100 books like Delusion and Dream in Wilhelm Jensen's 'Gradiva'

By Sigmund Freud, Helen M Downey (translator),

Here are 100 books that Delusion and Dream in Wilhelm Jensen's 'Gradiva' fans have personally recommended if you like Delusion and Dream in Wilhelm Jensen's 'Gradiva'. Shepherd is a community of 11,000+ authors and super readers sharing their favorite books with the world.

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Book cover of I Wonder as I Wander: An Autobiographical Journey

Lisa A. Kirschenbaum Author Of Soviet Adventures in the Land of the Capitalists: Ilf and Petrov's American Road Trip

From my list on Russians and Americans misunderstanding one another.

Why am I passionate about this?

As an American who writes about the history of the Soviet Union, I am constantly trying to understand people separated from me by identity, ideology, language—and time. Applying strategies for empathizing across political, cultural, and linguistic boundaries is, in many ways, the basic task of historical research. At a moment of intense political polarization, the task has become more necessary than ever. My most recent book examines this process by retracing the American journey of two Soviet travelers. Their willingness to laugh at themselves allowed them, at least sometimes, to set aside their presuppositions and see the alien land of the capitalists and the world of socialism anew.

Lisa's book list on Russians and Americans misunderstanding one another

Lisa A. Kirschenbaum Why did Lisa love this book?

The poet Langston Hughes’s autobiography engagingly recounts his travels to Cuba, Haiti, Japan, and Spain during the Civil War. The book's centerpiece is his 1931-1932 trip to the Soviet Union. He visited as part of a contingent of twenty-two African Americans hired to make a film on race relations in the United States.

The film project never panned out, but Hughes took advantage of the situation to visit Soviet Central Asia. He understood that his hosts tried too hard to convince American visitors of the progress made under the Soviet regime. But his autobiography also conveys the wonderful strangeness of being in a country officially committed to antiracism, where people of color had opportunities for education and advancement.  

By Langston Hughes,

Why should I read it?

3 authors picked I Wonder as I Wander as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.

What is this book about?

In I Wonder as I Wander, Langston Hughes vividly recalls the most dramatic and intimate moments of his life in the turbulent 1930s.

His wanderlust leads him to Cuba, Haiti, Russia, Soviet Central Asia, Japan, Spain (during its Civil War), through dictatorships, wars, revolutions. He meets and brings to life the famous and the humble, from Arthur Koestler to Emma, the Black Mammy of Moscow. It is the continuously amusing, wise revelation of an American writer journeying around the often strange and always exciting world he loves.


Book cover of Yuri Norstein and Tale of Tales: An Animator's Journey

Maya Balakirsky-Katz Author Of Freud, Jung, and Jonah: Religion and the Birth of the Psychoanalytic Periodical

From my list on the work of contemplation and physical space.

Why am I passionate about this?

I am attracted to people and ideas that bridge the internal and external life through their art and writing. I was driven to pursue art history and psychoanalysis for this reason. In one field, we have the external object as the center of inquiry, and in the other, the Self. These books all inspired me to see the world through a new lens.

Maya's book list on the work of contemplation and physical space

Maya Balakirsky-Katz Why did Maya love this book?

A meditative look at the inner life and social contexts of Norstein’s film Tale of Tales about a little grey wolf who wades through the realities of postwar culture as the eponymous character of a popular national lullaby. 

Kitson’s recovery of the material and spiritual biography of a Soviet auteur showed me the way to my own work on the Jewish labor force in Soviet animation. 

By Clare Kitson,

Why should I read it?

1 author picked Yuri Norstein and Tale of Tales as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.

What is this book about?

Tale of Tales fuses Yuri Norstein's memories of his past and hopes and fears for the future. This book examines the passage of these motifs into the film but it also looks into later influences that affected it.


Book cover of The Sacred Gaze: Religious Visual Culture in Theory and Practice

Maya Balakirsky-Katz Author Of Freud, Jung, and Jonah: Religion and the Birth of the Psychoanalytic Periodical

From my list on the work of contemplation and physical space.

Why am I passionate about this?

I am attracted to people and ideas that bridge the internal and external life through their art and writing. I was driven to pursue art history and psychoanalysis for this reason. In one field, we have the external object as the center of inquiry, and in the other, the Self. These books all inspired me to see the world through a new lens.

Maya's book list on the work of contemplation and physical space

Maya Balakirsky-Katz Why did Maya love this book?

Morgan illuminates and analyzes the visual culture of religion that scholars have neglected to consider seriously. His lyrical and incisive deep dive into the visual aspects and social contexts of a broad range of case histories, including religious Americana, opens up the “field” of visuality beyond the object itself and to the phenomenology of seeing.

