On Creativity and the Unconscious by Sigmund Freud

On Creativity and the Unconscious by Sigmund Freud

"Even ardent students of Freud are not likely to have encountered him in the roles in which he appears on these pages. For it is current fashion to insist on his single-minded concentration on establishing a psychological system anchored in scrupulous clinical observation. His lifelong absorption in exploring the roots of culture is, on the other hand, treated condescendingly as the pardonable hobby of a pure scientist, even though Freud repeatedly declared that his scientific activity was in a sense a detour from his original interests. . . . Each of these essays is a little gem in its own right. And each needs to be read again and again as representing the best which psychoanalysis has yet had to offer in the interpretation of culture."-from the Introduction by Benjamin Nelson