On the Cambridge Companion to Freud

This is a good collection to read alongside Freud’s collected works, if you’re inclined to make your way through them. It’s largely chronological, organized around specific themes — the unconscious, sexuality, “civilization,” and so on. The contributors are competent and rigorous; you can tell they aren’t academics merely trying ideas on for size. They have their own views, and can get argumentative, but you can trust their deep command of the literature. I was especially curious about what I’d call Freud’s middle period — Totem and Taboo, “Beyond the Pleasure Principle,” “The Ego and the Id.” I do think The Interpretation of Dreams and Civilization and Its Discontents are fundamental to making sense of him, but I find them nowhere near as interesting as that middle stretch. One place I learned a lot was the coverage of his work on hysteria: Freud practiced medicine for a long time before The Interpretation of Dreams, but by my own selective sense of him his work began with the dreams — which isn’t true at all, and the chapters on the earlier work on hysteria were illuminating. All told, it’s a remarkably learned and informative set of essays, and the place to go for anyone looking to dive deeper into Freud.