A review by va87
The Freud Reader by Sigmund Freud, Peter Gay

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.