Freud wrote over three and a half million words. He was a master of style and presentation and had something worthwhile to say on every page. Frequently he was magnificent, as for example in his First Introductory Lectures, but it would be expecting too much of anyone to suppose that in such a large volume of writing he would always be clear. Moreover, he was introducing new and difficult conce...

Already in the 1950s some were proclaiming the twentieth century the " psychoanalytic century. " As it happened, they were right. But to which psychoanalysis were they referring? For clearly there has never been one psychoanalysis, as scholars of various persuasions have noted. Even during Freud's life as a psychoanalyst, from 1896-1939, we find a multitude of possible psychoanalyses at work. F...

It is a widespread misconception that Sigmund Freud talks of phylogenic heritage only in his late work Der Mann Moses und die monotheistische Religion [1937], where he deals with collective Jewish identity. Striking remarks can already be found in Das Ich und das Es [1923] (which starts his second topography), but the idea already surfaces during the period of his first topography in Das Unbewu...

During a 1919 meeting between Gordon Allport and Sigmund Freud (Allport, 1967), Allport broke a silence by telling a story of a phobic boy with an anal mother whom Allport had observed on the train he had taken to meet Freud. Freud is said to have interpreted Allport's story of the boy along the lines of the joke whose thesis is that when one begins a story about a hypothetical friend that the ...

Freud's debt to philosophy and philosophers is probably the most disputed, controversial, and ultimately confusing area of the sources he is said to have drawn from in the development of his thought. Conventional wisdom suggests that Freud had little use for philosophy and even despised the few philosophers whom he bothered to read. Freud's dismissive remarks in his 1933 paper “The Question of ...