March 1938, Nazi Germany annexed Austria in the Anschluss. This led to violent outbursts of anti-Semitism in Vienna, and Freud and his family received visits from the Gestapo. Freud decided to go into exile "to die in freedom". He and his family left Vienna in June 1938 and moved to Hampstead, London.

A heavy cigar smoker, Freud endured more than 30 operations during his life due to oral cancer. In September 1939 he prevailed on his doctor and friend Max Schur to assist him in suicide. After reading Balzac's La Peau de chagrin in a single sitting he said, "My dear Schur, you certainly remember our first talk. You promised me then not to forsake me when my time comes. Now it is nothing but torture and makes no sense any more." Schur administered three doses of morphine over many hours that resulted in Freud's death on September 23, 1939.^[16] Three days after his death, Freud's body was cremated at Golders Green Crematorium in England during a service attended by Austrian refugees, including the author Stefan Zweig. His ashes were later placed in the crematorium's columbarium. They rest in an ancient Greek urn which Freud had received as a present from Marie Bonaparte and which he had kept in his study in Vienna for many years. After Martha Freud's death in 1951, her ashes were also placed in that urn. Golders Green Crematorium has since also become the final resting place for Anna Freud and her lifelong friend Dorothy Burlingham, as well as for several other members of the Freud family.

Freud's ideas

Freud has been influential in two related but distinct ways. He simultaneously developed a theory of how the human mind is organized and operates internally, and a theory of how human behavior both conditions and results from this particular theoretical understanding. This led him to favor certain clinical techniques for attempting to help cure psychopathology. He theorized that personality is developed by the person's childhood experiences.

Early work

Since neurology and psychiatry were not recognized as distinct medical fields at the time of Freud's training, the medical degree he obtained after studying for six years at the University of Vienna board certified him in both fields, although he is far more well-known for his work in the latter. As far as neurology went, Freud was an early researcher on the topic of neurophysiology, specifically cerebral palsy, which was then known as "cerebral paralysis." He published several medical papers on the topic, and showed that the disease existed far before other researchers in his day began to notice and study it. He also suggested that William Little, the man who first identified cerebral palsy, was wrong about lack of oxygen during the birth process being a cause. Instead, he suggested that complications in birth were only a symptom of the problem. It was not until the 1980s that Freud's speculations were confirmed by more modern research.^{citation needed}

Freud hoped that his research would provide a solid scientific basis for his therapeutic technique. The goal of Freudian therapy, or psychoanalysis, was to bring to consciousness repressed thoughts and feelings in order to free the patient from the suffering caused by the repetitive return of distorted forms of these thoughts and feelings. According to some of his successors, including his daughter Anna Freud, the goal of therapy is to allow the patient to develop a stronger ego.

Classically, the bringing of unconscious thoughts and feelings to consciousness is brought about by encouraging the patient to talk in free association and to talk about dreams. Another important element of psychoanalysis is a relative lack of direct involvement on the part of the analyst, which is meant to encourage the patient to project thoughts and feelings onto the analyst. Through this process, transference, the patient can reenact and resolve repressed conflicts, especially childhood conflicts with (or about) parents.

The origin of Freud's early work with psychoanalysis can be linked to Joseph Breuer. Freud actually credits Breuer with the discovery of the psychoanalytical method. One case started this phenomenon that would shape the field of psychology for decades to come, the case of Anna O. In 1880 a young girl came to Breuer with symptoms of what was then called female hysteria. Anna O. was a highly intelligent 21-year-old woman. She presented with symptoms such as paralysis of the limbs, dissociation, and amnesia; today this set of symptoms are known as conversion disorder. After many doctors had given up and accused Anna O. of faking her symptoms, Breuer decided to treat her sympathetically, which he did with all of his patients. He started to hear her mumble words during what he called states of absence. Eventually Breuer started to recognize some of the words and wrote them down. He then hypnotized her and repeated the words to her; Breuer found out that the words were associated with her father's illness and death.

In the early 1890s Freud used a form of treatment based on the one that Breuer had described to him, modified by what he called his "pressure technique". The traditional story, based on Freud's later accounts of this period, is that as a result of his use of this procedure most of his patients in the mid-1890s reported early childhood sexual abuse. He believed these stories, but after being heavily criticized for this belief and hearing a patient tell the story about Freud's personal friend being a victimizer, Freud concluded that his patients were fantasizing the abuse scenes.

