Reviews

The Freud Reader by Sigmund Freud, Peter Gay

scarlettwilliamsss's review against another edition

Freud can choke on the ghost of my castrated penis 

pretentiouslyemely's review against another edition

me when i dream about the sick patient i'm treating and how her sickness is actually not my fault

jz_reads's review

challenging informative reflective slow-paced

3.0

not the most riveting philosophy i've ever encountered, but it was entertaining enough. freud was a weird-ass mfer (literally) that manages to relate every thought or dream you've ever had back to a formative memory of witnessing your parents having sex. disturbing? yes. dry? as the sahara. but boring? never.

dominiki's review against another edition

had to read the essay on sexuality for grad school

catherinepbartnikgmailcom's review against another edition

I can already tell that I'll regret taking literature and psychoanalytic criticism...

va87's review

4.0

Though the back says "many of the selections are reproduced in full," the vast majority are not. I would have much preferred the unabridged printings of shorter important works like Beyond the Pleasure Principle at the cost of cutting short papers, or making the book much longer. For that matter, the abridgements are not always graceful -- the selection from the "Wolf Man" case, for example, gets confusing near the end when Freud refers to aspects of the case that have been taken out here. Gay's introduction is a wasted opportunity as well, as he generally just repeats what Freud says in "An Autobiographical Study," while he could have used that space to clarify ideas that fell through the cuts of the selections (the important concept of cathexis, for example, is defined nowhere in the reader by Freud or Gay afaik).

That said, this is probably the best single volume of Freud if you don't have the money or time to plunk down on the Standard Edition. Which you probably don't. The Freud Reader does its job.