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WorkSigmund Freud

The Interpretation of Dreams

A Viennese doctor reads his own dreams in public, line by line, and finds a hidden wish under every one.

by Sigmund Freud1,095 passages held

  • German, the original language
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Original title
Die Traumdeutung
First published
(aged 44)
Original language
German

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Overview

Alfred Maury, a French scholar who experimented on his own sleep, once dreamed that he was tried before Robespierre and sent to the guillotine, and woke to find that part of the bed had fallen across his neck. Sigmund Freud retells the story in his long opening survey of what science had said about dreams, a literature that mostly traced them to stimuli reaching the sleeping body and found little in them worth reading. Freud's book takes the side of ordinary people, who had always believed that dreams mean something. Every dream, he argues, fulfils a wish that the dreamer could not admit while awake, and an inner censorship disguises the wish before it is allowed through. What the sleeper remembers is a compressed and displaced version of hidden thoughts, and interpretation undoes the disguise by taking each element in turn and following what the dreamer associates with it. Most of his examples are his own dreams, beginning with one from July 1895 about a patient he calls Irma, which he reads as a wish to be cleared of blame for her treatment. In a section on dreams about the death of a parent he turns to Sophocles' Oedipus the King and sets out the idea he later called the Oedipus complex. Franz Deuticke published the book in Leipzig and Vienna on 4 November 1899, with 1900 on its title page, in 600 copies that took eight years to sell. Writing the preface to the second edition in 1908, Freud complained that psychiatrists and philosophers had ignored it. He added that he had understood only after finishing it that the book was his reaction to the death of his father, Jakob, in 1896. He went on revising it for the rest of his life, and eight German editions were published before he died; A. A. Brill's English translation appeared in New York in 1913.

Key concepts

What is the difference between a dream's content and its dream thoughts?

The content is the dream as the dreamer remembers it; the dream thoughts are the hidden meaning it stands for, recovered only by interpretation. Freud compares the two to the same message in two languages, the second written in pictures, like a rebus. The content is short and often absurd, while the thoughts behind it are long, coherent and usually contain the wish the dream fulfils.

What does Freud mean by the dream-work?

The dream-work is the set of operations that turns hidden thoughts into the dream we remember. Freud names four: condensation, which fuses several thoughts or people into one; displacement, which moves emphasis onto something minor; regard for what can be shown, which turns abstract ideas into pictures; and secondary revision, which smooths the result into a halfway sensible story. The dream-work does not think or judge; it only transforms.

Why does Freud call every element of a dream overdetermined?

Overdetermined means caused several times over: a single image in a dream is connected to more than one of the hidden thoughts at once. That is why a short dream can need pages of interpretation, and why one element can be read along several paths without contradiction. A figure in a dream may borrow its face from one person, its words from another and its situation from a third.

What is regression in a dream?

Regression is the backward path a thought takes in sleep. Awake, excitement runs from perception towards action; at night, with movement shut off, a thought runs back towards perception and appears as a vivid picture instead of a sentence. That is why dreams are mostly seen rather than thought, and why they can feel as real as waking life while they last.

What are the primary and secondary processes?

They are two ways the mind can work, set out in the book's last chapter. The primary process seeks quick discharge: it shifts and fuses ideas freely and ignores contradiction, as in dreams. The secondary process, built up later, holds energy back, tests what is real and thinks in orderly steps. Dreams show what the mind does when the second loosens its grip on the first.

Themes of the book

What this book returns to, gathered into themes and ordered by how much of the text each one occupies.

A Wish in Disguise

Is a dream a meaningless by-product of sleep, or a message? Freud sides with the old popular belief that it means something, and stakes the book on one answer: every dream fulfils a wish.

Against the doctors of his day, who traced dreams to a cold foot or a noise in the street, Freud argues that a dream is a wish shown as already granted. Children's dreams show this plainly. Adult dreams look nothing like it, because an inner censor lets a forbidden wish through only once it has been disguised. Even painful dreams, he insists, obey the rule, and the dream as a whole protects sleep by turning a disturbance into a scene the sleeper can go on dreaming.

