Sigmund Freud

Freud considers why we dream and what it means in the larger picture of our psychological lives. Delving into theories of manifest and latent dream content, the special language of dreams, dreams as wish fulfillments, the significance of childhood experiences, and much more, Freud, widely considered the "father of psychoanalysis," thoroughly and thoughtfully examines dream psychology. Encompassing dozens of case histories and detailed analyses of...

Civilization and Its Discontents is one of the last of Freud's books, written in the decade before his death and first published in German in 1929. It is, considered his most brilliant work. In it, he states his views on the broad question of man's place in the world. It seeks to answer several questions fundamental to human society and its organization: What influences led to the creation of civilization? Why and how did it come to be? What determines...

"Patterned on his eminently successful Introductory Lectures on Psycho-Analysis, Freud's New Introductory Lectures on Psycho-Analysis takes full account of his elaborations in, and changes of mind about, psychoanalytic theory, and discusses a variety of central and controversial themes, including anxiety, the drives, occultism, female sexuality, and the question of a Weltanschauung. It serves as an indispensable companion to the Introductory Lectures."...

When psychoanalytic investigation, which usually contents itself with frail human material, approaches the great personages of humanity, it is not impelled to it by motives which are often attributed to it by laymen. It does not strive "to blacken the radiant and to drag the sublime into the mire"; it finds no satisfaction in diminishing the distance between the perfection of the great and the inadequacy of the ordinary objects… Leonardo da Vinci...