Freud's Adolescence: Oedipus Complex and Parricidal Tendencies

In Freud’s Adolescence, Florian Houssier looks at the early years of the Father of Psychoanalysis and considers how his personal experiences shaped his later work. Including excerpts from many letters written by Freud himself, this volume allows a rare glimpse into the inner thoughts and emotions of one of his generation’s greatest minds.

Engaging with this lesser-known period of Freud’s life, the vivacity of his incestuous and parricidal fantasies comes to the surface, infiltrating his relational life as well as his dreams. Houssier proposes a new hypothesis about the conflicts of Freud’s adolescence, and their impact on his tendencies in later conflicts. This is the first book that sustains a systematic analysis of this material and adds a new dimension to the biography of Freud by exploring links between his life and creativity from a current theorisation of the adolescent process.

This book will be an essential read for all psychoanalysts, psychologists, lecturers, followers of Freud’s work and those looking into psychoanalysis as a whole.

Florian Houssier is a clinical psychologist and psychoanalyst (Société de Psychanalyse Freudienne). He is Professor of Clinical Psychology and Psychopathology at the Sorbonne, France; Director of the Laboratory Transversal Unit of Research: Psychogenesis and Psychopathology (UTRPP); and President of the Collège International de L'Adolescence (CILA).