By David Morgan,

Why should I read it?

1 author picked The Sacred Gaze as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.

What is this book about?

'Sacred gaze' denotes any way of seeing that invests its object - an image, a person, a time, a place - with spiritual significance. Drawing from many different fields, David Morgan investigates key aspects of vision and imagery in a variety of religious traditions. His lively, innovative book explores how viewers absorb and process religious imagery and how their experience contributes to the social, intellectual, and perceptual construction of reality. Ranging widely from thirteenth-century Japan and eighteenth-century Tibet to contemporary America, Thailand, and Africa, "The Sacred Gaze" discusses the religious functions of images and the tools viewers use to interpret…


Book cover of Mirrors of Memory: Freud, Photography, and the History of Art

Maya Balakirsky-Katz Author Of Freud, Jung, and Jonah: Religion and the Birth of the Psychoanalytic Periodical

From my list on the work of contemplation and physical space.

Why am I passionate about this?

I am attracted to people and ideas that bridge the internal and external life through their art and writing. I was driven to pursue art history and psychoanalysis for this reason. In one field, we have the external object as the center of inquiry, and in the other, the Self. These books all inspired me to see the world through a new lens.

Maya's book list on the work of contemplation and physical space

Maya Balakirsky-Katz Why did Maya love this book?

A century after German scholars developed art history as a highly conservative meta-theory well suited to the study of the broader categories of “civilization” and “culture,” the Viennese psychoanalytic movement developed a highly radical meta-theory that posited civilization and culture as fictions meant to curb individual desires. 

Art historian Mary Bergstein illuminates photography's rich role in Freud’s thinking. Bergstein deftly reminds us that Freud’s interdisciplinary approach to the history of art and the new science of psychoanalysis was specifically meaningful to his time and place. During the brief period when Vienna would be recognized as the capital of European modernism, psychoanalysis developed as a meta-theory—a radical one—with the cult of individual desires and fears at its heart.

By Mary Bergstein,

Why should I read it?

1 author picked Mirrors of Memory as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.

What is this book about?

Photographs shaped the view of the world in turn-of-the-century Central Europe, bringing images of everything from natural and cultural history to masterpieces of Greek sculpture into homes and offices. Sigmund Freud's library-no exception to this trend-was filled with individual photographs and images in books. According to Mary Bergstein, these photographs also profoundly shaped Freud's thinking in ways that were no less important because they may have been involuntary and unconscious.In Mirrors of Memory, lavishly illustrated with reproductions of the photos from Freud's voluminous collection, she argues that studying the man and his photographs uncovers a key to the origins of…


Book cover of Psychoanalysis: The Impossible Profession

Timothy D. Wilson Author Of Strangers to Ourselves: Discovering the Adaptive Unconscious

From my list on self knowledge.

Why am I passionate about this?

Like most adolescents, I was deeply concerned with what others thought of me and how I fit in. Unlike most adolescents, I sometimes did little experiments to test others’ reactions--such as lying down on a busy sidewalk, fully awake, to see how passersby would react (mostly with annoyance). Imagine my surprise when I discovered that there is an entire discipline--social psychology--that does real experiments on self-knowledge and social behavior. I got a Ph.D. in social psychology at the University of Michigan and have spent my career as a professor at the University of Virginia, where I have had great fun conducting such experiments.

Timothy's book list on self knowledge

Timothy D. Wilson Why did Timothy love this book?

Sigmund Freud and psychoanalysis have cast a long shadow over our understanding of the human mind. Most research psychologists today find Freud’s ideas to be oversimplified, exaggerated, or simply wrong. It is important to understand his legacy, however, and there is no better way to do so than to read this entertaining, gossipy book about psychoanalytic theory and treatment. Malcolm provides a rare peek into the consulting room of the psychoanalyst, with insightful critiques of the practice and theory of psychoanalysis. What is Freud’s legacy, exactly? I discuss that in Strangers to Ourselves, in a chapter entitled, “Freud’s genius, Freud’s myopia.”

By Janet Malcolm,

Why should I read it?

1 author picked Psychoanalysis as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.

What is this book about?

Through an intensive study of 'Aaron Green,' a Freudian analyst in New York City, New Yorker writer Janet Malcolm reveals the inner workings of psychoanalysis.


Book cover of Freud: The Mind of the Moralist

Todd Dufresne Author Of The Late Sigmund Freud: Or, The Last Word on Psychoanalysis, Society, and All the Riddles of Life

From my list on Freud and his legacy.

