Never ceasing to stimulate controversy, Freud is acknowledged as the founder of psychoanalysis, the key to unlocking the human mind, which has become so essential to mankind's survival in all the confusions of the 20th century. As science and technology have often rushed ahead of our ability to cope with the consequences, Freud saw that man is at war with himself and often unable to tolerate too much reality, and he pronounced that dreams are the contraband representations of the beast within man which are smuggled into awareness during sleep. In Freudian interpretation, the analysis of dreams constitutes the key to unlocking the vital secrets of the unconscious mind.

Reviews

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.ÄE. James Lieberman, George Washington Univ., Sch. of Medicine, Washington, DC Copyright 1999 Cahners Business Information.