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?...

Why do we laugh? The answer, argued Freud in this study of humour, is that jokes, like dreams, satisfy our unconscious desires.This text explains how jokes provide immense pleasure by releasing us from our inhibitions and allowing us to express sexual, aggressive, playful or cynical instincts that would otherwise remain hidden. In elaborating this theory, Freud brings together a collection of puns, witticisms, one-liners and anecdotes, many of which throw light on the society of early 20th century Vienna. Jokes, as Freud shows, are a method of giving ourselves away.

This volume brings together Freud's main contributions to the psychology of love. His illuminating discussions of the ways in which sexuality is always psychosexuality - that there is no sexuality without fantasy, conscious or unconscious - have changed the ways we think about erotic life. In these papers Freud develops his now famous theories about the sexuality of childhood and the transgressive nature of human desire. In the famous case study of the eighteen-year-old 'Dora', we see Freud at work, both putting into practice and testing his sexual theories that were to change the modern...