This book covers the life and work of Freud, clearly and effectively, in 235 pages. It tells us of Freud's early interests in neuroscience, the strange and unexplained psychological conditions he set himself to understand, and his wrong turns and successes in developing effective theories and treatments for these.

No psychologist has had as much of a lasting impact as Freud, and this book does much to dispel the common popular misunderstandings of Freud's contributions. That his theories are often misunderstood is in part due to the nature of his theories, which changed much during his life while he was developing them from working concepts, testing them, and producing more refined and reliable frameworks.

So many interesting pyschological phenomena were incorporated into and / or explained by Freud's theories, that it is difficult to find his work uninteresting of irrelevant to everyday life. These cover jokes, dreams, sexuality, errors in thought, or forgetting, as well as pathological conditions such as neurosis.Not only did he provide a better understanding of these individually, but also linked their workings together with the unconscious - the central role of which was first firmly established by Freud's research, then cemented by many years of subsequent psychological research by others.

I would recommend this to anyone with an interest in psychology, as it provides a valuable synthesis on top of Freud's accessible introductory works such as his lectures. For those who are more familiar with Freud's work, this still provides much of value in summarising, linking, and giving an historical context to the development of his thought, as well as a readable biography of his ideas. ( )

This book is a biography of the life and work of Freud. It attempts to provide an analysis of the mind at work, and the story of a long and intricate process of discovery. This book takes the form of uncompromising analysis, but the author is in tune with the subject to the extent that the personality and feelings of Freud and his contemporaries emerges from this book.

Psychoanalyst Dr David Bell has chosen to discuss Sigmund Freud by Richard Wollheim on FiveBooks as one of the top five on his subject - Psychoanalysis, saying that:



“…The Wollheim book on Freud was written as part of a series on Modern Masters and, unusually, they chose a philosopher to do Freud. This was remarkable, particularly in the British context, because Britain was not feeling particularly hospitable to Freud at that time, the early 1970s. It’s a short book and I always recommend it as an introduction to Freud because Wollheim brings an extremely philosophical mind to the subject and a mind that deeply understands psychoanalysis. He maps out the logical geography of Freud’s thought, including the early period leading up to the publication of The Interpretation of Dreams and the Studies on Hysteria, and he takes us through the model of the mind and into the broader reaches of Freud’s thought. …”



The full interview is available here: http://fivebooks.com/interviews/david-bell ( )