THE PENGUIN FREUD GENERAL EDITOR:
ADAM PHILLIPS
THE “WOLFMAN”
AND OTHER CASES
SIGMUND FREUD was born in 1856 in Moravia; between the ages of four and eighty-two his home was Vienna: in 1938 Hitler’s invasion of Austria forced him to seek asylum in London, where he died in the following year. His career began with several years of brilliant work on the anatomy and physiology of the nervous system. He was almost thirty when, after a period of study under Charcot in Paris, his interests first turned to psychology; and after ten years of clinical work in Vienna (at first in collaboration with Breuer, an older colleage) he invented what was to become psychoanalysis. This began simply as a method of treating neurotic patients through talking, but it quickly grew into an accumulation of knowledge about the workings of the mind in general. Freud was thus able to demonstrate the development of the sexual instinct in childhood and largely on the basis of an examination of dreams, arrived at this fundamentally discovery of the unconscious forces that influence our everyday thoughts and actions. Freud’s life was uneventful, but his ideas have shaped not only many specialist disciplines, but also the whole intellectual climate of the twentieth century.
LOUISE ADEY HUISH was formerly Mongomery Fellow in German at Lincoln College, Oxford. She has translated a variety of philosophical, psychoanalytical and literary texts. Her specialism is Austrian literature and she is the editor of three volumes in the bicentenary edition of the works of Johann Nestroy.
DAME GILLIAN BEER is King Edward VII Professor of English Literature at the University of Cambridge. Her publications include Darwin’s Plots: Evolutionary Narrative in Darwin, George Eliot and Nineteenth-century Fiction (second edition, 2000), Open Fields: Science in Cultural Encounter (1996) and Virginia Woolf: The Common Ground (1996). She has edited Virginia Woolf’s Between the Acts and Jane Austen’s Persuasion for Penguin. She is at present working on a study of island narratives.
ADAM PHILLIPS was formerly Principal Child Psychotherapist at Charing Cross Hospital in London. He is the author of several books on psychoanalysis including On Kissing, Tickling and Being Bored, Darwin’s Worms, Promises, Promises and Houdini’s Box.