Freud and Modern Psychology

Freud's discovery of an emotional basis for mental illness led him to pursue the emotional basis of human behavior in general. This pursuit led him to undertake observational studies of dreams (1900), everyday mistakes (1901), sexuality (1905b), character formation (1908, 1931), jokes (1905a), and the origin of guilt (1913). Volume 2 of Freud and Modern Psychology examines the texts of each of these major writings in general psychology, continuing to explore the contradiction between Freud's observations about the power of emotions and his narrow the­ oretical formulations about human behavior. Volume 2 also reviews the remarkable power of the uniquely moral emotions of shame and guilt not only to create psychiatric symptoms, as discussed in Volume 1, but to infiltrate our nightly dreams, create everyday parapraxes, influence the development of sexuality, specify the emotional release in jokes, shape personality, and "create" human culture. As we saw in Volume 1, we shall see again in