How To Read Freud

Description

In this engaging introduction, Josh Cohen argues that Freud shows above all that any thought, word or action, however apparently trivial, can invite close reading. Indeed, it may be just this insight that makes psychoanalysis so many oponents. By reading - closely - short extracts from across Freud's work addressing the neuroses, the unconscious, words, death and (of course) sex. How to Read Freud brings out the paradoxical core of psychoanalytic thinking: our innermost truths only ever manifest themselves as distortions. Read attentively, our dreams, errors, jokes, symptoms, in short, our everyday lives, reveal us as masters of disguise, as unrecognisable at first to ourselves as to others.

Josh Cohen is Senior Lecturer in English and Comparative Literature at Goldsmiths University of London and the author of Spectacular Allegories and Interrupting Auschwitz.