Modern Classics On Murder Mourning and Melancholia

By - Freud, Sigmund

Floor - Floor 1

Published - Penguin Books, London, 2005

ISBN 10 - 0141183799

ISBN 13 - 9780141183794

Book Status - 1 Qnty Available with us.

Subject - Social psychology

Shelf No - 10

Call Number - 150.1952 FRE

Physical Description - xxxiv, 243 pages ; 20 cm.

Book Information

These works were written against a background of war and racism. Freud sought the sources of conflict in the deepest memories of humankind, finding clear continuities between our 'primitive' past and 'civilized' modernity. In Totem and Taboo he explores institutions of tribal life, tracing analogies between the rites of hunter-gatherers and the obsessions of urban-dwellers, while Mourning and Melancholia sees a similarly self-destructive savagery underlying individual life in the modern age, which issues at times in self-harm and suicide. And Freud's extraordinary letter to Einstein, Why War? - rejecting what he saw as the physicist's naïve pacifism - sums up his unsparing view of history in a few profoundly pessimistic, yet grimly persuasive pages.

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