Freud for Beginners

by Richard Osborne, Maurice Mechan (illustrator)

Sigmund Freud, the father of psychoanalysis, began an intellectual revolution that would forever change the science of self-perception, interpersonal relationships, and whole theories of human behavior. His influence on 20th-century thinking and issues is arguably unparalleled, affecting attitudes on sex, religion, art, culture, and more. Written for the layperson, Freud for Beginners explains the doctor's dogma with wit and clarity, all in a contemporary context.

Genres: Psychology, Philosophy, Nonfiction, Biography, Science, Graphic Novels

174 pages, Paperback

First published September 1, 1993

About the author

Pseudonym for Robert Tine

Reviews

[Gleb Gruzov · Rating 2 out of 5]

Юнг - Сила
Фрейд - Могила

[John Dawn · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is a very clear, and logically structured introduction to the ideas of Freud; it gives the background , the life history and the development of his ideas and shows how they related to his times. Each stage in the development of his thinking is explained and the complexity of his ideas is wonderfully made accessible, and the drawings back up the material to make this an exciting introduction to a great thinker. His cultural impact is examined and the ways in which his ideas developed after his death is also explained, and the battles between his followers. Overall this makes a gripping and insightful introduction to a much misunderstood thinker, and does so with in quite a witty manner. Really quite impressive.

[Budge Burgess · Rating 3 out of 5]

Cartoon books are no place for the rehearsal of controversy or serious academic debate. This one purports to provide insights into Freud, the emergence of his theories, his role in creating the multi-billion dollar industry of psychoanalysis, but it is hardly a critical appraisal.
Freud, I believe, was a fraud, his theories unscientific and driven by his own egotism and greed for attention. He set back our understanding of human psychology by a century and more, he has saddled us with a legacy of commercial therapists making a profit from those with more wealth than sense ... and they are hardly likely to give up their lucrative jobs by challenging the theories behind their role - it would be a bit like the oil firms embracing global warming and devoting their profits to phasing out oil and introducing sustainable lifestyles instead.
Clearly, a cartoon book is hardly the best vehicle for a sophisticated, in depth exploration of Freud and his theories, never mind a critical one. But there are significant failings in this book – we whistle past Breuer, there’s no mention of Anna O and her invention of the ‘talking cures’ … an unforgiveable omission ... until later in the book when cartoon Freud discovers a much older Bertha Pappenheim (the real Anna O).
Anna O invented psychoanalysis - her talking cure - because she took a fancy to her doctor, Breuer, and simply concocted symptoms then deconstructed them for Breuer so she kept his attention and his presence. Breuer spent hours every evening in the Pappenheim home. The talking cure was pure invention by a young girl who had led a sheltered life and whose father was rich enough to pay the doctor's fees. Freud took it seriously ... and built a career, an industry and a legend on it. And, in the book, Freud gets the credit for a world-changing discovery ... Anna O coyly apologises for her young girl fantasies.
It is hardly a critical evaluation of Freud. Osborne lays out Freud's ideas briefly and concisely, couldn't really fault him. But he's uncritical. I looked up Richard Osborne to see if he was a practising psychoanalyst. I could find no trace of him.
The best part of the book is its last 20 pages or so where Osborne briefly outlines the arguments of Freud's critics. The feminist challenge, the recognition that there is no science involved. In fact, the absence of any scientific credibility was an early challenge to Freud - no sooner had he got his Psychoanalytic Association onto an international footing than people like Jung and Adler and others started splitting - there was no scientific base, they could go their own way and invent their own theories, theories which were every bit as credible (and every bit as unscieintific) as Freud's.
If you're wanting a quick run down on Freud's theories, there are some succinct comments here - just remember, they're a tad biased, they tend to venerate Freud rather than analyse his ideas.

[wakeupf*ck · Rating 3 out of 5]