In 1896 Freud posited that the symptoms of 'hysteria' and obsessional neurosis derived from unconscious memories of sexual abuse in infancy, and claimed that he had uncovered such incidents for every single one of his current patients (one third of whom were men). However a close reading of his papers and letters from this period indicates that these patients did not report early childhood sexual abuse as he later claimed: rather, he based his claims on analytically inferring the supposed incidents, using a procedure that was heavily dependent on the symbolic interpretation of somatic symptoms.

Freud and cocaine

Freud was an early user and proponent of cocaine as a stimulant as well as analgesic. He wrote several articles on the antidepressant qualities of the drug and he was influenced by his friend and confidant Wilhelm Fliess, who recommended cocaine for the treatment of the "nasal reflex neurosis." Fliess operated on Freud and a number of Freud's patients whom he believed to be suffering from the disorder, including Emma Eckstein, whose surgery proved disastrous.^{citation needed}.

Freud felt that cocaine would work as a panacea for many disorders and wrote a well-received paper, "On Coca," explaining its virtues. He prescribed it to his friend Ernst von Fleischl-Marxow to help him overcome a morphine addiction he had acquired while treating a disease of the nervous system.^{citation needed} Freud also recommended it to many of his close family and friends. He narrowly missed out on obtaining scientific priority for discovering cocaine's anesthetic properties (of which Freud was aware but on which he had not written extensively), after Karl Koller, a colleague of Freud's in Vienna, presented a report to a medical society in 1884 outlining the ways in which cocaine could be used for delicate eye surgery. Freud was bruised by this, especially because this would turn out to be one of the few safe uses of cocaine, as reports of addiction and overdose began to filter in from many places in the world. Freud's medical reputation became somewhat tarnished because of this early ambition. Furthermore, Freud's friend Fleischl-Marxow developed an acute case of "cocaine psychosis" as a result of Freud's prescriptions and died a few years later. Freud felt great regret over these events, which later biographers have dubbed "The Cocaine Incident."^{citation needed} However, he managed to move on, and even continued to use cocaine.

Dr. Jurgen von Scheidt speculated that most of Freud's psychoanalytical theory was a byproduct of his cocaine use.^[17]

The Unconscious

Perhaps the most significant contribution Freud made to Western thought were his arguments concerning the importance of the unconscious mind in understanding conscious thought and behavior. The western world overwhelmingly supported positivism up until Freud's time- the belief that self-knowledge as well as self-control is possible. Freud, however, came up with a revolutionary as well as controversial idea by declaring that people essentially have no free will.

As psychologist Jacques Van Rillaer, among others, pointed out, "contrary to what most people believe, the unconscious was not discovered by Freud. In 1890, when psychoanalysis was still unheard of, William James, in his monumental treatise on psychology, examined the way Schopenhauer, von Hartmann, Janet, Binet and others had used the term 'unconscious' and 'subconscious'".^[18] Boris Sidis, a Russian Jew who emigrated to the United States of America in 1887, and studied under William James, wrote The Psychology of Suggestion: A Research into the Subconscious Nature of Man and Society in 1898, followed by ten or more works over the next twenty five years on similar topics to the works of Freud. Historian of psychology Mark Altschule concluded, "It is difficult - or perhaps impossible - to find a nineteenth-century psychologist or psychiatrist who did not recognize unconscious cerebration as not only real but of the highest importance."^[19] Freud's advance was not, then, to uncover the unconscious but to devise a method for systematically studying it, and his claims about the dynamics and structure of the unconscious.

Freud called dreams the "royal road to the unconscious". By this, he meant that dreams illustrate the "logic" of the unconscious mind. Freud developed his first topology of the psyche in The Interpretation of Dreams (1899) in which he proposed the argument that the unconscious exists and described a method for gaining access to it. The preconscious was described as a layer between conscious and unconscious thought—that which we could access with a little effort. Thus, Freud argued against any attempts to repress the unconscious and instead believed that it needed to be understood in order to achieve the ideals of the Enlightenment, positivism and rationalism.

One key factor in the operation of the unconscious is "repression." Freud believed that many people "repress" painful memories deep into their unconscious mind. Although Freud later attempted to find patterns of repression among his patients in order to derive a general model of the mind, he also observed that repression varies among individual patients. Freud also argued that the act of repression did not take place within a person's consciousness. Thus, people are unaware of the fact that they have buried memories or traumatic experiences.