Why am I passionate about this?

I am a professor of philosophy and editor or author of 12 books. I started out in ‘Freud Studies’ in the 1990s with no agenda, just a deep interest in Freud’s ideas. Since then I’ve written quite a lot on it. Unfortunately, the field is so contentious, so overrun with books by former patients and analysts, that casual readers couldn’t possibly make heads or tails of it. Readers are best served by reading complete works of Freud and making their own assessments. After that, they can look at Freud’s voluminous and eye-opening correspondence with colleagues. Then they can consult good books, and lists of recommended works, that put them in the right direction.

Todd's book list on Freud and his legacy

Todd Dufresne Why did Todd love this book?

This is a very good, fair, smart, early interpretation of Freudian psychoanalysis in general, and of its significance for culture and intellectual history in particular. It’s very well written, probably because Susan Sontag (Rieff’s wife at the time) is widely reported to have actually written the book, and in the 1960s the book became highly influential. It is easily Rieff’s best book. 

By Philip Rieff,

Why should I read it?

1 author picked Freud as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.

What is this book about?

Now a classic, this book was hailed upon its original publication in 1959 as "An event to be acclaimed . . . a book of genuine brilliance on Freud's cultural importance . . . a permanently valuable contribution to the human sciences."-Alastair MacIntyre, Manchester Guardian

"This remarkably subtle and substantial book, with its nicely ordered sequences of skilled dissections and refined appraisals, is one of those rare products of profound analytic thought. . . . The author weighs each major article of the psychoanalytic canon in the scales of his sensitive understanding, then gives a superbly balanced judgement."-Henry A. Murray,…


Book cover of Introductory Lectures on Psycho-Analysis

Friedel Weinert Author Of Copernicus, Darwin, and Freud: Revolutions in the History and Philosophy of Science

From my list on scientific revolutions and their impact on the history of science.

Why am I passionate about this?

In an ideal world, I would have liked to be a cosmologist and a philosopher. But I became a philosopher with a passion for the history and philosophy of science. This has enabled me to kill two birds with one stone: I learn about the sciences that interest me (physics, evolutionary biology, political philosophy, and sociology), and I explore their philosophical consequences. My podcast, In the Beginning, there was…Philosophy is devoted to such topics.

Friedel's book list on scientific revolutions and their impact on the history of science

Friedel Weinert Why did Friedel love this book?

Freud has had a massive influence on Western culture: he created the "psychological human." People interpret slips of the tongue, strange dreams, or neurotic behaviour almost automatically in Freudian terms. Freud never wrote a textbook on psychoanalysis.

In these lectures, which were held at the University of Vienna during World War I, he presented the full range of his theories and observations. It covers Freudian slips, dreams, neuroses, and sexuality. (The unfinished Outline of Psychoanalysis, 1938, includes the Id, Ego, and Superego.)

Freud is a very persuasive and stylish writer who presents his theory as if it were a natural science, comparable to physics. He claims that his contemporaries were hostile to psychoanalysis because of its explosive revelations about human nature. He explains why his theory allegedly completed the Copernican revolution. Freud describes his findings and sets them in a cultural context.

By Sigmund Freud, James Strachey (translator),

Why should I read it?

1 author picked Introductory Lectures on Psycho-Analysis as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.

What is this book about?

In 1915 at the University of Vienna 60-year-old Sigmund Freud delivered these lectures on psychoanalysis, pointing to the interplay of unconscious and conscious forces within individual psyches.

In reasoned progression he outlined core psychoanalytic concepts, such as repression, free association and libido. Of the various English translations of Freud's major works to appear in his lifetime, only one was authorized by Freud himself: The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud under the general editorship of James Strachey. Freud approved the overall editorial plan, specific renderings of key words and phrases, and the addition of valuable notes,…


Book cover of The Memory Wars: Freud's Legacy in Dispute

Todd Dufresne Author Of The Late Sigmund Freud: Or, The Last Word on Psychoanalysis, Society, and All the Riddles of Life

From my list on Freud and his legacy.

Why am I passionate about this?

I am a professor of philosophy and editor or author of 12 books. I started out in ‘Freud Studies’ in the 1990s with no agenda, just a deep interest in Freud’s ideas. Since then I’ve written quite a lot on it. Unfortunately, the field is so contentious, so overrun with books by former patients and analysts, that casual readers couldn’t possibly make heads or tails of it. Readers are best served by reading complete works of Freud and making their own assessments. After that, they can look at Freud’s voluminous and eye-opening correspondence with colleagues. Then they can consult good books, and lists of recommended works, that put them in the right direction.

