In a draft attached to a letter to his friend and confidante Wilhelm Fliess (May 31, 1897), Freud develops an idea: The mechanism of fiction is the same as that of hysterical fantasies. He supports this thought with a brief analysis of the biographical sources of Goethe's Werther. A few months later, on October 15, 1897, Freud mails Fliess a detailed account of remembered events from his childhood that, Freud believed, underlined the universality of Oedipus Rex and Hamlet. Freud's foray into literature initiated the beginning of a new critical approach.
In Essential Papers on Literature...

This choice collection contains some of the most significant contributions to psychoanalytic and psychological understandingof the effect of object loss on adults and children. Designed for psychoanalysts, psychotherapists and students of psychoanalysis and psychotherapy, this important volume focuses on those contributions most directly relevant to the clinical situation, without neglecting fundamental descriptive and theoretical contributions.

Rita V. Frankiel has culled the literature on object loss and assembled the most salient and conceptually powerful contributions to the...

Essential Papers on Post Traumatic Stress Disorder collects the most important writings on the comprehension and treatment of Post Traumatic Stress Disorder. Editor Mardi J. Horowitz provides a concise and illuminating introductory essay on the evolution of our understanding of Post Traumatic Stress Disorder, and establishes the conceptual framework and terminology necessary to understand the disorder. The collected essays which follow provide a rich and comprehensive take on the complexity of Post Traumatic Stress Disorder, illuminating such issues as the variety of individual and...

Narcissism has recently been the focus of debate among professionals, in large part due to the controversies surrounding the world of Heinz Kohut and Otto Kernberg. Yet much has been written about narcissism throughout the history of psychoanalysis and this carefully selected collection brings together the essential work on narcissism.

The book first puts forth the major theoretical formulations - self-psychology, object relations, psychodynamics - and then explores diagnostic and therapeutic applications. The book offers landmark classic and contemporary contributions by authors...

Drug abuse, alcoholism, compulsive gambling, and other destructive addictions plague our society. Theories of addiction locate its cause variously--in factors related to the substance, the addict's personality, or to the addict's environment. Arguments about effective treatment programs are fierce.

Essential Papers on Addiction presents the most important writing and the various sides of the debate on the psychoanalytic understanding and treatment of addiction. Daniel Yalisove outlines the history of the treatment of addiction and introduces important psychoanalytic concepts...

Why do people take their own lives? How can clinicians best plan and carry out intelligent treatment of desperate patients who are giving up on themselves?

Suicide, its motivations, characteristics, and psychology are explicated in these papers by the most experienced and renowned experts on the subject. A definitive volume, Essential Papers on Suicide features the work of Ernest Jones; Kate Friedlander; George Murphy, R. H. Wilkinson, S. Gassner, and J. Kayes; Joseph C. Sabbath; Robert E. Litman; Milton Rosenbaum; Charles Swearingen; Avery D. Weisman; Mervin Glasser, Egl Laufer,...