Early Psychoanalytic Religious Writings presents, in one edited volume, many of the foundational writings in the psychoanalytic study of religion. These translated works by Abraham, Fromm, Pfister, and others, complement Freud’s seminal contributions and provide a unique window into the origins of psychoanalytic thinking.

Sigmund Freud’s relationship with Otto Rank was the most constant, close, and significant of his professional life. Freud considered Rank to be the most brilliant of his disciples. The two collaborated on psychoanalytic writing, practice, and politics; Rank was the managing director of Freud’s publishing house; and after several years helping Freud update his masterpiece, The Interpretation of Dreams, Rank contributed two chapters. His was the only other name ever to be listed on the title page. This complete collection of the known correspondence between the two brings to life their twenty-year collaboration and their painful break. The 250 letters compiled by E. James Lieberman and Robert Kramer humanize and dramatize psychoanalytic thinking, practice, and organization from 1906 through 1925. The letters concern not just the work and trenchant contemporaneous observations of Freud and Rank but also their friendships, supporters, rivals, families, travels, and other personal and professional matters. Most interestingly, the letters trace Rank’s growing independence, the father-son schism over Rank’s “anti-Oedipal” heresy, his surprising reconciliation with Freud, and the moment when they parted ways permanently. A candid picture of how the pioneers of modern psychotherapy behaved with their patients, colleagues, and families—and each other—the correspondence between Freud and Rank demonstrates how psychoanalysis developed in relation to early twentieth-century science, art, philosophy, and politics. A rich primary source on psychiatry, history, and culture, The Letters of Sigmund Freud and Otto Rank is a cogent and powerful narrative of early psychoanalysis and its two most important personalities.

David Ernst Oppenheim, a classics scholar and professor of Greek and Latin at a Vienna school, had begun pursuing an interest in the interrelatedness of mythology, folklore and psychoanalytic concepts, and attended lectures given by Freud in 1906. In 1909, he sent to Freud a paper he had written about mythology in which he revealed a knowledge of psychoanalysis. He was subsequently invited to join Freud’s Vienna Psychoanalytic Association in 1910, where he gave talks on the fire as a sexual symbol and on suicides at school age. The manuscript for Dreams in Folklore, to which Oppenheim contributed the folklore and Freud the commentary, was written in 1911. It remained in the possession of his family, before finally being published in 1958. Along with the English translation of a letter from Freud to Oppenheim, and the manuscript itself, Dreams in Folklore also includes the complete original paper in German, “Träume im Folklore.”

""There is no category of supposed human beings that comes closer to the orangutan than does a Polish Jew," said a Bavarian writer, reflecting the eighteenth-century view that Jews were profoundly flawed. The Jewish body, popular opinion held, was malformed - from feet to nose - and predisposed to a host of illnesses ranging from the plague to hysteria. The Jewish soul had a peculiar stench. The Jewish libido had a tendency toward incest. The Jewish gaze was pathological, and precluded the possibility of unbiased observation. By the close of the nineteenth century, these ideas had found their way into European medical journals, and the medical establishment was convinced that Jews were both diseased and perverted. It was an interesting time to be a Jewish physician." "In The Case of Sigmund Freud, Sander Gilman traces the "medicalization" of Jewishness in the science and medicine of turn-of-the-century Vienna, and the ways in which Jewish physicians responded to the effort to incorporate this racist biological literature into medical practice. Focusing on the new science of psychoanalysis, Gilman looks at the strategic devices Sigmund Freud employed to detach himself from the stigma of being Jewish and shows how Freud's work in psychoanalysis evolved in response to the biological discourse of the time." "In order to circumvent the prevailing debates about race, Gilman argues, Freud carefully formulated the particular biological charges against the Jew into a universal definition of a human being. As a consequence, his early psychoanalytic theories transcended the controversies about biological determinism, and yet remained framed by them."--BOOK JACKET.Title Summary field provided by Blackwell North America, Inc. All Rights Reserved

Since its initial publication this critique of Freud's methods for gathering and evaluating evidence has become a classic in Freud scholarship. foreword by Frederick Crews Psychoanalysis: science or belief system? Since its initial publication this critique of Freud's methods for gathering and evaluating evidence has become a classic in Freud scholarship. Malcolm Macmillan's exhaustive analysis of Freud's personality theory describes the logical and other assumptions on which Freud's work was based and shows how these assumptions interacted with his clinical observations to produce all-embracing but faulty methods for gathering and evaluating evidence. Macmillan provides a meticulous account of the historical evolution of Freud's thought and its background in Freud's contacts with the books and people that influenced him and evaluates the entirety of the Freudian system. Included is a compilation of major criticisms of the methodology and assumptions of Freudian theory and a new comprehensive afterword by the author surveying the relevant literature published since 1989. (cloth published by Elsevier-North Holland in 1991)

First Published in 2002. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.