You're working in a book shop...

You're working in a book shop. A timid young man enters and makes two purchases: Sense and Sensibility and Freud's The Interpretation of Dreams.

What assumptions do you make about the man?

I would probably assume he wanted to read those books

I would feel sympathy for a person that (i suppose) isn't cucked by the conventional memefication of freud and wants to make up his own mind about Freuds revolutionary work on the human psyche.

I don't care about sense and sensibility

This, but I would also assume they would be relegated to a bookshelf after a few attempted reading sessions, never to be read again.

what a pleb! he has a small wiener! your mom!

what do you think is freud's best work? i think he gets too much "wacko" treatment, but at the same time i'm not sure how much i could get from him at this point, when his most important ideas have already been distilled and widely circulated

On the Psychical Mechanism of Hysterical Phenomena.

Hysteria seems to be a valid phenomena, all too readily discarded as sexist by dogmatists of both sexes.

i'll give it a go, thank you user. you into jung also by any chance?

Best work is hard to say. The Interpretation of Dreams is his most important work. Generally i would recommend to first get his main concepts down, for this the 3 lectures on psychoanalysis are perfect. maybe some secondary literature as to have them explained in clear and precise ways. And then, as you are right about Freud having been distilled and circulated, move on to what interests you. If Freuds theory of dreams interests you, then read interpretation of dreams. You don't have to read all of it. His work on Mass Culture has been quite influential, his investigation on the artist is interesting as well etc. etc.

If you actually read Freud you will realize that he relativizes his own findings constantly, encourages deeper research and points out the "pioneer nature" of his work. Try to avoid the retardation of going with a pre-fabricated opinion of "hurr he's been proven wrong, he's outdated" into it. Freuds work, while having been transformed, reinterpreted and exposed in it's flaws, remains critical, enlightening (not in absolute terms) and essential to the understanding of the psyche and in more historical terms of the 20th perspective. You can always move on to other psychoanalysts that followed him, many of them will deny Freud but all share him as their foundation.

And if you find that it is rubbish and speculative bullshit, then first let me say that it is in many ways superior to mainstream empirical psychology since many of the phenomena that are discussed in our daily life (nagging voice at the back of my head, for example is one of those) or constantly repeated throughout art and other mediums can't be quantified via biopsychological or conventional empirical methods. It is psychoanalysis with it's "speculative empirical" model, that investigates them.

And secondly: Well in that case you atleast learned some history.

tl;dr: Start with The Three Lectures on Psychoanalysis

>Hysteria

It's like i'm in the 19th century again...