The Theme of the Three Caskets

The Theme of the Three Caskets explores a profound insight: "It is in vain that an old man yearns for the love of a woman as he had it first from his mother." In some of the most densely packed pages that Freud ever wrote, the founder of psychoanalysis demonstrates, through literary, mythical, and folktale examples, the extraordinary way that wishes manifest themselves in people's dreams and choices as inverted images.

Magisterial and brilliant, this short essay also illuminates Freud's own preoccupation with his daughter, Anna, at the time that he was writing it.