James Strachey Book order (chronological)

The Standard Edition of the complete works of the father of psychoanalysis - the only definitive paperback edition on the market. Translated from the German under the General Editorship of James Strachey; in collaboration with Anna Freud; assisted by Alix Strachey and Alan Tyson.

The Ego and the Id ranks high among the works of Freud's later years. The heart of his concern is the ego, which he sees battling with three forces: the id, the super-ego, and the outside world. Of the various English translations of Freud's major works to appear in his lifetime, only one was authorized by Freud himself: The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud under the general editorship of James Strachey. Freud approved the overall editorial plan, specific renderings of key words and phrases, and the addition of valuable notes, from bibliographical and explanatory. Many of the translations were done by Strachey himself; the rest were prepared under his supervision. The result was to place the Standard Edition in a position of unquestioned supremacy over all other existing versions.

Freud approved the overall editorial plan, specific renderings of key words and phrases, and the addition of valuable notes, from bibliographical and explanatory. Many of the translations were done by Strachey himself; the rest were prepared under his supervision. The result was to place the Standard Edition in a position of unquestioned supremacy over all other existing versions.Newly designed in a uniform format, each new paperback in the Standard Edition opens with a biographical essay on Freud's life and work--along with a note on the individual volume--by Peter Gay, Sterling Professor of History at Yale.

"In his final years, Freud devoted most of his energies to a series of highly ambitious works on the broadest issues of religion and society. As early as 1908, he produced a powerful paper on the repressive hypocrisy of 'civilized sexual morality', and its role in 'modern nervous illness'. Deepening this analysis in Civilization and Its Discontents, he argues that civilized values - and the impossible ideals of Christianity - inevitably distort our natural aggression and impose a terrible burden of guilt. It is also here that Freud developed his last great theoretical innovation: the strange and haunting notion of an innate death drive, locked in a constant struggle with the forces of Eros."--Publisher website

Setting forth in rich detail Freud's new theory of anxiety, Inhibitions, Symptoms and Anxiety (1926) is evidence for one of them. In rethinking his earlier work on the subject, Freud saw several types of anxiety at work in the mind and here argues that anxiety causes repression, rather than the other way around.

These two short accounts, written respectively in 1909 and 1926, are a good introduction to psychoanalysis for the general reader, for whom they were originally prepared.