Sigmund Freud

Central to Sigmund Freud's philosophy on psychoanalysis is the idea that dreams give a window into one's unconscious desires. This is the principal argument of his groundbreaking work "The Interpretation of Dreams", published in 1899. However, realizing the incredibly technical and dense nature of that more detailed work, Freud felt that a simpler and more accessible derivation of his theories was necessary in order to popularize his ideas and to...

The struggle between the urgencies of instinct and the restrictions of civilization is addressed throughout the works of Sigmund Freud, and in Civilization and Its Discontents, the theme is developed with particular richness and depth. This famous study explores the guilt that arises when personal desires clash with social norms, and it examines attempts to reconcile the conflict. In a sense, such guilt is among civilization's building blocks, keeping...

Between 1915 and 1917, Sigmund Freud delivered a series of well-received lectures at the University of Vienna on his theories of psychoanalysis. Nine of them focused on Freud's theories about dreams-what they are and what they mean. The content of these lectures are presented in Dreams.Freud covered a lot of ground in his lectures, focusing first on the general difficulties involved in studying dreams, then on the many aspects of dream interpretation,...

"Leonardo da Vinci and a Memory of His Childhood (1910) remains among the most fascinating, though speculative, works of Freud's entire output. A detailed reconstruction of Leonardo's emotional life from his earliest years, it represents Freud's first sustained venture into biography from a psychoanalytic perspective, and also his effort to trace one route that homosexual development can take" -- Back cover.