Freud, the Contemporary Super-ego, and Western Morality traces the origins of the relationship between the morality of the super-ego and the destructive impulse of the death drive in the liberal democracies of the 21st century. Giosuè Ghisalberti begins by refuting the analysis by contemporary social theorists of the phenomenon described as "the return of the religious," presenting instead a comprehensive set of ideas as outlined by Freud in the writings of the 1920s and the analysis of a contemporary theological-political unconscious. Ghisalberti argues that the psyche of the liberal West has regressed to an infantile and primitive present, driven by an unconscious hostility towards the Oedipus complex and, more comprehensively, to Western civilization as a whole. The book re-examines Freud’s psychoanalytic ideas on the nature of obsessions, interpreted first from the murder of the primal father in Totem and Taboo, and turns to his grounding ideals of intelligence, creativity, and freedom as the affirmation of the coming-to-be-human in modernity. Freud, the Contemporary Super-ego, and Western Morality will be of great interest to psychoanalysts in practice and in training. It will also be key reading for academics and scholars of psychoanalytic studies, philosophy, political theory and the humanities.

“Many major ideas have been borne out [of his theories] and are still relevant today.” —Huffington Post One of famed psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud’s most prominent ideas was that of the id, the ego, and the super-ego—the three main factors behind the workings of the human mind. Freud claimed these components of the human psyche controlled all processes of personality, behaviors, and traits in a person. The Id was a person’s most basic and impulsive instincts—the ones that feed into our deepest desires and physical needs. The Super-Ego was the opposite of the id. This component controlled our highest morals and standards, operating through our conscience and making us desire to be our most ideal-selves. The piece in the middle is the Ego. The ego mediates between the id and realities of the world around us, while being supervised (and guilted) by the super-ego. In this new edition of his book, The Ego and the Id, Sigmund Freud delves deeper into the concepts of the human mind and the results of the conflicts and workings between them.

This early work by Sigmund Freud was originally published in 1908 and we are now republishing it with a brand new introductory biography. ''Civilized' Sexual Morality and Modern Nervous Illness' is a psychological essay on the effect of social culture on mental illness. Sigismund Schlomo Freud was born on 6th May 1856, in the Moravian town of P ibor, now part of the Czech Republic. He studied a variety of subjects, including philosophy, physiology, and zoology, graduating with an MD in 1881. Freud made a huge and lasting contribution to the field of psychology with many of his methods still being used in modern psychoanalysis. He inspired much discussion on the wealth of theories he produced and the reactions to his works began a century of great psychological investigation."

Due to the inherent contradiction in Freud's concept of the Superego, there is a gap in our psychoanalytic understanding of how conscience evolves. This distinction is essential for the successful treatment of patients dominated by a harsh Superego and provides valuable insight into how contemporary society evaluates moral decisions. The Petrified Ego argues for a revision of psychoanalytic theory to include instinct as the primary form of morality. It makes the case that our earliest, infantile notion of 'good' and 'bad' is rather founded on experiences which have been 'safe or 'threatening'. More often than not, this is the basis of our moral judgement of others. It is only through direct challenge to these visceral values that beliefs independent of the survival instinct can be forged. Why does this matter? Lack of distinction between the two means that consideration of the 'right or wrong' or the 'good or bad' of others' behaviour is no more than the rationalising of an instinctual response.

The book is a study of the evolving history of knowledge in the arts and sciences in the modern era – from 1648 through the present. Modernism is treated as an epoch with evolving disciplines whose articulated problems of a time and the inquiry methods to address them, develop in a coordinated manner, given a mutual awareness. When one organizes the development of knowledge over periods of years, and gives it an appellation such as “Modernism,” the organization of facts is guided by concepts and values discerned throughout these periods. These facts of knowledge development share sufficient understandings to be called an “era,” or an “epoch,” or other terms that insist on the shared aspects of those years. One can call such an effort a “metahistory,” in that what is tracked is not merely a knowledge that is political, economic, ideological, sociological, or scientific, but an overview that tracks the respective conceptual developments of the fields in how they have changed and augmented their problem formulations, inquiry methods, and explanatory conceptions over time.

Many of the earliest books, particularly those dating back to the 1900s and before, are now extremely scarce and increasingly expensive. We are republishing these classic works in affordable, high quality, modern editions, using the original text and artwork.