Mass Psychology and Other Writings
Book Details
- Publisher : Penguin Books
- Published : January 2004
- Cover : Paperback
- Pages : 352
- Category :
Psychoanalysis - Catalogue No : 21280
- ISBN 13 : 9780141182414
- ISBN 10 : 0141182415
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Freud's religious unbeliefs are too easily dismissed as the standard scientific rationalism of the twentieth-century intellectual, yet he scorned the high-minded humanism of his contemporaries. In "Mass Psychology and Analysis of the 'I'" he explores the notion of 'mass-psychology' - his findings would prove all too prophetic in the years that followed. Writings such as "A Religious Experience" and "The Future of an Illusion" continue earlier work on the essential savagery of the civilized mind, and "Moses the Man" and "Monotheistic Religion" excavates the roots of religion and racism, which he concludes are inextricably intertwined. This remarkable collection reveals Freud not only at his most radically pessimistic, but also at his most personally courageous - engaging with his own adherences, his own antecedents, his own identity.
About the Author(s)
Sigmund Freud was born in 1856 in Moravia; from 1860 until Hitler's invasion of Austria in 1938 he lived in Vienna. He was then forced to seek asylum in London, where he died the following year. He began his career as a doctor, specialising in work on the anatomy and physiology of the nervous system. He was almost thirty when his interests first turned to psychology, and during ten years of clinical work in Vienna he developed the practice of what he called ""psychoanalysis"". This began simply as a method of treating neurotic patients by investigating their minds, but it quickly grew into an investigation of the workings of the mind in general, both ill or healthy. Freud demonstrated the normal development of the sexual instinct in childhood and, largely on the basis of an examination of dreams, arrived at his fundamental discovery of the unconscious forces that influence our everyday thoughts and actions. Freud's ideas have shaped not only many specialist disciplines, but have also influenced the entire intellectual climate of the last century.
Adam Phillips is a psychoanalyst and a visiting professor in the English Department at the University of York. He is the author of several well-known volumes, all widely acclaimed, including On Kissing, Tickling and Being Bored, Going Sane, Side Effects and recently On Kindness, co-written with historian Barbara Taylor, On Balance, Missing Out and One Way and Another.
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