This book was a required purchase not for a psychology or even a philosophy course, but a political science course. But I think that's a testament to just how wide ranging is Freud's influence. For what it's worth, from what I can tell by what I marked up, the assigned essays were "The Ego and the Id." There's a lot more titles here though I can recognize as tremendously influential: "The Interpretation of Dreams," "Family Romances," "Totem and Taboo," "The Unconscious," "Beyond the Pleasure Principle," "The Future of an Illusion" and "Civilization and its Discontents."

The back cover describes The Freud Reader as "the first single-volume work to capture Freud's ideas as scientist, humanist, physician, and philosopher." Not included though is the work I've heard cited as the best work for the general reader, "Introduction to Psychoanalysis." Nevertheless, at least in this translation by James Strachey, I find Freud to be a lucid and interesting writer--more than I would have guessed. I think my biggest complaint with this book is that in choosing to stuff it into one book we get a book of 832 pages that could crush my foot if it fell on it, and eye-sight killing tiny font. ( )

it just looks intimidating. to add this to my library puts me among a different rank of readers. i'm not just the anti-utopia/fiction reader. I've now gone into the dimensions of repressions, ids, egos, you know psycho-analyzation. this is the most comprehensive collection of Freud work and the editor is really intimate with Freud. It includes 'Civilization and Its Discontents' which is obvi a classic. ( )

My view of this book is distorted by the fact that I am a psychology student and believe that Freud's work has spawned many misconceptions of psychology and what psychologists do. Though his theories are interesting in parts, as a whole it is speculative with no empirical grounding. ( )

The Future of an Illusion

Author of numerous books on Freud, including a highly regarded biography, Gay offers the general reader a comprehensive survey of Freud's psychoanalytical, political, and philosophical writings. Preceded by a weighty introduction that emphasises Freud's commitment to science and reason, this single-volume work includes some 50 of Freud's texts, organised chronologically with headnotes. The selections range from case studies and theoretical discussions about dreams, anxiety, and anal eroticism to essays on lay analysis and religion as humankind's obsessional neurosis. Read sequentially, they allow readers to trace Freud's conceptual shift from a topographic theory of the mind to his structural theory of drives.