The Freud Reader

The Freud Reader gathers Freud's primary texts in a single volume, arranged chronologically so the development of his thinking can be followed from the early clinical papers to the late writings on culture and religion. Peter Gay, Freud's biographer, selects across the full range: the case histories, the papers on technique, the dream book, the theory of sexuality, the metapsychological essays, and the cultural works from Totem and Taboo to Civilization and Its Discontents and Moses and Monotheism. Gay opens the anthology with the 1925 Autobiographical Study, then lets the chronology carry the rest.

Each section carries a headnote placing the text in Freud's life and in the sequence of his revisions, so a reader can see where a concept enters and how it later shifts. The practitioner who wants Freud's own formulations rather than a commentator's paraphrase finds the load-bearing texts gathered in the form in which they were first argued.