Freud’un psikanalizi nasıl geliştirdiği ve hatta bu fikri nasıl ortaya attığına dair açıklayıcı resimler ve yazılara sahip olan kapsamlı sayılabilecek bir kitaptı. Freud’un tüm çalışmalarından ziyade araştırmalarının başlangıcını yılan balıklarının üreme organlarıyla yapmış olması beni hem güldürdü biraz da şaşırttı. Psikanalizin temelini fizyolojik açıdan hayvan ve insanları oldukça araştırarak atmış olduğunu gördüm zaten psikoseksüel gelişim basamaklarında da bunun etkileri oldukça hissediliyordu. Ayrıca freud’un araştırmacı fakat bir o kadar garip bir ruha sahip olan arkadaşı Wilhelm Fliees’a kitapta birkaç sayfa için yer verilmiş olması da hoştu. Tüm fikirlerini ve araştırmalarını en ince ayrıntısına kadar wilhelm ile paylaştığını öğrendim ve arkadaşının oldukça garip olmasına karşın freud’un onun düşüncelerinin etkisinde uzun kalmamış olması da kendi zihninin güçlü bir iradesi olduğunun göstergesi. Çünkü arkadaşı bir insanın burnunun da bir cinsel organ olduğunu savunan bir tip ve cinsellik üzerine olan araştırmalarda freud’un bir süre wilhelm’ın etkisinde kaldığı net bir biçimde görülüyor fakat o dönemde yaptığı tüm çalışmaları ve araştırmaların gerçekliğini geniş zaman içerisinde reddederek kendi fikir ve analizlerine yönelerek psikolojide bir çığır açıyor. Fakat tüm bu fikirleri wilhelm’a anlatmayı da bırakmıyor

[Animesh Mitra · Rating 4 out of 5]

Good book for the beginners.

[Vitória Bredoff]

um dos meus primeiros contatos com psicanálise;
como disse quem me presenteou: "pouco rigoroso... mas vale como uma boa introdução!"

[NatalieAB · Rating 4 out of 5]

I knew that I was taking a chance reading a non-fiction book, designed more for adults than kids, only about psychoanalysis. I am happy to say I was pleasantly surprised! Richard Osborne did a fantastic job of creating a fun environment even with a serious topic. I laughed, I learned, and I'm happy that I read this book.

[m · Rating 1 out of 5]

Decent but not worth reading.

I think the comic-book format can be deployed for serious ends, like it is in Art Spiegelman's Maus books. But I found the comics in this book to be more of a hindrance than help to Osborne's story-telling needs.

The text in this book is generally pretty good. I'm a big fan of Freud, so I liked Osborne's mostly-adversarial take on him. I also liked that Osborne devoted many pages to describing Freud's competitors, acolytes and intellectual descendants.

But the reader of this fairly long comic-book is unlikely to gain any sense of why people like W. H. Auden called Freud "no more a person now but a whole climate of opinion."

https://poets.org/poem/memory-sigmund...

So, there's no way would I'd recommend that anyone vaguely interested in Freud should read this comic-book instead of any one of Freud's essays or books of equal length, like (in no particular order of importance):

Civilization & Its Discontents
Three Essays on Sexuality
The Ego & the Id
Leonardo da Vinci and a Memory of His Childhood
Totem & Taboo
"Remembering, Repeating and Working-Through"
The Future of an Illusion

Richard Rorty once wrote:

But not until Freud did we get a usable way of thinking of ourselves as machines to be tinkered with, a self-image that enabled us to weave terms describing psychic mechanisms into our strategies of character-formation.

. . . the intellectual's increased ability to treat vocabularies as tools rather than mirrors—is Freud's major legacy. He broke some of the last chains that bind us to the Greek idea that we, or the world, have a nature that, once discovered, will tell us what we should do with ourselves. He made it far more difficult than it was before to ask the question "Which is my true self?" or "What is human nature?" By letting us see that even in the enclave which philosophy had fenced off, there was nothing to be found save traces of accidental encounters, he left us able to tolerate the ambiguities that the religious and philosophical traditions had hoped to eliminate.

"Freud and Moral Reflection"
by Richard Rorty, Essays on Heidegger, 1991.

[Michael P. · Rating 4 out of 5]

Massively disappointed that FREUD is one of the few books in this series that does not reference Shakespeare when Freud did and Ernest Jones did. Jones is well covered in these pages. The Shakespeare is why I read the darn thing. Still, quite a good introduction to Freud and his shit-brained ideas. The book happily spends time on the psychoanalytical movement as championed by others, such as Jones, who to some degree disagreed with Freud, evolved his ideas, or applied them to areas Freud had not. There is a bit of fault finding, but basically this was written by a loyalist, which is also a disadvantage.

[Sean Sexton · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book is an excellent introduction and overview to Freud's work. It explains the difficult concepts of his theories in an entertaining way, comic-book style. But more importantly, it does a nice job of explaining difficult concepts in a very understandable and direct way.

[Sandra Clark · Rating 4 out of 5]

I love all these books.

[Rachelle · Rating 3 out of 5]

very childish way to explain Freud.