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Sigmund Freud: The Basics is an easy-to-read introduction to the life and ideas of Sigmund Freud, the founder of psychoanalysis and a key figure in the history of psychology. Janet Sayers provides an accessible overview of Freud’s early life and work, beginning with his childhood. Her book includes the stories of his most famous patients: Dora, Little Hans, the Rat Man, Judge Schreber, and the Wolf Man. It also discusses Freud’s key ideas such as psychosexual development, the Oedipus complex, and psychoanalytic treatment. Sayers then covers Freud’s later work, with a description of his observations about depression, trauma and the death instinct, as well as his 1923 theory of the id, ego, and superego. The book includes a glossary of key terms and concludes with examples of how psychoanalysis has been applied to the study of art, literature, film, anthropology, religion, sociology, gender politics, and racism. Sigmund Freud: The Basics offers an essential introduction for students from all backgrounds seeking to understand Freud’s ideas and for general readers with an interest in psychology. For those already familiar with Freudian ideas, it offers a helpful guide to their interdisciplinary applications and context not least today.

This book investigates what was distinctive about the predisposition to psychosis Freud posited in Daniel Paul Schreber, a presiding judge in Saxony’s highest court. It argues that Freud’s 1911 Schreber text reversed the order of priority in late nineteenthcentury conceptions of the disposing causes of psychosis – the objective-biological and subjective-biographical – to privilege subjective disposition to psychosis, but without returning to the subjectivity of early nineteenth-century Romantic psychiatry and without obviating the legitimate claims of biological psychiatry in relation to hereditary disposition. While D. P. Schreber is the book’s reference point, this is not a general treatment of Schreber, or of Freud’s reading of the Schreber case. It focuses rather on what was new in Freud’s thinking on the disposition to psychosis, what he learned from his psychiatrist contemporaries and what he did not, and whether or not psychoanalysts have fully received his aetiology.

Freud began university intending to study both medicine and philosophy. But he was ambivalent about philosophy, regarding it as metaphysical, too limited to the conscious mind, and ignorant of empirical knowledge. Yet his private correspondence and his writings on culture and history reveal that he never forsook his original philosophical ambitions. Indeed, while Freud remained firmly committed to positivist ideals, his thought was permeated with other aspects of German philosophy. Placed in dialogue with his intellectual contemporaries, Freud appears as a reluctant philosopher who failed to recognize his own metaphysical commitments, thereby crippling the defense of his theory and misrepresenting his true achievement. Recasting Freud as an inspired humanist and reconceiving psychoanalysis as a form of moral inquiry, Alfred Tauber argues that Freudianism still offers a rich approach to self-inquiry, one that reaffirms the enduring task of philosophy and many of the abiding ethical values of Western civilization.

'This book provides a powerfully argued and beautifully constructed account of the early development of the child in the family context from a psychoanalytic perspective. It draws particularly on the theoretical trajectory from Freud to Klein and Bion. It is written in a clear, accessible and jargon-free style and it is evident that the author wishes to reach and interest a wide audience of parents and others involved in the upbringing of children in the broadest sense. The growth of the child's mind is the story she wants to tell. The wealth of detailed examples drawn from the systematic observation of babies and young children, from more everyday observation of children's behaviour in family and social contexts and from a range of clinical interventions draws the reader into a vivid understanding of the author's conceptual framework and provides many memorable vignettes of children's lives.

A moody Freud posed against a background of holiday pictures pinned to a wall; or lurking at the very edge of a large family group; or lost in a crowd of nineteenth-century scientists. These snapshots or posed portraits not only tell stories, they also carry a specific emotional charge. The earlier essays in this book follow traces of Freud's early years through the evidence of such album photographs; the later essays use them to reconstruct the stories of various family members. An unknown photo of his half-brother Emanuel initiates an investigation into the Manchester Freuds. An identity photo of his daughter Anna, and the document to which it is attached, throw light on the critical final days of her trip to England in 1914. A faded idyllic print of children playing evolves into a discussion of Ernst Freud's luck and childhood. The suicide of Anna's artist cousin, Tom Seidmann Freud, emerges from a snap of her infant daughter Angela.

[...]Freud's writings do vary and are of more than one description, but I am speaking now of the style which predominates and characterizes the main volume of his work.) Its general character is not only direct and plain-spoken-simple statements without padding- but in particular it conveys vividly an awareness of his readers or hearers, as if he were speaking directly to them, and were concerned to put forward his views in a form intelligible to them. Yet he had developed this special capacity for presenting his conclusions as if he were bent on enabling the reader to take them in-so much so that it colours his whole style and gives the presentation a simplicity and lucidity (often when the content is obscure) that is peculiar to him and most rare in such work. There was a marriage in him of the seeker after existing truth and the creator giving the world a new living truth- the scientist and the artist in one. First he thought of it as a storehouse of memories; then he discovered its character as the mental side of the instincts we are born with, those dynamic forces in us which issue in all our emotions, actions and behaviour, thoughts and feelings, and activate them.

This book argues that Freud's mapping of trauma as a scene is central to both his clinical interpretation of his patients' symptoms and his construction of successive theoretical models and concepts to explain the power of such scenes in his patients' lives. This attention to the scenic form of trauma and its power in determining symptoms leads to Freud's break from the neurological model of trauma he inherited from Charcot. It also helps to explain the affinity that Freud and many since him have felt between psychoanalysis and literature (and artistic production more generally), and the privileged role of literature at certain turning points in the development of his thought. It is Freud's scenography of trauma and fantasy that speaks to the student of literature and painting. Overall, the book develops the thesis of Jean Laplanche that in Freud's shift from a traumatic to a developmental model, along with the undoubted gains embodied in the theory of infantile sexuality, there were crucial losses: specifically, the recognition of the role of the adult other and the traumatic encounter with adult sexuality that is entailed in the ordinary nurture and formation of the infantile subject.

Freud's Mexican disciples, Mexican books, Mexican antiquities, and Mexican dreams.Freud's Mexico is a completely unexpected contribution to Freud studies. Here, Rubén Gallo reveals Freud's previously undisclosed connections to a culture and a psychoanalytic tradition not often associated with him. This book bears detailed testimony to Freud's relationship to a country he never set foot in, but inhabited imaginatively on many levels.In the Mexico of the 1920s and 1930s, Freud made an impact not only among psychiatrists but also in literary, artistic, and political circles. Gallo writes about a \"motley crew\" of Freud's readers who devised some of the most original, elaborate, and influential applications of psychoanalytic theory anywhere in the world. After describing Mexico's Freud, Gallo offers an imaginative reconstruction of Freud's Mexico: Freud owned a treatise on criminal law by a Mexican judge who put defendants-including Trotsky's assassin-on the psychoanalyst's couch; he acquired Mexican pieces as part of his celebrated collection of antiquities; he recorded dreams of a Mexico that was fraught with danger; and he belonged to a secret society that conducted its affairs in Spanish.