Todd's book list on Freud and his legacy

Todd Dufresne Why did Todd love this book?

This well-written, tightly-argued little book of 1995 gathers together four feature articles from The New York Review of Books that together represent a watershed moment in ‘Freud Studies.’ For here was the NYRB, a long-standing bastion of psychoanalysis, publishing splashy articles that functioned like a Hollywood expose of Freud’s failings as a man, thinker, and therapist. In truth, Crews was simply giving voice to a ‘revisionist’ portrait of Freud that started in earnest in the wake of Jones’s three-volume ‘life and work’ of Freud (1953-57). Best of all: Crews connects it all to the ‘recovered memory’ movement of the 1980s and 90s, thereby drawing a  disturbing portrait of Freud’s legacy.  

By Frederick Crews,

Why should I read it?

1 author picked The Memory Wars as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.

What is this book about?

The author's critique of Freudian psychoanalyis and the "recovered memory" movement, first published in 1993 in The New York Review of Books to a storm of controversy, is presented along with twenty-five responses. IP.


Book cover of Otto Rank: A Rediscovered Legacy

Jeff Greenberg Author Of The Worm at the Core: On the Role of Death in Life

From my list on the core desires that guide human behavior.

Why am I passionate about this?

I am a Regents Professor of Psychology at the University of Arizona. Ever since I was a child growing up in the South Bronx, I have been interested in why people are so driven to believe they are right and good, and why there is so much prejudice in the world. This has led to me to a lifelong exploration of the basic motivations that guide people’s actions, and how these motivations influence how people view themselves and others, and the goals they pursue.

Jeff's book list on the core desires that guide human behavior

Jeff Greenberg Why did Jeff love this book?

This book summarizes the contributions of Otto Rank, the brilliant and influential psychoanalyst. Rank focused on two core psychological motivations, the desires for psychological security on the one hand, and for stimulation, growth, and creativity on the other. His work illuminates how these desires often work in concert but also often can be in opposition over the course of the lifespan, contributing to guilt, anxiety, and stunting growth. Rank’s analysis inspired the development of both existential psychology and humanistic psychology. Rank’s approach to psychological well-being is based on accepting and even affirming the limitations of life, understanding what you really want in life, and developing the will to move creatively toward achieving those goals so that one can live an authentic and satisfying life.   

By Esther Menaker,

Why should I read it?

1 author picked Otto Rank as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.


Book cover of Freud's Patients: A Book of Lives

Todd Dufresne Author Of The Late Sigmund Freud: Or, The Last Word on Psychoanalysis, Society, and All the Riddles of Life

From my list on Freud and his legacy.

Why am I passionate about this?

I am a professor of philosophy and editor or author of 12 books. I started out in ‘Freud Studies’ in the 1990s with no agenda, just a deep interest in Freud’s ideas. Since then I’ve written quite a lot on it. Unfortunately, the field is so contentious, so overrun with books by former patients and analysts, that casual readers couldn’t possibly make heads or tails of it. Readers are best served by reading complete works of Freud and making their own assessments. After that, they can look at Freud’s voluminous and eye-opening correspondence with colleagues. Then they can consult good books, and lists of recommended works, that put them in the right direction.

Todd's book list on Freud and his legacy

Todd Dufresne Why did Todd love this book?

In principle, psychoanalytic theory and practice rely on evidence adduced from the clinical case studies of patients. Freud, however, presented very few such cases. With this in mind, Borch-Jacobsen has done something of permanent importance to the field: he researched and wrote 38 ‘lost’ and unofficial case studies of Freud’s patients and gathered them all into one volume. The book as such functions as a shocking disconfirmation of everything we thought we knew about Freud the man, the theorist, and the therapist. And, best of all, it does so in plain, highly accessible language.  

By Mikkel Borch-Jacobsen,

Why should I read it?

1 author picked Freud's Patients as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.

What is this book about?

Everyone knows the characters described by Freud in his case histories: 'Dora', the 'Rat Man', the 'Wolf Man'. But what do we know of the people, the lives behind these famous pseudonyms: Ida Bauer, Ernst Lanzer, Sergius Pankejeff? Do we know the circumstances that led them to Freud's consulting-room, or how they fared - how they really fared - following their treatments?
And what of those patients about whom Freud wrote nothing, or very little: Pauline Silberstein, who threw herself from the fourth floor of her analyst's building; Elfriede Hirschfeld, Freud's 'grand-patient' and 'chief tormentor'; the fashionable architect Karl Mayreder;…


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