The Penguin Freud Reader

Adam Phillips assembles this single-volume selection from the Penguin Freud, the modern translation programme he edited, drawing together metapsychological papers, technique papers, and the long case histories into one sequence. Phillips arranged the texts to trace how Freud's thinking moved, so a clinician can read the account of the unconscious, the drives, and the structural model alongside the case material that pressed those concepts into shape, including the Wolf Man.

For the consulting room, the value is in having Freud's own words rather than a commentary: the papers on transference and technique, the writing on mourning and the death drive, the theory of dreams, set out in translations that render his prose as argument rather than doctrine. Phillips's introduction reads Freud as a writer who listens, treating interpretation as a form of close reading. The selection was published by Penguin Classics in 2006.