Later, Freud distinguished between three concepts of the unconscious: the descriptive unconscious, the dynamic unconscious, and the system unconscious. The descriptive unconscious referred to all those features of mental life of which people are not subjectively aware. The dynamic unconscious, a more specific construct, referred to mental processes and contents which are defensively removed from consciousness as a result of conflicting attitudes. The system unconscious denoted the idea that when mental processes are repressed, they become organized by principles different from those of the conscious mind, such as condensation and displacement.

Eventually, Freud abandoned the idea of the system unconscious, replacing it with the concept of the Ego, super-ego, and id (discussed below). Throughout his career, however, he retained the descriptive and dynamic conceptions of the unconscious.

Psychosexual development

Freud hoped to prove that his model was universally valid and thus turned to ancient mythology and contemporary ethnography for comparative material. Freud named his new theory the Oedipus complex after the famous Greek tragedy Oedipus Rex by Sophocles. "I found in myself a constant love for my mother, and jealousy of my father. I now consider this to be a universal event in childhood," Freud said. Freud sought to anchor this pattern of development in the dynamics of the mind. Each stage is a progression into adult sexual maturity, characterized by a strong ego and the ability to delay gratification (cf. Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality). He used the Oedipus conflict to point out how much he believed that people desire incest and must repress that desire. The Oedipus conflict was described as a state of psychosexual development and awareness. He also turned to anthropological studies of totemism and argued that totemism reflected a ritualized enactment of a tribal Oedipal conflict.

Freud originally posited childhood sexual abuse as a general explanation for the origin of neuroses, but he abandoned this so-called "seduction theory" as insufficiently explanatory, noting that he had found many cases in which apparent memories of childhood sexual abuse were based more on imagination than on real events. During the late 1890s Freud, who never abandoned his belief in the sexual etiology of neuroses, began to emphasize fantasies built around the Oedipus complex as the primary cause of hysteria and other neurotic symptoms. Despite this change in his explanatory model, Freud always recognized that some neurotics had been sexually abused by their fathers, and was quite explicit about discussing several patients whom he knew to have been abused.^[20]

Freud also believed that the libido developed in individuals by changing its object, a process codified by the concept of sublimation. He argued that humans are born "polymorphously perverse", meaning that any number of objects could be a source of pleasure. He further argued that, as humans develop, they become fixated on different and specific objects through their stages of development—first in the oral stage (exemplified by an infant's pleasure in nursing), then in the anal stage (exemplified by a toddler's pleasure in evacuating his or her bowels), then in the phallic stage. Freud argued that children then passed through a stage in which they fixated on the mother as a sexual object (known as the Oedipus Complex) but that the child eventually overcame and repressed this desire because of its taboo nature. (The lesser known Electra complex refers to such a fixation on the father.) The repressive or dormant latency stage of psychosexual development preceded the sexually mature genital stage of psychosexual development.

Freud's way of interpretation has been called phallocentric by many contemporary thinkers. This is because, for Freud, the unconscious desires the phallus (penis). Males are afraid of losing their masculinity, symbolized by the phallus, to another male. Females always desire to have a phallus - an unfulfillable desire. Thus boys resent their fathers (fear of castration) and girls desire theirs.

Ego, super-ego, and id

In his later work, Freud proposed that the psyche could be divided into three parts: ego, super-ego, and id. The id is known as the child-like portion of the psyche that is very impulsive and only takes into account what it wants and disregards all consequences. The super-ego is the moral code of the psyche that solely follows right and wrong and takes into account no special circumstances in which the morally right thing may not be right for that situation. Finally, the ego is the balance between the two. It is the part of the psyche that is, usually, portrayed in the person's action, and after the super-ego and id are balanced, the ego acts in a way that takes both impulses and morality into consideration.

Freud discussed this structural model of the mind in the 1920 essay Beyond the Pleasure Principle, and fully elaborated it in The Ego and the Id (1923), where he developed it as an alternative to his previous topographic schema (conscious, unconscious, preconscious).

Freud acknowledged that his use of the term Id (or the It) derives from the writings of Georg Grodeck. The term Id appears in the earliest writing of Boris Sidis, attributed to William James, as early as 1898.

