Sigmund Freud: Essays and Papers (riverrun editions)

Description

'Freud the writer is what Joan Riviere so elegantly presents to the English-Language reader' Lisa Appignanesi from her preface to Sigmund Freud: Essays and Papers This collection focuses in on the set of Riviere's translations that made up the first library of Freud in English. Including his papers on metapsychology, applied psychoanalysis and technique, and within those broader categories are subjects as diverse as narcissism, love, paranoia and homosexuality. Riviere's great understanding of Freud's work is evident as we see his engrossingly direct arguments - the style that distinguished him from academics of his day - take shape in her talented translations. We are presented with Freud's various guises, both an essayist and master storyteller he brings to life the vagaries of his patients. Riviere was a major player in disseminating psychoanalysis into English, 'no less than the man she translated is she a figure to be hidden from history', in this collection the translator and the scientist come together in a rich, engrossing brew.

Sigmund Freud (1856 - 1939) was born in Moravia before his family moved to Vienna. Fleeing Nazi persecution in 1938, he took refuge in London where he died the following year. He is the founder of psychoanalysis and one of the most important, if controversial, thinkers of the 20th Century. Joan Riviere (1883 - 1962) was born in Brighton before moving to Gotha, Germany at seventeen where she spent a year perfecting her German. After a war-time analysis with Ernest Jones, Riviere began to see patients of her own and became a founding member of the British Psychoanalytical Society. She met Freud at a conference in the Hague in 1920 and asked to be analysed by him. The same year she became Translation Editor of the newly established British Journal of Psycho-Analysis, a post she held until 1937. Lisa Appignanesi is the author of Everyday Madness: On Grief, Anger, Loss and Love, Mad, Bad and Sad: A History of Women and the Mind Doctors, and Freud's Women (with John Forrester), alongside many other books. She was Chair of the Freud Museum London, President of English PEN and is currently Chair of the Royal Society of Literature.