The Interpretation of Dreams

1900

Sigmund Freud (1856–1939)

The foundational principles for Psychoanalysis were developed by Sigmund Freud from 1886 to 1900. At the end of this period, he published his most important book, The Interpretation of Dreams. The book proposed an entirely psychological, rather than neurological, model of the mind. Although Freud constantly revised most of his theories, most of this book’s major ideas were articulated in terms that he did not later modify or revise.

The immediate origin of the book’s topic was the death of his father, which occurred in 1896. The event caused deep turmoil in Freud’s life and left him depressed. After several months, he decided to act as if he were a patient and, using dreams and free association, to analyze himself. It was through this self-analysis that Freud found in dreams the “royal road to the unconscious.” His analysis of dreams led him to suggest that dreams have two levels of meaning: the manifest content, which is superficial and does not contain the real psychological meaning of the dream, and the latent content, which is the real meaning dressed in symbolic form. Dreams, Freud suggested, are wish fulfillments whose latent meaning is intended to disguise their socially unacceptable nature. In this way dreams are like symptoms of Hysteria, in that both represent ideas or wishes that are too dangerous to be expressed in everyday life. Here Freud had a great insight: he had previously supposed that his patients’ reports of childhood sexual experiences represented actual events. Now he saw that these experiences had probably not happened; rather, his patients’ memories of them were sexual wishes expressed in symbolic form.

When Freud began to use free association to analyze his own dreams after his father’s death, he was shocked to discover many of the same types of wishes in his own dream life. Of greatest importance was his discovery through self-analysis of the existence of the Oedipus Complex, a principle that proved critically important for his later work on the development of personality.

SEE ALSO Oedipus Complex (1897), Psychoanalysis (1899), Psychosexual Development (1905), Jungian Psychology (1913), Defense Mechanisms (1936)

Dream by Catalan symbolist painter Joan Brull, c. 1905.