The life and death drives

Freud believed that humans were driven by two conflicting central desires: the life drive (libido) (survival, propagation, hunger, thirst, and sex) and the death drive (Thanatos). Freud's description of Cathexis, whose energy is known as libido, included all creative, life-producing drives. The death drive (or death instinct), whose energy is known as anticathexis, represented an urge inherent in all living things to return to a state of calm: in other words, an inorganic or dead state. He recognized Thanatos only in his later years and develops his theory on the death drive in Beyond the Pleasure Principle. Freud approaches the paradox between the life drives and the death drives by defining pleasure and unpleasure. According to Freud, unpleasure refers to stimulus that the body receives. (For example, excessive friction on the skin's surface produces a burning sensation; or, the bombardment of visual stimuli amidst rush hour traffic produces anxiety.) Conversely, pleasure is a result of a decrease in stimuli (for example, a calm environment the body enters after having been subjected to a hectic environment). If pleasure increases as stimuli decreases, then the ultimate experience of pleasure for Freud would be zero stimulus, or death. Given this proposition, Freud acknowledges the tendency for the unconscious to repeat unpleasurable experiences in order to desensitize, or deaden, the body. This compulsion to repeat unpleasurable experiences explains why traumatic nightmares occur in dreams, as nightmares seem to contradict Freud's earlier conception of dreams purely as a site of pleasure, fantasy, and desire. On the one hand, the life drives promote survival by avoiding extreme unpleasure and any threat to life. On the other hand, the death drive functions simultaneously toward extreme pleasure, which leads to death. Freud addresses the conceptual dualities of pleasure and unpleasure, as well as sex/life and death, in his discussions on masochism and sadomasochism. The tension between Eros and Thanatos represents a revolution in his manner of thinking. Some also refer to the death instinct as the Nirvana Principle.

These ideas resemble aspects of the philosophies of Arthur Schopenhauer and Friedrich Nietzsche. Schopenhauer's pessimistic philosophy, expounded in The World as Will and Representation, describes a renunciation of the will to live that corresponds on many levels with Freud's Death Drive. Similarly, the life drive clearly parallels much of Nietzsche's concept of the Dionysian in The Birth of Tragedy. However, Freud denied having been acquainted with their writings before he formulated the groundwork of his own ideas.^[21]

Freud's legacy

Psychotherapy

Freud's theories and research methods have always been controversial. However, Freud has had a tremendous impact on psychotherapy. Many psychotherapists follow Freud's approach to a greater or lesser extent, even if they reject Freud's theories.

Freud's contributions to psychotherapy have been extensively criticised by scholars and historians.

H. J. Eysenck claimed that Freud 'set psychiatry back one hundred years', consistently mis-diagnosed his patients, fraudulently misrepresented case histories and that "what is true in Freud is not new and what is new in Freud is not true".^[22]

Mikkel Borch-Jacobsen wrote that "The truth is that Freud knew from the very start that Fleischl, Anna O. and his 18 patients were not cured, and yet he did not hesitate to build grand theories on these non-existent foundations...he disguised fragments of his self-analysis as ‘objective’ cases, that he concealed his sources, that he conveniently antedated some of his analyses, that he sometimes attributed to his patients ‘free associations’ that he himself made up, that he inflated his therapeutic successes, that he slandered his opponents."[2]

Philosophy

While he saw himself as a scientist, Freud greatly admired Theodor Lipps, a philosopher and main supporter of the ideas of the subconscious and empathy^[23]. Freud's theories have had a tremendous effect on the humanities—especially on the Frankfurt school and critical theory. Freud had an incisive influence on French philosophers following the "return to Freud" of the French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan. Freud's model of the mind is often considered a challenge to the enlightenment model of rational agency, which was a key element of much modern philosophy.

Patients

Freud used pseudonyms in his case histories. Many of the people identified only by pseudonyms were traced to their true identities by Peter Swales. This is a partial list of patients whose case studies were published by Freud:

People on whom psychoanalytic observations were published but who were not patients:

