FREUD, Sigmund
Drei Abhandlungen zur Sexualtheorie
First edition. Large 8vo. (238x150mm). pp. [ii], 84. Uncut. Original blue-grey paper wrappers, lettered in black on front and rear wrapper. Slight shelf wear, some restoration to spine. An excellent copy. One of the foundation texts of the twentieth century. Along with his first book, The Interpretation of Dreams, the lectures on Pyscho-Analysis and the late Civilization and its Discontents, this text changed forever our conception of the child. Indeed, these three essays have been described as Freud’s "most momentous and original contributions to human knowledge" after The Interpretation of Dreams. Freud’s work on the pervasiveness of perversion is perhaps the most radical and far-reaching idea of the twentieth-century. And his central discussion of sexuality in infancy and childhood cuts to the heart of modern concerns. For Freud, the child no longer existed in Rousseau’s innocent State of Nature, but was rather a mass of unfocussed and unspecified sexuality which needed to be socially conditioned. A major cultural document.
