The Interpretation of Dreams: The Complete and Definitive Text

by Sigmund Freud

Overview

The most complete edition of Sigmund Freud’s classic work on the psychology and significance of dreams. 

What are the most common dreams and why do we have them? What does a dream about death mean? What do dreams of swimming, failing, or flying symbolize?

First published in 1899, Sigmund Freud's groundbreaking book The Interpretation of Dreams explores why we dream and why dreams matter in our psychological lives. Delving into theories of manifest and latent dream content; the special language of dreams; dreams as wish fulfillments; the significance of childhood experiences; and much more, Freud offers an incisive and enduringly relevant examination of dream psychology. Encompassing dozens of case histories and detailed analyses of actual dreams, this landmark work grants us unique insight into our sleeping experiences.

Renowned for translating Freud's German writings into English, James Strachey―with the assistance of Freud's daughter Anna―first published this edition in 1953. Incorporating all textual alterations made by Freud over a period of thirty years, it remains the most complete translation of the work in print.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780465019779
Publisher:	Basic Books
Publication date:	02/23/2010
Pages:	688
Sales rank:	59,107
Product dimensions:	5.50(w) x 8.20(h) x 1.50(d)
Age Range:	13 - 18 Years

About the Author

Sigmund Freud (1856-1939) was a clinical neurologist living and practicing in Vienna. His groundbreaking theories of the id, ego, and super-ego of the mind continue to be studied throughout the world.

James Strachey (1887–1967) was a British academic and psychoanalyst. The Interpretation of Dreams is considered a major foundational text of the field and one of Strachey’s preeminent translations.

Read an Excerpt

CHAPTER ONE

THE SCIENTIFIC LITERATURE DEALING WITH THE PROBLEMS OF DREAMS

In the pages that follow I shall bring forward proof that there is a psychological technique which makes it possible to interpret dreams, and that, if that procedure is employed, every dream reveals itself as a psychical structure which has a meaning and which can be inserted at an assignable point in the mental activities of waking life. I shall further endeavour to elucidate the processes to which the strangeness and obscurity of dream are due and to deduce from those processes the nature of the psychical forces by whose concurrent or mutually opposing action dreams are generated. Having gone thus far, my description will break off, for it will have reached a point at which the problem of dreams merges into more comprehensive problems, the solution of which must be approached upon the basis of material of another kind.

I shall give by way of preface a review of the work done by earlier writers on the subject as well as of the present position of the problems of dreams in the world of science, since in the course of my discussion I shall not often have occasion to revert to those topics. For, in spite of many thousands of years of effort, the scientific understanding of dream has made very little advance--a fact so generally admitted *'in the literature that it seem unnecessary to quote instances in support of it. In these writings, of which a list appears at the end of my work, many stimulating observations are to be found and a quantity of interesting material bearing upon our theme, but little or nothing that touches upon the essential natureof dreams or that offers a final solution of any of their enigmas. And still less, of course, has passed into the knowledge of educated laymen.

It may be asked what view was taken of dreams in prehistoric times by primitive races of men and what effect dreams may have had upon the formation of their conceptions of the world and of the soul; and this is a subject of such great interest that it is only with much reluctance that I refrain from dealing with it in this connection. I must refer my readers to the standard works of Sir John Lubbock, Herbert Spencer, E. B. Tylor and others, and I will only add that we shaft not be able to appreciate the wide range of these problems and speculations until we have dealt with the task that lies before us here---the interpretation of dreams.

The prehistoric view of dreams is no doubt echoed in the attitude adopted towards dream by the peoples Of classical antiquity. They took it as axiomatic that dream were connected with the world of superhuman beings in whom they believed and that they were revelations from gods and daemons. There could he no question, moreover, that for the dreamer dreams had an important purpose, which was as a rule to foretell the future. The extraordinary variety in the content of dreams and in the impression they produced made it difficult, however, to have any uniform view of them and made it necessary to classify dreams into numerous groups and subdivisions according to their importance and trustworthiness. The position adopted towards dreams by individual philosophers in antiquity was naturally dependent to some extent upon their attitude towards divination in general.

In the two works of Aristotle which -deal with dreams, they have already become a subject for psychological study. We are told that dreams are not sent by the gods and are not of a divine character, but that they are 'daemonic,' since nature is 'daemonic' and not divine.

