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Library of Congress Research Guides

Sigmund Freud Rare Book Collection: A Resource Guide

About the Collection

Title page of the first edition of Sigmund Freud's groundbreaking work on the interpretation of dreams, Die Traumdeutung.
Sigmund Freud. Die Traumdeutung. 1900 [i.e. 1899]. The Sigmund Freud Collection. Library of Congress Rare Book and Special Collections Division.

The Library's Manuscript Division holds a large and extremely important collection of Sigmund Freud's papers. To support this collection, the Rare Book and Special Collections Division set out in 1975 to form a Freud collection of first editions in German and English and later editions containing textual revisions by the author. Given the extent of these revisions and the fact that American and English editions were frequently the work of different translators, forming a comprehensive collection was a major challenge. Early on the Manuscript Division transferred to the Rare Book and Special Collections Division more than 50 books that had once been in Freud's library. These were not always books by Freud, but mostly consisted of books which had either been purchased by him or presented to him by the authors, including Havelock Ellis, Norman Douglas, Andre Breton, Paul Eluard, and Morton Prince. Virtually all the books have either an inscription to Freud, his signature, or some other indication of ownership. Among the books not presented by their authors, which Freud presumably purchased to further his research are titles by fellow psychiatrists and neurologists such as Pierre Janet, Friedrich Goltz, Daniel Hack Tuke, and Carl Wernicke.

Not long after receiving the books from Freud's library, the division purchased a collection of 67 German-and English-language books, pamphlets, and offprints by Freud. In this collection was an offprint of Über Coca (Vienna, 1885), one of Freud's early separate publications; an inscribed copy of Zur Auffassung der Aphasien (Leipzig & Vienna, 1891), Freud's rare first book; Studien über Hysterie (Leipzig and Vienna, 1895), written jointly with Josef Breuer; and the third, 1909 edition of Die Traumdeutung. With subsequent purchases, the Freud collection has grown to over 200 titles.

Two outstanding donations to the collection came in 1976. Dr. Kurt Eissler, secretary of the Sigmund Freud Archives, presented to the Library a very special copy of volume 4 of Sammlung kleiner Schriften zur Neurosenlehre (Leipzig and Vienna, 1918) in which Freud's famous case history of the psychanalysis and dream interpretation of "the Wolf-Man" was first published. The copy given to the Library is the one which Freud inscribed to "the Wolf-Man" himself, Sergei Pankejeff. Since "The Wolf-Man" was had long sought to remain anonymous, the volume was restricted until his death in 1979. Also in 1976, the Baltimore-District of Columbia Society and Institute for Psychoanalysis raised the funds to purchase for the collection a copy of the first edition of Freud's groundbreaking 'Die Traumdeutung [The Interpretation of Dreams]' (Leipzig and Vienna, 1900).

To locate all materials in the Freud collection, use the following search in the Library of Congress Online Catalog:

The Sigmund Freud Collection contains many of the first printings of his works, a great deal of which are extremely rare. While his first separately printed book was based on his medical school dissertation, the Library owns several offprints from earlier journal articles that were his very first publications, often those copies found in Freud's own papers, which are held in the Manuscript Division. The very first of these was a neurological treatise, "Über den Ursprung der hinteren Nervenwurzeln im Rückenmark von Ammocoetes (Petromyzon Planeri)" translated as, "About the origin of the posterior nerve roots in the spinal cord of Ammocoetes (Petromyzon planeri)" which appeared in Kaiserliche Akademie der Wissenschaften in Wien in 1871. His first separately published book, Zur Auffassung der Aphasien, on the subject of aphasia was published in Vienna in 1891, and not translated into English until 1953.

The linked materials in the preceding text and the following titles link to fuller bibliographic information in the Library of Congress Online Catalog. Links to additional online content are included when available.

Translations of Sigmund Freud's works from German into English was often accompanied by competition among his followers, who often wanted to appear closer to him personally and professionally than their peers. It was through these translations that Freud's ideas made such an enormous  impact on American and British psychiatry for over a century. 

Freud himself was a translator himself, most often from French, and the collection contains several of these including Hippolyte Bernheim's Hypnotisme, suggestion, psychothérapie, études nouvelles (1892) and Marie Bonaparte's Topsy (1937).

The following titles link to fuller bibliographic information in the Library of Congress Online Catalog. Links to additional online content are included when available.

In 1975, the Manuscript Division transferred to the Rare Book and Special Collections Division more than 50 books that had once been in Freud's library. These were not always books by Freud, but mostly consisted of books which had either been purchased by him or presented to him by the authors, including Havelock Ellis, Norman Douglas, Andre Breton, Paul Eluard, and Morton Prince. Virtually all the books have either an inscription to Freud, his signature, or some other indication of ownership. Among the books not presented by their authors, which Freud presumably purchased to further his research are titles by fellow psychiatrists and neurologists such as Pierre Janet, Friedrich Goltz, Daniel Hack Tuke, and Carl Wernicke.

The following titles link to fuller bibliographic information in the Library of Congress Online Catalog. Links to additional online content are included when available.

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