Freud: Inventor of the Modern Mind (Eminent Lives)

By: Peter D. Kramer

Narrated by: William Dufris

Length: 6 hrs and 1 min

Publisher's summary

Referred to as "the father of psychoanalysis", Sigmund Freud is credited with championing the "talking cure" and charting the human unconscious. Both revered and reviled, he was a brilliant innovator but also a man of troubling contradictions, sometimes tyrannical, often misrepresenting the course and outcome of his treatments to make the "facts" match his theories.

Peter D. Kramer, acclaimed author, practicing psychiatrist, and a leading national authority on mental health, offers a stunning new take on this controversial figure. Kramer is at once critical and sympathetic, presenting Freud the mythmaker, the storyteller, the writer whose books will survive among the classics of our literature, and the genius who transformed the way we see ourselves.

©2006, 2012 Peter D. Kramer (P)2012 HarperCollinsPublishers

A non Freudian view

This remarkable work covers all the main works of Freud with a very neutral.point of view. It makes me think if one should read a great philosopher like Freud in such a unpassiomate way. I remember reading some interesting reviews with revealing insights about the human nature from people that loved his works. I don't know if it's fair to read him in such a critical fashion. He made a science where there was none. His ideas and examples are as unreal as the bodies moving in vacuum described by Newton. It's pointless to.stress that there is no retilínear moves in vacuum without friction, as is useless to.stress that his patients are not this simple. Freud discovered that human mind gravitates around a fetishist deviation of primal feelings and this is basic for the 20th Century. The book brings a cautious view, as someone aproaching a living snake in bare hands. Very Freudian indeed.

A fascinating alternative view of Freud

What made the experience of listening to Freud: Inventor of the Modern Mind (Eminent Lives) the most enjoyable?

Freud has undoubtedly done more to influence modern psychiatry and psychology than any other thinker. Yet his methods were unscientific by modern standards. He used no data and conducted no experiments. Furthermore, as Kramer beautifully elucidates, his successes as a clinician were greatly exaggerated. Nonetheless his insights have benefited many in psychotherapy--Kramer deftly navigates between the reality and myths of Freud--telling a fascinating story.