Dreams, that is, do not arise from supernatural manifesta-tions but follow the laws of the human spirit, though thelatter, it is true, is akin to the divine. Dreams are definedas the mental activ ity of the sleeper in so far as he isasleep.'

Aristotle was aware of some of the characteristics of dream-life. He knew, for instance, that dreams give a magnified construction to small stimuli arising during steep. 'Men think that they are walking through fire and are tremendously hot, when there is only a slight heating about certain parts.' And from this circumstance he draws the conclusion that dreams may very well betray to a physician the first signs of some bodily change which has not been observed in waking.

Before the time of Aristotle, as we know, the ancients regarded dreams not as a product of the dreaming mind but as something introduced by a divine agency; and already the two opposing currents, which we shall find influencing opinions of dream-life at every period of history, were making themselves felt. The distinction was drawn between truthful and valuable dreams, sent to the sleeper to warn him or foretell the future, and vain, deceitful and Worthless dreams, whose purpose it was to mislead or destroy him.

The Interpretation of Dreams. Copyright © by Sigmund Freud. Reprinted by permission of HarperCollins Publishers, Inc. All rights reserved. Available now wherever books are sold.

Table of Contents

Editor'S Introduction xi

Preface to the First Edition xxiii

Preface to the Second Edition xxv

Preface to the Third Edition xxvii

Preface to the Fourth Edition xxviii

Preface to the Fifth Edition xxix

Preface to the Sixth Edition xxix

Preface to the Eighth Edition xxxi

Preface to the Third (Revised) English Edition xxxii

I The Scientific Literature Dealing With the Problems of Dreams 35

(a) The Relation of Dreams to Waking Life 41

(b) The Material of Dreams-Memory in Dreams 44

(c) The Stimuli and Sources of Dreams 54

(1) External Sensory Stimuli 55

(2) Internal (Subjective) Sensory Excitations 62

(3) Internal Organic Somatic Stimuli 65

(4) Psychical Sources of Stimulation 70

(d) Why Dreams Are Forgotten After Waking 73

(e) The Distinguishing Psychological Characteristics of Dreams 77

(f) The Moral Sense in Dreams 93

(g) Theories of Dreaming and Its Function 101

(h) The Relation Between Dreams and Mental Diseases 113

Postscript, 1909 118

Postscript, 1914 120

II The Method of Interpreting Dreams: An Analysis of a Specimen Dream 121

III A Dream is the Fulfilment of a Wish 147

IV Distortion in Dreams 159

V The Material and Sources of Dreams 187

(a) Recent and Indifferent Material in Dreams 188

(b) Infantile Material as a Source of Dreams 211

(c) The Somatic Sources of Dreams 240

(d) Typical Dreams 259

(?) Embarrassing Dreams of Being Naked 260

(?) Dreams of the Death of Persons of Whom the Dreamer Is Fond 266

(?) Other Typical Dreams 288

(?) Examination Dreams 291

VI The Dream-Work 295

(a) The Work of Condensation 296

(b) The Work of Displacement 322

(c) The Means of Representation in Dreams 326

(d) Considerations of Representability 353

(e) Representation by Symbols in Dreams-Some Further Typical Dreams 363

(f) Some Examples-Calculations and Speeches in Dreams 414

(g) Absurd Dreams-Intellectual Activity in Dreams 434

(h) Affects in Dreams 466

(i) Secondary Revision 493

VII The Psychology of the Dream-Processes 513

(a) The Forgetting of Dreams 516

(b) Regression 535

(c) Wish-Fulfilment 550

(d) Arousal by Dreams-The Function of Dreams-Anxiety-Dreams 572

(e) The Primary and Secondary Processes-Repression 585

(f) The Unconscious and Consciousness-Reality 605

Appendix A A Premonitory Dream Fulfilled 617

Appendix B List of Writings by Freud Dealing Predominantly or Largely with Dreams 621

Additional Notes 623

Bibliography

(a) Author Index and List of Works Quoted 625

(b) List of Works on Dreams Published Before 1900 647

Index Of Dreams

(a) Freud's Own Dreams 653

(b) Other People's Dreams 654

General Index 657

Editorial Reviews

"The groundbreaking work that launched psychoanalysis."—Time

"A century after the book's publication, Freud's ideas have seeped so deeply into the culture that most people invoke them daily without being aware of it."—New York Times

