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.
In what is considered one of his most prominent ideas, Austrian psychiatrist, Sigmund Freud explains the dynamic of the human psyche in terms of the roles and conflicts produced by the id, ego, and super-ego. Freud suggests that all human behaviors and traits, including personality disorders, are created by the complex conflicts and workings of these three components of human personality.
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.
Reprint of the 1930 American edition. In this seminal book, Sigmund Freud enumerates the fundamental tensions between civilization and the individual. The primary friction stems from the individual's quest for instinctual freedom and civilization's contrary demand for conformity and instinctual repression. Many of humankind's primitive instincts (for example, the desire to kill and the insatiable craving for sexual gratification) are clearly harmful to the well-being of a human community. As a result, civilization creates laws that prohibit killing, rape, and adultery, and it implements severe punishments if such commandments are broken. This process, argues Freud, is an inherent quality of civilization that instills perpetual feelings of discontent in its citizens.
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.
Originally published in 1918, this landmark collection of essays by the father of psychoanalysis represents one of Freud's most penetrating attempts to decipher the mysteries of human behavior. Its focus is the conflict between primitive feelings and the demands of civilization, i.e., the struggle to reconcile unconscious desires with socially acceptable behavior. Totemism involves the belief in a sacred relationship between an object (totem) and a human kinship group. Men and women bearing the same totem are prohibited from marrying each other, this being a form of incest taboo. Freud identifies a strong unconscious inclination as the basis of taboo, and he attempts to define its source by tracing the earliest appearance in childhood development of totemism. After an examination of the incest taboo in primitive societies around the world, Freud discusses taboo and the ambivalence of emotions; animism, magic, and the omnipotence of thought; and the infantile recurrence of totemism.
These works reveal Freud at hi s most iconoclastic, asking challenging questions about the powerful attraction of group identity - how this has the power to bind us and drive us to hatred. In Mass Psychology (1921) he explores the psyche as a social force, with a compelling analysis of how institutions such as the Church and army can generate unquestioning loyalty to a leader and provoke us to commit atrocities - Freud's finding s would prove all too prophetic in the years that followed. Works such as Moses the Man, written at the time of Freud's flight from Nazism in 1938, warn of the dangers of nationalism. And other writings like The Future of an Illusion examine religion and ritual in a painstaking critique of religious faith.
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.