It contains fifty-one key texts, spanning Freud's entire career from early case histories through his work on dreams, essays on sexuality, and on to his late writings, including Civilisation and Its Discontents. Peter Gay, a leading scholar of Freud, has put together this selection to provide a full portrait of Freud's thought.
[Freud] was possessed of exceptional literary gifts. There can be no question that he was a great writer: to read him is to be beguiled by him... His influence on all of us was enormous, and it would be as impossible to return to a pre-Freudian way of thinking as to return to a pre-heliocentric theory of the solar system The Times