Notes

^ Rice, Emanuel (1990). Freud and Moses: The Long Journey Home. SUNY Press, 9, 18, 34. ISBN 0791404536.
^ Gresser, Moshe (1994). Dual Allegiance: Freud As a Modern Jew. SUNY Press, 225. ISBN 0791418111.
^ Expertensprechen zum Thema Aale
^ Was dachten Nazis über den Aal? : Textarchiv : Berliner Zeitung
^ Der Aal im Nationalsozialismus
^ ^a ^b Hall, Calvin, S. (1954). A Primer in Freudian Psychology. Meridian Book. ISBN 0452011833.
^ Bowlby, John (1999). Attachment and Loss: Vol I, 2nd Ed.. Basic Books, 13-23. ISBN 0-465-00543-8.
^ Joseph Aguayo Charcot and Freud: Some Implications of Late 19th Century French Psychiatry and Politics for the Origins of Psychoanalysis (1986). Psychoanalysis and Contemporary Thought, 9:223-260
^ http://www.healthcentral.com/anxiety/c/1950/20288/freud-101/ AnxietyConnection.com Jerry KennardFreud 101: Psychoanalysis Tuesday, February 12, 2008]
^ Freudfile Sigmund Freud Life and Work - Jean-Martin Charcot
^ Gay, Peter (1988). Freud: A Life for Our Time, p.65-66.
^ Hans Jurgen Eysenck. Decline and Fall of the Freudian Empire. Transaction Publishers. 2004, p146
^ Blumenthal, Ralph (24 December 2006). "Hotel log hints at desire that Freud didn't repress", International Herald Tribune.
^ "The Life of Sigmund Freud". WGBH Educational Foundation (2004). Retrieved on 2007-11-24.
^ Gay, Peter (1999-03-29). "The TIME 100: Sigmund Freud", Time Inc.. Retrieved on 2007-11-24.
^ Gay, Peter (1988). Freud: A Life for Our Time. New York: W. W. Norton & Company.
^ Scheidt, Jürgen vom (1973). "Sigmund Freud and cocaine". Psyche: pp. 385–430.
^ Meyer (2005, 217).
^ Altschule, M (1977). Origins of Concepts in Human Behavior. New York: Wiley, 199. , cited in Allen Esterson, Freud returns?
^ Freud: A Life for Our Time, p.95.
^ Zilborg, Beyond the Pleasure Principle, p.xxvii.
^ Eysenck, Hans, Decline and Fall of the Freudian Empire (Harmondsworth: Pelican, 1986)
^ Pigman, G.W. (April 1995). "Freud and the history of empathy". The International journal of psycho-analysis 76 (Pt 2): 237–56.
^ Appignanesi & Forrester (1992). Freud's Women, p.108.

Corey, Gerald (2000). Theory and Practice of Counseling and Psychotherapy. 6th ed. ISBN 0534348238

Bibliography

Major works by Freud

Studies on Hysteria (with Josef Breuer) (Studien über Hysterie, 1895)
With Robert Fliess: The Complete Letters of Sigmund Freud to Wilhelm Fliess, 1887-1904, Publisher: Belknap Press, 1986, ISBN 0674154215
The Interpretation of Dreams (Die Traumdeutung, 1899 [1900])
The Psychopathology of Everyday Life (Zur Psychopathologie des Alltagslebens, 1901)
Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality (Drei Abhandlungen zur Sexualtheorie, 1905)
Jokes and their Relation to the Unconscious (Der Witz und seine Beziehung zum Unbewußten, 1905)
Totem and Taboo (Totem und Tabu, 1913)
On Narcissism (Zur Einführung des Narzißmus, 1914)
Beyond the Pleasure Principle (Jenseits des Lustprinzips, 1920)
The Ego and the Id (Das Ich und das Es, 1923)
The Future of an Illusion (Die Zukunft einer Illusion, 1927)
Civilization and Its Discontents (Das Unbehagen in der Kultur, 1930)
Moses and Monotheism (Der Mann Moses und die monotheistische Religion, 1939)
An Outline of Psycho-Analysis (Abriß der Psychoanalyse, 1940)
A Phylogenetic Fantasy: Overview of the Transference Neuroses translated by Axel Hoffer by Peter Hoffer, Harvard University Press.

Correspondence

The Complete Letters of Sigmund Freud to Wilhelm Fliess, 1887-1904, (editor and translator Jeffrey Moussaieff Masson), 1985, ISBN 0-674-15420-7
The Sigmund Freud Carl Gustav Jung Letters, Publisher: Princeton University Press; Abr edition , 1994, ISBN 0691036438
The Complete Correspondence of Sigmund Freud and Karl Abraham, 1907-1925, Publisher: Karnac Books, 2002, ISBN 1855750511
The Complete Correspondence of Sigmund Freud and Ernest Jones, 1908-1939., Belknap Press, Harvard University Press, 1995, ISBN 067415424X
The Sigmund Freud Ludwig Binswanger Letters, Publisher: Open Gate Press, 2000, ISBN 187187145X
The Correspondence of Sigmund Freud and Sándor Ferenczi, Volume 1, 1908-1914, Belknap Press, Harvard University Press, 1994, ISBN 0674174186
The Correspondence of Sigmund Freud and Sándor Ferenczi, Volume 2, 1914-1919, Belknap Press, Harvard University Press, 1996, ISBN 0674174194
The Correspondence of Sigmund Freud and Sándor Ferenczi, Volume 3, 1920-1933, Belknap Press, Harvard University Press, 2000, ISBN 0674002970
The Letters of Sigmund Freud to Eduard Silberstein, 1871-1881, Belknap Press, Harvard University Press, ISBN 067452828X
Sigmund Freud and Lou Andreas-Salome; letters, Publisher: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich; 1972, ISBN 0151334900
The Letters of Sigmund Freud and Arnold Zweig, Publisher: New York University Press, 1987, ISBN 0814725856

