Perhaps nothing is more revealing about a person than what he or she reads. In 1938, when Freud was forced by the Nazis to flee Vienna, he brought with him to London a large portion of his annotated personal library. Reading Freud's Reading is a guided tour of this library, the intellectual tools of the genius of Sigmund Freud.

Specialists from a wide range of areas—from the history of medicine, to literary scholarship, to the history of classical scholarship—spent two months working on questions raised by Freud's reading and his library at the Freud Museum in London. These specialists are joined here by internationally renowned scholars including Ned Lukatcher, Harold P. Blum, and Michael Molnar to apply a wide range of critical approaches, from depth psychoanalysis to cultural analysis. Together, they present a detailed look at the implications of how, and what, Freud read, including the major sources he used for his work.