Books
A short reading list, with one sentence on what each book is for.
Oedipus the King
Sophocles
A king hunts the source of a plague and finds himself. The play Freud read as the plot every child rehearses.
A woman buries her brother against the law and will not retreat. Lacan read her as a desire that does not give way.
Oedipus at Colonus
Sophocles
The blinded king at the end of his wandering, no longer guilty and not yet forgiven, arriving somewhere to die.
Murder answering murder across three generations until a court is invented to stop it. Klein wrote on it late in life.
Medea
Euripides
A woman betrayed by her husband destroys what he values most. The literature on maternal destructiveness begins here.
A god arrives and a city loses its reason. Pentheus is undone by his own mother, who does not recognise him until after.
Hamlet
William Shakespeare · 1603
A son who cannot act on a father's death. Freud read the delay as the son's own wish already carried out by another.
King Lear
William Shakespeare · 1608
An old man divides his kingdom by asking to be told he is loved. Freud read the closing scene as a man choosing his end.
Macbeth
William Shakespeare · 1623
Two people get what they wanted and cannot survive having it. Freud used Lady Macbeth for those wrecked by success.
The Merchant of Venice
William Shakespeare · 1600
A suitor must choose between three caskets. Freud read the choice of the plainest as a man choosing his own death.
Faust, Part One
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe · 1808
A scholar who has exhausted knowledge trades for experience instead. Freud quoted it more often than any other work.
The Sorrows of Young Werther
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe · 1774
A young man's unreturned love told in his own letters. The book that gave its name to the Werther effect.
The Sandman
Ernst Theodor Amadeus Hoffmann · 1816
A student haunted by a childhood terror about stolen eyes. Freud built The Uncanny on this story.
The Purloined Letter
Edgar Allan Poe · 1844
A letter hidden by being left in plain sight. Lacan opened the Ecrits with a seminar on it.
Gradiva
Wilhelm Jensen · 1903
An archaeologist falls in love with a figure on a Roman relief. Freud wrote a whole book about his delusion.
A libertine dialogue stating a law of pleasure that admits no exception. Lacan set it beside Kant and asked what they share.
A man contracts himself into servitude to a woman he adores. The novel that gave masochism its name.
A student kills to prove he is exempt, then spends the book unable to carry it. The guilt arrives before the confession.
The Brothers Karamazov
Fyodor Dostoevsky · 1880
Four sons and a father nobody mourns. Freud wrote on it as the parricide every son has already committed in wish.
A man who takes his own humiliation as proof that he is free. The clearest account of enjoyment taken in suffering.