The Interpretation of DreamsSigmund Freud

Freud completed The Interpretation of Dreams in 1899; it was issued with the date 1900. He later called the insight it contains the one that falls to a person's lot only once in a lifetime. The book has seven chapters. Chapter I surveys the scientific literature on dreams up to 1900. Chapter II introduces Freud's method through the analysis of his own "Irma" dream. Chapters III and IV state the central thesis: a dream is the fulfillment of a wish, often a disguised fulfillment when censorship distorts the latent content into the strange surface of the manifest dream. Chapter V examines the material and sources of dreams, including recent residues of the day and infantile wishes. Chapter VI, the longest, describes the dream-work: condensation, displacement, considerations of representability, and secondary revision. Chapter VII offers a psychology of the dream processes and of the unconscious.

The argument answers both popular dream-books and the academic view that dreams are meaningless somatic noise. Freud claims that every dream has a sense and that the sense is a wish, often sexual or infantile, that consciousness will not admit. Dream interpretation becomes the "royal road" to the unconscious and the model for later analytic work on symptoms, slips, and neurosis. The book also contains early formulations of the Oedipus complex. Later psychology has disputed many of Freud's claims about symbolism and universal infantile wishes. What the work fixed in the Conversation is the idea that mental life is double: a surface of conscious report and a depth of wishes that speech and dream both reveal and hide.