Sigmund Freud: The Basics

Sigmund Freud: The Basics is an easy-to-read introduction to the life and ideas of Sigmund Freud, the founder of psychoanalysis and a key figure in the history of psychology. 

Janet Sayers provides an accessible overview of Freud’s early life and work, beginning with his childhood. Her book includes the stories of his most famous patients: Dora, Little Hans, the Rat Man, Judge Schreber, and the Wolf Man. It also discusses Freud’s key ideas such as psychosexual development, the Oedipus complex, and psychoanalytic treatment. Sayers then covers Freud’s later work, with a description of his observations about depression, trauma and the death instinct, as well as his 1923 theory of the id, ego, and superego. The book includes a glossary of key terms and concludes with examples of how psychoanalysis has been applied to the study of art, literature, film, anthropology, religion, sociology, gender politics, and racism.

Sigmund Freud: The Basics offers an essential introduction for students from all backgrounds seeking to understand Freud’s ideas and for general readers with an interest in psychology. For those already familiar with Freudian ideas, it offers a helpful guide to their interdisciplinary applications and context not least today.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

List of Figures

Acknowledgements

Preface 

Part I: Pre-psychoanalytic Freud

Conclusions to Part I

Part II: Unconscious-conscious dynamics 

Conclusions to Part II

Part III: Psychoanalytic case studies

Conclusions to Part III

Part IV: Consolidating psychoanalysis 

Conclusions to Part IV

Part V: War and its psychoanalytic aftermath

Conclusions to Part V

Part VI: Beyond clinical psychoanalysis

1. Childhood and youth
2. Talking cure
3. Resistance and repression
4. Repressed abuse
5. Wishful fantasy
6. Dreams 
7. Freudian slips
8. Jokes
9. Sex
10. Dora’s dreams
11. Hans’s phobia
12. The rat man’s obsession
13. Schreber’s schizophrenia
14. The wolf man’s nightmare
15. Freud vs. Jung
16. Sex and repression
17. Freudian symbols
18. More about sex
19. Symptom formation
20. Psychoanalytic treatment
21. Mourning and melancholia
22. Trauma and the death instinct
23. Oedipus, castration, penis envy
24. Id-ego-superego
25. Art, literature, film
26. Anthropology
27. Religion
28. Sociology
29. Gender politics
30. Racism

Conclusions to Part VI

Glossary

References

Index

Janet Sayers is emeritus professor of psychoanalytic psychology at the University of Kent in Canterbury where she also works as a clinical psychologist for the National Health Service. Her previous Routledge books include Art, Psychoanalysis and Adrian Stokes: A Biography; Freud’s Art: Psychoanalysis Retold; and Boy Crazy: Remembering Adolescence, Therapies and Dreams.