Biography of freud book

Before we go into your five book choices, could you say a little bit about your personal involvement with Freud? I know you’ve been involved in a number of ways with Freud and Freudian projects.

I guess I first directly engaged with Freud as a reader. That’s an intimate relationship, isn’t it? I studied literature at university, back in the sixties and inevitably Freud came up. I read more when I was writing my PhD—about femininity. Then, by sheer coincidence, I went to work at a social research firm in New York. This was back in the early 70s. The woman who had brought me in and was one of the partners of the firm was the daughter of a leading psychoanalyst. So I started to learn about psychoanalysis in a different way by meeting analysts, and I grew a little more familiar with a way of thinking. I was a writer in residence for this firm and the book I wrote based on their research was then published by a psychoanalytic press who asked me if I would become their outside editor and so, by a series of accidents, I learned about a field I hadn’t started out to learn about.

Can you say the title of the book in passing?

Language of Trust. It was based on intergenerational research at a time when one of the great unravellings between the generations was taking place: Vietnam, the growth of popular culture, political movements were all in play. We were all interested in Freud back then, whether for or against. Later, when I was a director of the ICA, someone recommended John Forrester to me when we were running a series on Freud and Lacan: we eventually got together… Some years back, I served for some years as chair of the Freud Museum in London. I’m also on the ‘Scientific Board’ of the Berggasse Museum at Freud’s old home in Vienna.

And in your writing?

Well, Freud is like the weather. He’s everywhere. If you look anywhere in our culture his ideas will appear, even if they’re not named as his ideas. Once you’ve read him,

From one of the world’s foremost authorities on Sigmund Freud comes a strikingly original biography of the father of psychoanalysis

Becoming Freud is the story of the young Freud—Freud up until the age of fifty—that incorporates all of Freud’s many misgivings about the art of biography. Freud invented a psychological treatment that involved the telling and revising of life stories, but he was himself skeptical of the writing of such stories. In this biography, Adam Phillips, whom the New Yorker calls “Britain’s foremost psychoanalytical writer,” emphasizes the largely and inevitably undocumented story of Freud’s earliest years as the oldest—and favored—son of Jewish immigrants from Eastern Europe and suggests that the psychoanalysis Freud invented was, among many other things, a psychology of the immigrant—increasingly, of course, everybody’s status in the modern world.

Psychoanalysis was also Freud’s way of coming to terms with the fate of the Jews in Europe in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. So as well as incorporating the writings of Freud and his contemporaries, Becoming Freud also uses the work of historians of the Jews in Europe in this significant period in their lives, a period of unprecedented political freedom and mounting persecution. Phillips concludes by speculating what psychoanalysis might have become if Freud had died in 1906, before the emergence of a psychoanalytic movement over which he had to preside.

1988 book by Peter Gay

Freud: A Life for Our Time is a 1988 biography of Sigmund Freud, the founder of psychoanalysis, by the historian Peter Gay. The book was first published in the United Kingdom by J. M. Dent & Sons Ltd. The book has been praised by some commentators and compared to the psychoanalyst Ernest Jones's The Life and Work of Sigmund Freud (1953–1957). However, it has been criticized by authors skeptical of psychoanalysis, who have accused Gay of lacking objectivity and of repeating incorrect claims about Freud's work.

Summary

In Freud: A Life for Our Time, Peter Gay provides an in-depth examination of the life and work of Sigmund Freud, the founder of psychoanalysis. Through his historical perspective, Gay places Freud and his theories within the various contexts of his time and surroundings. He examines how the psychiatric profession, which Freud subverted and revolutionized, influenced his ideas and theories. He also looks at the impact of the Austrian culture, where Freud lived as an unbelieving Jew and unconventional physician, on his personal and professional life. He also explores how the traumas of war and totalitarian dictatorship that occurred in Europe during Freud's lifetime, affected the psychological state of the people and how it influenced his theories.

Furthermore, Gay explains how Freud's ideas have had a profound impact on Western culture as a whole, and how they have transformed the way we understand ourselves and human behavior