100 Books Like The Interpretation of Dreams

Every couple of years–or whenever I’m feeling very blue–I pick up Dicken’s novel and reacquaint myself with the beguiling Samuel Pickwick, Esq., the only saint whose company I can bear. Samuel is a retired businessman who now wants to enjoy life with a jolly band of dim misfits like himself, and they set off for adventures across Britain.

Mainly, though, his jolly naïveté gets them into scrapes. Pickwick is a true innocent, ignorant of the ways of men and ignorant of himself. And so, in the end, he must be bailed out by the less deceived. Yes, ignorance can be bliss for beautiful souls–but only if someone else is driving.

“This book was written in good faith, reader.” It’s hard not to love a book that begins with a lie. Written in the late 16th century, during the Wars of Religion, Montaigne’s Essays purport to be the occasional, delightful jottings of a distracted nobleman.

In fact, his large ambition was to ease his readers into a revolutionary new way of thinking about themselves that would temper their passions. He wanted to persuade us that we are always changing our feelings and, tastes and ideas; the only thing constant seems to be our inconstancy. And “that’s ok,” purrs Montaigne, because I’m the same way. Forget sin, you can’t be fully responsible for yourself. Forget heaven, learn to live happy on earth. Saint Augustine fumes….

The Oedipus myth, which seems so familiar to us, shakes me every time I return to the version written by ancient Greek dramatist Aeschylus. The reason is that no one in the story is to blame for the carnage that ensues. At the center of the tragedy is Oedipus, who does and does not want to know the truth about himself: that he unwittingly killed his father and married his mother.

I am struck over and over again by the intricate ruses he uses against himself, and which we are all susceptible to. I put the book down every time, wondering if self-knowledge is always such a good thing and what I might be hiding from myself.

An autobiography like no other. Though written sixteen centuries ago, Saint Augustine’s Confessions are more gripping and surprising than any contemporary memoir I know. Cast in the form of a prayer to God, the book reveals the inner turmoil of someone who, on the surface, at least, seems happy and talented.

But that is only because he keeps his misery from himself. “I have become a question to myself,” he writes. When a painful moment of self-revelation finally arrives, he sees all his inner pain and blemishes and is horrified. And in that same moment, with God’s help, it all disappears. And life begins again.

Sigmund Freud and psychoanalysis have cast a long shadow over our understanding of the human mind. Most research psychologists today find Freud’s ideas to be oversimplified, exaggerated, or simply wrong. It is important to understand his legacy, however, and there is no better way to do so than to read this entertaining, gossipy book about psychoanalytic theory and treatment. Malcolm provides a rare peek into the consulting room of the psychoanalyst, with insightful critiques of the practice and theory of psychoanalysis. What is Freud’s legacy, exactly? I discuss that in Strangers to Ourselves, in a chapter entitled, “Freud’s genius, Freud’s myopia.”

This well-written, tightly-argued little book of 1995 gathers together four feature articles from The New York Review of Books that together represent a watershed moment in ‘Freud Studies.’ For here was the NYRB, a long-standing bastion of psychoanalysis, publishing splashy articles that functioned like a Hollywood expose of Freud’s failings as a man, thinker, and therapist. In truth, Crews was simply giving voice to a ‘revisionist’ portrait of Freud that started in earnest in the wake of Jones’s three-volume ‘life and work’ of Freud (1953-57). Best of all: Crews connects it all to the ‘recovered memory’ movement of the 1980s and 90s, thereby drawing a  disturbing portrait of Freud’s legacy.  

This is a very good, fair, smart, early interpretation of Freudian psychoanalysis in general, and of its significance for culture and intellectual history in particular. It’s very well written, probably because Susan Sontag (Rieff’s wife at the time) is widely reported to have actually written the book, and in the 1960s the book became highly influential. It is easily Rieff’s best book. 

During the short walk that entered literary history, Sigmund Freud met Rainer Maria Rilke, a poet who experienced the terror of mortality and felt eerily that everything human is ultimately worthless. Not really, Freud answered.

The mortality of nature and humans–the end of the beloved human face–gives them their ultimate meaning. It is because we know that everything that exists will be gone one day, which is why we cherish them. I read about it for the first time in this book. It is written with a very mild and careful hand, describing all things worthy of living. 

History isn’t just “what happened.” Trillions of things happened. History is about the patterns to be found among those trillions of facts. Getting at such patterns means following deep themes, and what could be deeper than ideas? Watson explores when, where, how, and why significant ideas emerged in history, how ideas led to more ideas, to inventions, to cultural changes…we witness the emergence of a soul as a concept, we’re there to see Freud construct his tripartite model of the human psyche… Every idea is part of a thread and this book is woven of many threads. 

Talking of voice, finding your writer’s voice lies in the confidence that comes from effort and application. Alvarez was a poet, writer, critic, and poetry editor at The Observer newspaper in the 1960s, where he nourished the writing of Sylvia Plath and others. When you think of your favourite writers it’s usually their voice that grabs and sustains interest and trying to figure out your own, as a writer, can take time. Playing with other voices, trying them on for size, making one your own, is something Alvarez explores through his own insights about the work of Plath, Yeats, Jean Rhys, Freud, and others.