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The Cambridge Companion to Freud (Cambridge Companions to Philosophy)

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If you are confused by Freud, this book will confuse you even further. The thirteen essays in this book were not designed to explain or even apply Freudian principles in any coherent fashion. Indeed, they took confusion one step further by adding post-moderninst jargon to Freudian jargon, making their usefulness to serious scholarship somewhat questionable as well. (Academic essays using trendy intellectual concepts and phraseology tend to have a short shelf life.)

That being said, there was one essay which I found to be of interest. Gerald Izenberg's chapter on the Seduction Theory ("Seduced and abandoned: The rise and fall of Freud's seduction theory") was an interesting study in defense mechanisms. Freud's first theory of the etiology of "hysteria" was that it was generated by the repression of memories of early childhood sexual abuse. A year later, Freud unaccountably changed his position. Real abuse was now transformed into "phantasies" of abuse. This new line of thought generated the cornerstone of Freudian ideology--that what the patient reported as true was merely symbolic. When Jeffrey Masson published his book "Assault on Truth" arguing that Freud's reversal was not due to a recognition of a theoretical error, but to the icy reception the "seduction theory" received from his colleagues (as well as lingering guilt over Freud's participation in the botched surgery of one of his patients), the psychoanalytic community rallied to Freud's defense--the best example of which is to be found in Izenberg's chapter. (Izenberg even mentions Masson in a footnote.)

If you are interested in approaching Freud from a critical perspective, be sure to read Masson's books. They are all very engaging and well researched. (Start with "Final Analysis") A good general introduction to Freud's life and theory can be found in "Freud and His Followers" by Paul Roazen.

Freud is an enormous influence. I bought this book to observe how contemporary intellectuals handle him. I think there are better books if you are looking for an introduction to Freud's thought as a system. As with most cambridge series, the tension between being accesible to new students of Freud and providing up-to-date scholarship for specialists is hard to straddle.

However, the essays are all interesting (some more than others, by far [Chp. 4, 12, 13 are the best in my opinion]) and I don't regret the time I spent reading them.

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It's a regular book about Freud , but it's very complex and confusing and NOT recommended for begginers.It's not a good source of information about Freud himself it's focused on his ideas instead. The information is fragmented and is placed in a strange sequence.