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The essays contained in this volume, which originated in a seminar led by Sander Gilman in 1992 at the Freud Museum in London, examine Freud's reading in two principal ways. Some of the essays study markings and marginalia in books owned by Freud; others, without referring to his library, explore authors and works that he read or was likely to have read. The result is a fascinating overview of Freud's reading from classical philology to physics and of his habits of annotation. One does not expect a collection by different hands to maintain a uniform standard of excellence, but anyone interested in Freud's engagement with his sources and the intellectual context of his work should feel grateful for this book.
A complete catalogue of books owned by Freud does not exist, but the ones he chose to take with him when he left Vienna in 1938 represent the bulk of his library and are in the Freud Museum. (One eagerly awaits the publication of Keith Davies' catalogue of the Museum's collection.) The members of the seminar discovered certain patterns of annotation in the books they examined. Freud's markings usually consist of short vertical lines in the margins; occasionally, a word or an exclamation mark, or underlining in the text itself. Often Freud did not mark a book all the way to the end, although it would be unwise to conclude the absence of markings means that he stopped reading or did not read carefully.