Biographies

The area of biography has been especially contentious in the historiography of psychoanalysis, for two main reasons: first, following Freud's death, significant portions of his personal papers were for several decades made available only at the permission of his biological and intellectual heirs (Anna Freud was extremely protective of her father's reputation); second, much of the data and theory of psychoanalysis hinges upon the personal testimony of Freud himself, and so to challenge Freud's honesty has been seen by many as an attack on the roots of his work.

Freud wrote autobiographical material, including On the History of the Psychoanalytic Movement (1914) and An Autobiographical Study (1924), which provided much of the basis for discussions by later biographers, including critics, since they contain a number of prominent omissions and potential misrepresentations. Major biographies on Freud published in the twentieth century include:

Helen Walker Puner, Freud: His Life and His Mind (1947) — Puner's "facts" were often shaky at best but she was insightful with regard to Freud's unanalyzed relationship to his mother, Amalia.

Ernest Jones, The Life and Work of Sigmund Freud, 3 vols. (1953–1958) — the first authorized biography of Freud, made by one of his former students with the authorization and assistance of Anna Freud, with the hope of "dispelling the myths" from earlier biographies. Though this is the most comprehensive biography of Freud, Jones has been accused of writing more of a hagiography than a history of Freud. Among his questionable assertions, Jones diagnosed his own analyst, Ferenczi, as "psychotic." Jones also maligned Otto Rank, Ferenczi's close friend and Jones's most important rival for leadership of the movement in the 1920s.
Henri Ellenberger, The Discovery of the Unconscious (1970) — was the first compelling attempt to situate Freud within the context of his time and intellectual thought, arguing that he was the intellectual heir of Franz Mesmer and that the genesis of his theory owed a large amount to the political context of turn of the 19th century Vienna. (Swiss link: http://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henri_F._Ellenberger)
Frank Sulloway, Freud: Biologist of the Mind (1979) — Sulloway, one of the first professional/academic historians to write a biography of Freud, positioned him within the larger context of the history of science, arguing specifically that he was a biologist in disguise (a "crypto-biologist", in Sulloway's terms), and sought to actively hide this.
Peter Gay, Freud: A Life for Our Time (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1988) — Gay's impressively scholarly work was published in part as a response to the anti-Freudian literature and the "Freud Wars" of the 1980s (see below). Gay's book is probably the best pro-Freud biography available, though he is not completely uncritical of Freud. His "Bibliographical Essay" at the end of the volume provides astute evaluations of the voluminous literature on Freud up to the mid-1980s.
Breger, Louis. "Freud: Darkness in the Midst of Vision." (New York: Wiley, 2000). Written from a psychoanalytic point of view (the author is a former President of the Institute of Contemporary Psychoanalysis), this is a criticial life of Freud. It corrects, in the light of recent historical research, many (though not all) of several disputed traditional historical accounts of events repeated by Peter Gay.

The creation of Freud biographies has been written about at some length. See, for example, Elisabeth Young-Bruehl, "A History of Freud Biographies," in Discovering the History of Psychiatry, edited by Mark S. Micale and Roy Porter (Oxford University Press, 1994).