"It is impossible to read The Interpretation of Dreams without coming away wiser."—Globe & Mail

"Freud's classic. Freud has been a dominant force in Western thinking and here's the book that started it all."—Psychology Today

"[An] epoch-making book."— Economist

"At the beginning of our century, the publication of The Interpretation of Dreams changed our everyday perception of that essential component of human existence."—Daily Mail

From the Publisher

There are few things more self-indulgent than keeping a dream journal, but the king of shrinks makes a persuasive case that understanding yourself starts with understanding that nightmare about the octopus, the train, and Heidi Klum. (After all, your subconscious helps you root out the things you can't say out loud: I'm afraid, or I'm ashamed.) Let the efficiency experts brag about maximizing each minute of your day; Freud salvages the lost hours of your night.
—Esquire

Jeff Gordinier

In her new translation, Crick (emeritus, German, Univ. Coll., London) gives us the first edition of Freud's magnum opus (1900) with historical context and notes on the theory and practice of translation. While this version lacks the fullness of Freud's intellectual development, it reveals the fundamental work clearly and in context. Serious students can have the best of both worlds by comparing Crick's work with James Strachey's 1953 work (a variorum of all eight editions, considered the "standard") in passages of particular interest. This more literal version, not beholden to the psychoanalytic movement and its defense of Freud as scientist, pays respect to Strachey while "attempting to render Freud's varying registers, listening for latent metaphors as well as his grand elucidatory analogies." Here we come closer to Freud's masterly German, yet, as with Strachey, it reads like good English. Recommended for academic and larger general libraries.--E. James Lieberman, George Washington Univ., Sch. of Medicine, Washington, DC Copyright 1999 Cahners Business Information.

Library Journal

Freud considered The Interpretation of Dreams his most important work. Its thesis-like opening pages slowly give way to a long, packed work of quirky brilliance - what one might see as a Decameron-like framework for tales of secret suffering in high bourgeois Vienna. The writing alternates between theoretical, analytic and narrative. Freud examines around 250 dreams with a verbal skill and humour which, the translator says, have given her delight. But the Dreambook not only displays imagination. It unfolds a theory of how human imagination works. In effect, Freud attributes to the unconscious the power of a writer brilliantly deploying the classical tropes to transform his material. For many of us, fascinated by the wordplay which infected the Joyce of Finnegans Wake, and by the interface of philosophy and metaphor, this is why we read The Interpretation; nothing to do with psychoanalysis.

With parallel observations on behaviour and humour in The Psychopathology of Everyday Life (1901) and The Joke and its Relation to the Unconscious (1905), Freud tries to catalogue the mind's inventiveness against a backdrop of modern philosophy. There is something of Locke and Hume, but also of Brentano's phenomenology, in his account of how we represent the world to ourselves, how our mental representations link up with words, how objects come to be thought about by association with each other, and what it is for an object to exist only in the mind. This eclectic philosophical mixture underlies his account of the unconscious. The three books, led by the Dreambook, with its wonderful exploration of language, are the key to the French Freud. Anglo-American psychoanalysis has looked to, and found, a quite different Freud. The Anglophone world has been partly misled by James Strachey, translator and editor of the Standard Edition. Strachey made key errors, like "instinct" for Trieb, and "mind" for Seele. Worse by far, he thought Freud was talking about structures rather than processes. He introduced pseudo-medical Latin and terrible un-English abstractions like "ideational", following Ernest Jones's instruction to make Freud appeal to scientists. Freud's own style was much more familiar. He would never have written, as Strachey had him do in his Latrine Dream: "I micturated."

Joyce Crick insists that, given Strachey's persistent overall value, and status as a classic, she is not out to fix what ain't bust. But she is right to get rid of "cathexis", "coenaesthesia", "ideational" and so on at a stroke. She probably won't change minds already made up on Freud, but with her brief to give us a new Interpretation of Dreams one hundred years after it first appeared in November 1899, she provides a fresh introduction to a man better approached as a fascinating writer and thinker than a discredited scientist. . . .

Times Literary Supplement