Freud’s Thinking: An Introduction

In this brief but comprehensive introduction to Freud’s theories, Mikkel Borch-Jacobsen provides a step-by-step overview of his ideas regarding the unconscious, the cure, sexuality, drives, and culture, highlighting their indebtedness to contemporary neurophysiological and biological assumptions. The picture of Freud’s emergence is very different from that of the fact-finding scientist he claimed to be. Bold conceptual innovations – repression, infantile sexuality, the Oedipus complex, narcissism, the death drive – were not discoveries made by Freud. Still, speculative constructs were placed on clinical material to satisfy the requirements of the general theory of the mind and culture he was building. Freud’s Thinking provides a final accounting of this mirage of the reason that was psychoanalysis.