Product Description

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #1634046 in Books
• Published on: 2005-11-01
• Formats: Audiobook, CD
• Original language: English
• Binding: MP3 CD

From Amazon.com
Whether we love or hate Sigmund Freud, we all have to admit that he revolutionized the way we think about ourselves. Much of this revolution can be traced to The Interpretation of Dreams, the turn-of-the-century tour de force that outlined his theory of unconscious forces in the context of dream analysis. Introducing the id, the superego, and their problem child, the ego, Freud advanced scientific understanding of the mind immeasurably by exposing motivations normally invisible to our consciousness. While there's no question that his own biases and neuroses influenced his observations, the details are less important than the paradigm shift as a whole. After Freud, our interior lives became richer and vastly more mysterious.

These mysteries clearly bothered him--he went to great (often absurd) lengths to explain dream imagery in terms of childhood sexual trauma, a component of his theory jettisoned mid-century, though now popular among recovered-memory therapists. His dispassionate analyses of his own dreams are excellent studies for cognitive scientists wishing to learn how to sacrifice their vanities for the cause of learning. Freud said of the work contained in The Interpretation of Dreams, "Insight such as this falls to one's lot but once in a lifetime." One would have to feel quite fortunate to shake the world even once. --Rob Lightner

From Library Journal
In her new translation, Crick (emeritus, German, Univ. Coll., London) gives us the first edition of Freud's magnum opus (1900) with historical context and notes on the theory and practice of translation. While this version lacks the fullness of Freud's intellectual development, it reveals the fundamental work clearly and in context. Serious students can have the best of both worlds by comparing Crick's work with James Strachey's 1953 work (a variorum of all eight editions, considered the "standard") in passages of particular interest. This more literal version, not beholden to the psychoanalytic movement and its defense of Freud as scientist, pays respect to Strachey while "attempting to render Freud's varying registers, listening for latent metaphors as well as his grand elucidatory analogies." Here we come closer to Freud's masterly German, yet, as with Strachey, it reads like good English. Recommended for academic and larger general libraries.AE. James Lieberman, George Washington Univ., Sch. of Medicine, Washington, DC
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From AudioFile
Freud's most famous and polemic book presents a challenge to narrator Robert Whitfield, who interprets the heavy rhetoric with dispatch and precision, while relating the fascinating dreams with expressive interest and skill. The German text is translated into unstilted English, but the remaining French allows Whitfield to exploit his bilingual ability. Modern medicines have made psychoanalysis less popular than in its heyday, but the impact of Freudian theory on our civilization can never be ignored. For the curious and the serious, Whitfield aptly augments the exploration of this classic book just as a guide aids the tour of an old church. J.A.H. © AudioFile 2002, Portland, Maine-- Copyright © AudioFile, Portland, Maine