Sigmund Freud

:Freud redirects to here. For other Freuds, see Freud (disambiguation)

Books about Freud and psychoanalysis

Psychoanalysis: theory and practice

• Philip Rieff, Freud: The Mind of the Moralist, 3d ed. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1979)
• Anthony Bateman and Jeremy Holmes, Introduction to Psychoanalysis: Contemporary Theory & Practice (London: Routledge, 1995)

Conceptual critiques

• Eysenck, H. J. and Wilson, G. D. The Experimental Study of Freudian Theories, Methuen, London (1973)
• Hobson, J. Allan Hobson, Dreaming: An Introduction to the Science of Sleep (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004). ISBN 0192804820. (Critique of Freud's dream theory in terms of current neuroscience)
• Mitchell, Juliet. Psychoanalysis and Feminism: A Radical Reassessment of Freudian Psychoanalysis Originally published in 1974; Basic Books reissue (2000) ISBN 0465046088
• Voloshinov, Valentin. Freudianism: A Marxist critique, Academic Press (1976) ISBN 0127232508

Biographies

The area of biography has been especially contentious in the historiography of psychoanalysis, for two primary reasons: first, the vast majority of historical material on Freud has been, since his death, made available only at the permission of his biological and intellectual heirs (his daughter, Anna Freud, was extremely protective of her father's reputation); second, much of the data and theory of Freudian psychoanalysis hinges upon the personal testimony of Freud himself, and so to challenge Freud's legitimacy or honest has been seen by many as an attack on the roots of his enduring work.

Related Topics:
Historiography - Anna Freud

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The first biographies of Freud were written by Freud himself — his On the History of the Psychoanalytic Movement (1914) and An Autobiographical Study (1924) provided much of the basis for discussions by later biographers, including "debunkers" (as they contain a number of prominent omissions and potential misrepresentations). A few of the major biographies on Freud to come out over the twentieth century were:

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• Helen Walker Puner, Freud: His Life and His Mind (1947) — an associate editor of Parents magazine, Puner's book was for a thoroughly popular audience, and was the source of many long-lasting "myths" about Freud (that psychoanalysis was a religion; that Freud hated his father; etc.)
• Ernest Jones, The Life and Work of Sigmund Freud, 3 vols. (1953-1958) — the first "authorized" biography of Freud, made by one of his former students with the authorization and assistance of Anna Freud, with the hope of "dispelling the myths" from earlier biographies.
• Henri Ellenberger, The Discovery of the Unconscious (1970) — was the first book to, in a compelling way, attempt to situate Freud within the context of his time and intellectual thought, arguing that he was the intellectual heir of Franz Mesmer and that the genesis of his theory owed a large amount to the political context of turn of the 19th century Vienna.
• Frank Sulloway, Freud: Biologist of the Mind (1979) — Sulloway, one of the first professional/academic historians to write a biography of Freud, positioned Freud within the larger context of the history of science, arguing specifically that Freud was, in fact, a biologist in disguise (a "crypto-biologist", in Sulloway's terms), and sought to actively hide this.
• Peter Gay, Freud: A Life for Our Time (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1988) — Gay's work was published as a response to the anti-Freudian literature and the "Freud Wars" of the 1980s (see below).

The creation of Freud biographies has itself even been written about at some length — see, for example, Elisabeth Young-Bruehl, "A History of Freud Biographies," in Discovering the History of Psychiatry, edited by Mark S. Micale and Roy Porter (Oxford University Press, 1994).

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Biographical critiques

Freud himself, and psychoanalysis generally, have proved sufficiently unheimlichhttp://www-rohan.sdsu.edu/~amtower/uncanny.html (disturbing) to many readers that something of a cottage industry in exposes of Freud's alleged personal faults has grown up, mostly in the USA, and especially starting from the 1980s. For example:

Related Topics:
Cottage industry - Expose

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• Bakan, David. Sigmund Freud and the Jewish Mystical Tradition, D. Van Nostrand Company, 1958; New York, Schocken Books, 1965; Dover Publications, 2004. ISBN 0486437671
• Crews, F. C. Unauthorized Freud : doubters confront a legend, New York, Viking 1998. ISBN 0670872210
• Dufresne, T. Killing Freud, Continuum International Publishing Group, 2003, ISBN 0826468934
• Eysenck, H. J. The Decline and Fall of the Freudian Empire, Scott-Townsend Publishers, Washington D. C., (1990) ISBN 1878465015
• Jurjevich, R. M. The Hoax of Freudism: A study of Brainwashing the American Professionals and Laymen Dorrance (1974) ISBN 0805918566
• LaPiere, R. T. The Freudian Ethic: An Analysis of the Subversion of Western Character Greenwood Press (1974) ISBN 0837175437
• MacDonald, K. The Culture of Critique: An Evolutionary Analysis of Jewish Involvement in Twentieth-Century Intellectual and Political Movements Authorhouse (2002) ISBN 0759672229
• Macmillan, Malcolm. Freud Evaluated: The Completed Arc MIT Press, 1996 ISBN 0262631717
• Stannard, D. E. Shrinking History: On Freud and the Failure of Psychohistory Oxford University Press, Oxford (1980) ISBN 0195030443
• Szasz, Thomas. Anti-Freud: Karl Kraus's Criticism of Psychoanalysis and Psychiatry, Syracuse University Press, 1990, ISBN 0815602472.
• Thornton, E. M. Freud and Cocaine: The Freudian Fallacy, Blond & Briggs, London (1983) ISBN 0856341398
• Webster, Richard. Why Freud Was Wrong: Sin, Science, and Psychoanalysis BasicBooks, 1995. ISBN 0465095798