Freud and Jung Book Recommendations

April 12, 2008 9:20 AM

I'd like to start reading Freud and Jung. Any recommendations for books?

I'm already considering "How to read Freud," "How to read Jung," "Two Essays on Analytical Psychology," and "Memories, Dreams, Reflections." I know that the hive mind must have some other suggestions (and something more for Freud). Thanks!

posted by majikstreet to Writing & Language (6 answers total)

Best answer: As far as essays go I can't recommend Jung's On The Relation of Analytical Psychology to Poetry highly enough. It continues to be one of the most important and sweeping pieces of erudition I have ever read.

"The impact of an archetype, whether it takes the form of immediate experience or is expressed through the spoken word, stirs us because it summons up a voice that is stronger than our own. Whoever speaks in primordial images speaks with a thousand voices; he enthrals and overpowers, while at the same time he lifts the idea he is seeking to express out of the occasional and the transitory into the realm of the ever-enduring. He transmutes our personal destiny into the destiny of mankind, and evokes in us all those beneficent forces that ever and anon have enabled humanity to find a refuge from every peril and to outlive the longest night."
posted by paradoxflow at 9:38 AM on April 12, 2008 [2 favorites]

Best answer:
Man & His Symbols is Jung's own introduction to his work

also, Hopcke's "Guided Tour of the Collected Works of C.G. Jung" is a good resource
.

much of Freud's thinking about the structure of the unconscious is laid out in "The Interpretation of Dreams" - but then he changed his mind on some stuff, so follow this with "Beyond the Pleasure Principle"

for Freud on religion, society & such check out "Civilization & its Discontents" and "The Future of an Illusion"

.

if you really want to get into it all, there's The Freud/Jung Letters
(available online here)

posted by jammy at 10:05 AM on April 12, 2008

One of Jung's works that I keep returning to over the years is Answer to Job. If you can find his original writings on the Archetypes, be prepared for heavy going. I loved his stuff on alchemy, also.
posted by RussHy at 11:05 AM on April 12, 2008

Adam Phillips has recently edited a new Freud reader from Penguin. This is by far the best single-volume Freud selection, since it draws on the heterogeneous new translations of the new Penguin Freud series rather than the notoriously problematic Standard Edition translations; it ought to be more fun to read and also more stylistically interesting and various. Phillips's own essays on psychoanalysis are also well worth seeking out, by the way.
posted by RogerB at 11:35 AM on April 12, 2008

I found Freud's Women particularly useful in understanding the social and intellectual context of his ideas. It's also very readable.
posted by paduasoy at 4:55 AM on April 13, 2008

I would also recommend Jacques Derrida's essay 'Freud and the Scene of Writing', which is on JSTOR and collected in Writing and Difference.
posted by 15 step at 11:27 AM on April 13, 2008