100 Best Psychoanalysis Books of All Time

Esther Perel

I recently reread. [source]

David Heinemeier Hansson

Escape from Freedom examines what happened to the human psyche when we went from a medieval caste system to the modern world. As we gained freedom from all sorts of oppressions, we also got detached from a predictable and safe role in society. That anxiety is often difficult to cope with, especially when things don’t turn out the way we aspired to. Fromm argues that we need to balance this freedom from with just as much freedom to. Positive freedom, not just negative freedom. The book was written in 1941 and obviously colored by the rise of fascism and the world wars. But it’s message is as timely today, in an age of populism and unease. It draws a compelling connection between the loss of identity and belonging with the appeal of authoritarian figures. That it’s a human response to turn away from freedom when that freedom turns life into anxiety and disappointment. So from Trump to Erdogan, there’s strong public support. [source]

Dr. Gabor Maté

All about the fact that stuff happens to us as children, negative things happen. Then, we adapt to those things by taking on certain defensive ways of being. And then, we live the rest of our lives from those defensive modes. [source]

Judith Edwards

Winnicott’s Playing and Reality, not published till after his death, is a fine and illuminating collection of his major thinking. [source]

Daniel Pick

People often think of psychoanalysis as a theory of the individual – a lot of Freud’s early ideas and writing does indeed emerge from his struggle to make sense of the individual patients he treats. But there is also this other dimension, which is about groups and institutions. Indeed, some of Freud’s papers read like stories about the problems of group hatred, loyalty and love within the psychoanalytical movement itself. [source]

Ruth Wisse

Humour is a way of allowing for all that we cannot allow ourselves because we are trying so hard to be civilized and good people. [source]

Stephen Lew

When asked what books he would recommend to youngsters interested in his professional path, Stephen mentioned Love's executioner and other tales of psychotherapy. [source]

The CEO Library Community (through anonymous form)

One of the best 3 books I've read in 2019 [source]

Suzanne O'Sullivan

This was the starting point when people first considered the idea that stress and psychological distress can be ‘converted’ into physical symptoms. [source]

Merve Emre

It’s a survey of many different systems of belief—Eastern and Western, theological and aesthetic—from the beginning of recorded human history, to see how they can all be placed into the schema that Jung has set up. [source]

Simon Critchley

The question that he’s asking in the book is about how we categorise the mad and the sane. [source]

Chibli Mallat

Yes, my interest in Deleuze started when I read his Proust et les Signes in high school in Paris in 1977. He was still relatively unknown outside France. Since then I have pillaged his extraordinary conceptual coinage – I use ‘Thousand Planes’ (my translation of Mille Plateaux) in my Introduction to Middle Eastern Law as a holding concept for 4,000 years of Middle Eastern and Islamic law. It is impossible to circumvent Deleuze as the major philosopher of the century. Foucault predicted as much in a famous quote that goes something like: the 21st century will be Deleuzian or nothing. Deleuze, who died in1995, has indeed moved from being a maverick thinker to becoming a major world political and philosophical reference. [source]

David Bell

Melanie Klein is perhaps the most influential post-Freudian and, where Freud found the child in the adult and saw how all of us carry within us childhood thoughts, feelings and fantasies that have a determining effect on our lives, often unconsciously, Klein found the infant in the child. She developed a form of psychoanalysis that could access the internal life of quite young children. [source]

Irina Botnari

I’m reading more books at the same time. Guilty. Some of them are Tools of Titans - Tim Ferriss, My Berlin Child – Anne Wiazemsky, Women who Run with the Wolves - Clarissa Pinkola Estés. Tim is full of lessons to learn, remember & implement, I’ll see what the rest of the books will unfold. [source]

Renata Salecl

Darian Leader is a British psychoanalyst who in a great way undermines today’s ideas about depression. He starts with the premise that we live in a society of hyped optimism, where depression appears as a danger that goes against optimism – it’s something for people who gave up the fight for success or whatever. Today we use the terms depression and stress too much – they dominate psychiatric and self-help discourse. [source]

Alain de Botton

Winnicott was one of the most accomplished interpreters of Freud in England. And what is interesting is that he makes psychoanalysis very English. [source]

Daniel Pick

One of his key suggestions is that sexuality and politics could be bound together in complex and often disguised ways, and that a huge amount of libido was directed or, as he would have seen it, horrifically misdirected into fascism. Something was “played out” in politics that had to do with very deep frustrations. I think Reich had a strong belief that sexual liberation might lead to greater tolerance and be conducive to anti-fascism. Conversely that repression and frustration might go some way to explaining the attractions of demagogic figures. It was like a very sinister form of sublimation. The German historian Klaus Theweleit took this further in Male Fantasies, published in the 1970s, with an analysis of the torrent of sexual and political hatreds exposed in letters by early Nazi enthusiasts, most notably amongst those who made up armed and often violent organised right-wing gangs or units, notably the Freikorps after 1918. [source]