Books about Freud and psychoanalysis

Ernest Jones : "The Life and Work of Sigmund Freud.", Publisher: Basic Books, 1981, ISBN 0-465-04015-2
"The Language of Psycho-Analysis" , Jean Laplanche et J.B. Pontalis, Editeur: W. W. Norton & Company, 1974, ISBN 0-393-01105-4
"Sigmund Freud and Lou Andreas-Salome" : Letters" Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company (November 1985), ISBN 0-393-30261-X
Lou Andreas-Salome : "The Freud Journal" , Publisher: Texas Bookman, 1996, ISBN 0-7043-0022-2
Sabina Spielrein : "Destruction as cause of becoming", 1993, OCLC 44450080
Marthe Robert: "The Psychoanalytic Revolution", Publisher: Avon Books; Discus ed edition, 1968, OCLC 2401215
Jean-Michel Quinodoz : Reading Freud: A Chronological Exploration of Freud's Writings, Publisher: Routledge; 2005, ISBN 1583917470
Appignanesi, Lisa & Forrester, John, "Freud's Women" Publisher: Weidenfeld & Nicolson: London. (1992). ISBN 0-75381-916-3
Bettelheim, Bruno : "Freud and Man's Soul" Publisher: Vintage; Vintage edition, 1983, ISBN 0-394-71036-3
Gay, Peter : "Freud: A Life For Our Time" Publisher: J. M. Dent & Sons Ltd, London, 1988, ISBN 0-333-48638-2
André Green: "The Work of the Negative" by Andre Green, Andrew Weller (Translator), Publisher: Free Association Books, 1999, ISBN 1-85343-470-1
André Green: "On Private Madness", Publisher: International Universities Press, 1997, ISBN 0-8236-3853-7
André Green: "The Chains of Eros", Publisher: Karnac Books, 2002, ISBN 1-85575-960-8
André Green: "Psychoanalysis: A Paradigm For Clinical Thinking" Publisher: Free Association Books, 2005, ISBN 1-85343-773-5
John Farrell. Freud's Paranoid Quest: Psychoanalysis and Modern Suspicion (NYU Press, 1996). A vigorous account of the relations between Freud's logic, rhetoric, and personality, as well as his relations with literary sources like Cervantes, Goethe, and Swift.
Lear, Jonathan. Freud Routledge (2005) ISBN 0-415-31451-8
Lear, Jonathan. Love and Its Place in Nature. A Philosophical Interpretation of Psychoanalysis. New York: Farrar, Strauss and Giroux, 1990.
Neu, Jerome (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Freud (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994).
Parisi, Thomas. "Civilization and Its Discontents. An Anthropology for the Future". Twayne, 1999. ISBN 0-8057-7934-5.
Rieff, Philip. Freud: The Mind of the Moralist, 3d ed. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1979).
Roazen, Paul. Freud and His Followers (Random House, 1975). A rich study of the development of psychoanalysis, based upon many personal interviews. ISBN 0394488962
Young-Bruehl, Elisabeth (1992). Freud on Women: A Reader. Norton. ISBN 0-393-30870-7.
Anthony Bateman and Jeremy Holmes, Introduction to Psychoanalysis: Contemporary Theory & Practice (London: Routledge, 1995)
Isbister, J. N. "Freud, An Introduction to his Life and Work" Publisher: Polity Press: Cambridge, Oxford. (1985)

