Modern Classics On Murder Mourning and Melancholia

Modern Classics On Murder Mourning and Melancholia

by Sigmund Freud
Please fill out the form below to request this book.
Publisher:
National Geographic Books
Genre:Psychology
Language: en
Published:November 01, 2005
ISBN13:9780141183794
ISBN10:0141183799

About the Book

These works were written against a background of war and racism. Freud sought the sources of conflict in the deepest memories of humankind, finding clear continuities between our 'primitive' past and 'civilized' modernity. In Totem and Taboo he explores institutions of tribal life, tracing analogies between the rites of hunter-gatherers and the obsessions of urban-dwellers, while Mourning and Melancholia sees a similarly self-destructive savagery underlying individual life in the modern age, which issues at times in self-harm and suicide. And Freud's extraordinary letter to Einstein, Why War? - rejecting what he saw as the physicist's naïve pacifism - sums up his unsparing view of history in a few profoundly pessimistic, yet grimly persuasive pages.