Books by Ernest Jones
“Jones was 20 years younger than Freud. Not only did he know Freud and his family and all the first players within psychoanalysis, but he has a very lively knowledge of them…This was a book which, when it first came out, was considered to be part of the warts-and-all school of biography. Now that we’ve had so many decades of Freud detractors, and styles of biographical writing have changed, it feels much more like an idealizing biography. It was, in any case, the first Freud biography in English and the first big biography to deal both with the life and the ideas. Later biographers of Freud tended to separate out the intellectual biography from the lived biography, which is perhaps odd in itself, since a lot of psychoanalysis is based on self-interpretation.” Read more...
The best books on Sigmund Freud
Lisa Appignanesi, Novelist
Interviews where books by Ernest Jones were recommended
The best books on Sigmund Freud, recommended by Lisa Appignanesi
Born into a middle-class Jewish family in Moravia in the Austro-Hungarian empire, Sigmund Freud spent most of his life in Vienna, until fleeing to London just before his death in 1939. Using his classical education to illustrate his points, he introduced the idea that we have an ‘unconscious’ that plays an important role in our actions. For his sessions when patients talked freely to him about their thoughts in a one-on-one setting, he coined the term ‘psychoanalysis.’ Freud expert Lisa Appignanesi talks us through books that shed light on his life as well as his work.