Conceptual critiques

Adler, Mortimer J. What Man Has Made of Man: A Study of the Consequences of Platonism and Positivism in Psychology (New York: Longmans, Green, 1937). (A philosophical critique from a Thomistic point of view.)
Aziz, Robert. The Syndetic Paradigm:The Untrodden Path Beyond Freud and Jung (2007), a refereed publication of The State University of New York Press. ISBN-13:978-0-7914-6982-8.
Chasseguet-Smirgel, Janine & Grunberger, Béla. Freud or Reich? Psychoanalysis and Illusion. (London: Free Association Books, 1986)
Cioffi, Frank. Freud and the Question of Pseudoscience. Chicago and La Salle: Open Court, 1998.
Deleuze, Gilles and Guattari, Félix. Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. Robert Hurley, Mark Seem and Helen R. Lane (London and New York: Continuum, 2004). (This first volume of the famous two-part work (also subtitled Capitalism and Schizophrenia) criticises Freud's argument that the Oedipus complex determines subjectivity. It also criticises the Lacanian 'return to Freud.')
Ellenberger, Henri. The Discovery of the Unconscious: the History and Evolution of Dynamic Psychiatry (London: Penguin, 1970). (An extensive account and sensitive critique of Freudian metapsychology.) (Swiss link: http://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henri_F._Ellenberger)
Ettinger, Bracha. The Matrixial Borderspace (Essays from 1994-1999. University of Minnesota Press, 2006).
Eysenck, H. J. and Wilson, G. D. The Experimental Study of Freudian Theories, Methuen, London (1973).
Eysenck, Hans. Decline and Fall of the Freudian Empire (Harmondsworth: Pelican, 1986).
Hobson, J. Allan Hobson. Dreaming: An Introduction to the Science of Sleep (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004). ISBN 0-19-280482-0. (Critique of Freud's dream theory in terms of current neuroscience)
Irigaray, Luce. Speculum of the Other Woman (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1985).
Johnston, Thomas. Freud and Political Thought (New York: Citadel, 1965). (Discusses the importance of psychoanalysis for political theory.)
Kofman, Sarah. The Enigma of Woman: Woman in Freud's Writings (Ithaca, NY, & London: Cornell University Press, 1985).
Marcuse, Herbert. Eros and Civilization: A Philosophical Inquiry into Freud (Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 1974). (Mentioned above.)
Mitchell, Juliet. Psychoanalysis and Feminism: A Radical Reassessment of Freudian Psychoanalysis Originally published in 1974; Basic Books reissue (2000) ISBN 0-465-04608-8
Ricoeur, Paul. Freud and Philosophy: An Essay on Interpretation, trans. Denis Savage (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1972).
Ricoeur, Paul. The Conflict of Interpretations: Essays in Hermeneutics, ed. Don Ihde (London: Continuum, 2004). (A critical examination of the importance of Freud for philosophy.)
Roazen, Paul. Freud and His Followers. (New York: Random House, 1975).
Szasz, Thomas. Anti-Freud: Karl Kraus's Criticism of Psychoanalysis and Psychiatry, Syracuse University Press, 1990, ISBN 0-8156-0247-2.
Torrey, E. Fuller. Freudian Fraud: The Malignant Effect of Freud's Theory on American Thought and Culture. New York, NY : HarperCollins, 1992.
Voloshinov, Valentin. Freudianism: A Marxist critique, Academic Press (1976) ISBN 0-12-723250-8
Wollheim, Richard. Freud, 2nd edn. (London: Fontana, 1991).

Biographical critiques

Bakan, David. Sigmund Freud and the Jewish Mystical Tradition, D. Van Nostrand Company, 1958; New York, Schocken Books, 1965; Dover Publications, 2004. ISBN 0-486-43767-1
Crews, Frederick. Unauthorized Freud : Doubters Confront a Legend, New York, Viking 1998. ISBN 0-670-87221-0
Dolnick, Edward. Madness on the Couch: Blaming the Victim in the Heyday of Psychoanalysis ISBN 0-684-82497-3
Dufresne, Todd. Killing Freud, Continuum International Publishing Group, 2003.
Esterson, Allen. Seductive Mirage: An Exploration of the Work of Sigmund Freud. Chicago: Open Court, 1993.
Eysenck, H. J. The Decline and Fall of the Freudian Empire, Scott-Townsend Publishers, Washington D. C., (1990)
Falk, Avner. Freud and Herzl. Contemporary Psychoanalysis, vol. 14, July, pp. 357-387.
Farrell, John. Freud's Paranoid Quest: Psychoanalysis and Modern Suspicion. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1996.
Jurjevich, R. M. The Hoax of Freudism: A study of Brainwashing the American Professionals and Laymen Dorrance (1974) ISBN 0-8059-1856-6
LaPiere, R. T. The Freudian Ethic: An Analysis of the Subversion of Western Character Greenwood Press (1974) ISBN 0-8371-7543-7
Ludwig, Emil. Doctor Freud, Manor Books, New York, 1973
MacDonald, Kevin B. The Culture of Critique: An Evolutionary Analysis of Jewish Involvement in Twentieth-Century Intellectual and Political Movements Authorhouse (2002) ISBN 0-7596-7222-9
Macmillan, Malcolm. Freud Evaluated: The Completed Arc MIT Press, 1996 ISBN 0-262-63171-7 [originally published by New Holland, 1991]
Masson, Jeffrey Moussaieff. The Assault on Truth: Freud's Suppression of the Seduction Theory, Ballantine Books (November 2003), ISBN 0-345-45279-8
Scharnberg, Max. The Non-Authentic Nature of Freud's Observations, Almqvist & Wiksell International, 1993 ISBN 91-554-3122-4
Stannard, D. E. Shrinking History: On Freud and the Failure of Psychohistory Oxford University Press, Oxford (1980) ISBN 0-19-503044-3
Thornton, E. M. Freud and Cocaine: The Freudian Fallacy, Blond & Briggs, London (1983) ISBN 0-85634-139-8
Webster, Richard. Why Freud Was Wrong: Sin, Science, and Psychoanalysis BasicBooks, 1995. ISBN 0-465-09579-8

Contents

Biography

Early life