Letter from Sigmund Freud to The Antiquary Hinterberger, Undated [1907]

(Undated [1907])

You ask me to name “ten good books”1 and refuse to add a word of explanation, thus leaving to me not only the choice of the books but also the interpretation of your request. Accustomed to paying attention to small details, I have to take my clue from the very words in which you clothe your mysterious demand. You don't say “the ten greatest works” (of world literature), in which

case, like so many other people, I should feel obliged to mention: Homer, the tragedies of Sophocles, Goethe's Faust, Shakespeare's Hamlet, Macbeth, etc. Neither do you say “the ten most significant books,” in which case I should have to mention such scientific achievements as those of Copernicus, the old physician Johann Weier on witchcraft, Darwin's Descent of Man, and so on. You don't even ask for “favorite books,” among which I should not have forgotten Milton's Paradise Lost and Heine's Lazarus. So I assume that a special emphasis falls on the word “good,” and that by it you mean books with which one is on the kind of terms one is with “good” friends, books to which one owes some part of one's knowledge of life and philosophy, books one has enjoyed and likes to recommend to others, but in relation to which the element of shy reverence, the conviction of one's own smallness versus their greatness, does not play a special part. So I shall name for you ten such “good” books that come to mind without much reflection: