Books
A short reading list, with one sentence on what each book is for.
Sexuality as developmental and various rather than fixed. Revised repeatedly by Freud himself over twenty years.
Introductory Lectures on Psycho-Analysis
Sigmund Freud · Penguin Classics · 1917
Freud teaching. Still the clearest single-volume statement of the first theory in his own voice.
Repetition compulsion and the death drive. The turn that unsettled his own earlier system.
The structural model. Ego, id and superego as it is actually argued rather than as it is summarised.
Anxiety as signal rather than as discharge. The revision that underlies most later work on defence.
Freud on why culture costs us something. His most read work outside clinical circles.
Introversion, extraversion and the four functions, argued at length rather than as a personality quiz.
The best entry point to Jung: eleven essays covering dream analysis, type, and the aims of therapy.
Two Essays on Analytical Psychology
Carl Gustav Jung · Princeton University Press · 1943
Publisher pageWhere Jung sets out his break from Freud and the concept of individuation.
The Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious
Carl Gustav Jung · Princeton University Press · 1959
Publisher pageThe core theoretical statement on archetype, anima and the collective layer of the psyche.
Part autobiography, part confession. The nearest thing to Jung explaining himself.
Written deliberately for a general reader, and the last thing Jung completed.
The systematic account of defence. Still the reference point for how the term is used clinically.
Psychoanalytic Studies of the Personality
William Ronald Dodds Fairbairn · Routledge · 1952
Publisher pageThe decisive move from drive to object. The person seeks relationship, not discharge.
The paranoid-schizoid and depressive positions in Klein's own late formulation.
Basic assumption groups. Read as much in organisations now as in clinical training.
Containment, alpha function, and thinking as something that has to be developed rather than assumed.
The standard guide. Klein is difficult; Segal makes her teachable without flattening her.
The Maturational Processes and the Facilitating Environment
Donald Woods Winnicott · Routledge · 1965
Publisher pageThe good-enough mother, the true and false self, and the holding environment.
Regression as something that can be worked with rather than only managed.