Welcome back to Hardcore Literature, your favourite book club.

Deep dives into the greatest books ever written.

Provocative poems, evocative epics, and life-changing literary analyses.

We don't just read the great books. We live them.

Together we'll suck the marrow out of Shakespeare, Homer, Tolstoy and many more.

We'll relish the most moving art ever committed

to the page and stage from every age. Join us and me, your host, Benjamin McAvoy, on the reading

adventure of a lifetime with hardcore literature. Sigmund Freud's, the interpretation of of Dreams is one of the most significant works ever penned,

and is a landmark not only in the field of psychology, but in the tradition of great literature too.

And like many revolutionary and endlessly influential works,

de Kramdaitung was born out of great personal crisis. In 1896, Jakob Freud, the father to the father

of psychoanalysis, died at the age of 81. His son, who had just entered his 40s,

entered a period of intense and sustained mourning. Rather than let the grief overwhelm and

crush him, however, Sigmund channeled his pain into his work and put his own feelings,

his interiority, his mind, his self up to scientific examination in order to gather evidence

for his psychological theories. Where would the world of art, human endeavour, scientific advance and

self-understanding be, if not for sons, needing to endure the death of their father? Shakespeare

lost his father, and of course his father lost a father, as is the common lot. But the Bard's response

was to pen the tragedy of Hamlet. Freud himself reminds us that it was hot on the heels of the loss

of not only Shakespeare's father, but his son, Hamnet, that one of the greatest plays of all time was born. And indeed,

that play makes it into Freud's top three works of literature of all time. The list is Edipus Rex

by Sophocles, Hamlet by William Shakespeare, and the brothers Karamatov by Fyodor Dostoevsky.

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