  • wish fulfillment
  • desire
  • dreams
  • sleep
  • censorship
  • dream censorship
  • anxiety

Enter a dialogue

How a Dream Is Made

Why does a dream look so strange, if it only carries a wish? The answer lies in the work that turns hidden thoughts into the pictures we remember.

Freud separates the dream as remembered from the thoughts behind it and names the labour between them the dream-work. It compresses many thoughts into one image, shifts emphasis from the important to the trivial, translates ideas into pictures, and finally tidies the result into a passable story. Interpretation runs the process backwards: the dream is cut into pieces and the dreamer says what comes to mind for each. The old dream-books, with their fixed meanings, are set aside because they skip the dreamer altogether.

  • dream-work
  • condensation
  • displacement
  • representation
  • dream formation
  • dream interpretation
  • association

Enter a dialogue

The Child Who Still Dreams

Where does the force of a dream come from? Behind the trivial events of yesterday Freud finds the wishes of early childhood, some of them wishes no adult would own.

Dreams borrow their scenery from the day before, but their energy, Freud argues, comes from childhood wishes that were repressed and never died. The boldest instance is the dream of a beloved parent's death. A small child, he holds, wants the rival parent gone, and Sophocles' Oedipus moves us because his fate could have been ours. Hamlet, unable to avenge his father on the man who did what he once wished, is the same wish in a more repressed age.

  • childhood
  • memory
  • sexuality
  • repression
  • unconscious

Enter a dialogue

Within this work

passages held
1,095
distinct concepts
617
by passages held, corpus-wide
#57

What this book thinks together

The wheel takes this book’s leading concepts and shows how often they come up together. The wider the band between two, the more of its passages speak of both. Among them, most often together: “dreams” and “memory”.
Concept co-occurrence, strongest first 8 concepts, joined by 28 pairings. 81 pairings reach beyond these concepts and are not drawn.
ConceptPaired conceptShared passages
dreamsmemory96
dream interpretationmemory91
dreamswish fulfillment83
dream interpretationwish fulfillment70
dream interpretationsexuality67
dream interpretationdream-work63
dreamsunconscious56
associationdream interpretation48
dream interpretationunconscious40
dream interpretationdreams35
associationmemory34
unconsciouswish fulfillment26
memoryunconscious25
associationdreams23
memorywish fulfillment19
memorysexuality17
dream-workmemory15
dream-workwish fulfillment15
sexualityunconscious10
associationdream-work7
sexualitywish fulfillment7
dreamssexuality6
dream-workdreams5
dream-worksexuality5
associationunconscious4
associationsexuality3
dream-workunconscious3
associationwish fulfillment2

Works held

The author's work in order, this book marked in place. Your-language title first, the original beneath it where the two differ; side chips show which full texts are held.

  1. 1900 The Interpretation of Dreams (Die Traumdeutung) you are here DE
  2. 1901 The Psychopathology of Everyday Life (Zur Psychopathologie des Alltagslebens)

    The dream book's method carried into waking life; its slips and forgettings became the opening part of the lectures Freud later gave to beginners in Vienna.

     DE
  3. 1905 Jokes and their Relation to the Unconscious (Der Witz und seine Beziehung zum Unbewußten)

    Freud's only book-length study of comedy, and the one most built from borrowed material: puns, anecdotes and Jewish jokes, each taken apart in turn.

     DE
  4. 1907 Frühe Schriften zu Religion und Dichtung

    Two early excursions from the clinic, gathered here in one volume: the seed of Freud's later books on religion, and his short account of where a writer's stories come from.

     DE
  5. 1910 Zur Theorie des Unbewußten

    Four theoretical papers written between 1910 and 1915 and gathered here in one volume, on the road from the dream book to the metapsychological essays of 1915 — the last of the four is one of those essays.

     DE
  6. 1913 Spätere Schriften zu Dichtung und Mythos

    Two essays from 1913 and 1917, gathered here in one volume, that show Freud the reader of Shakespeare and Goethe: the dream-book method applied to a stage motif and to the first page of a famous autobiography.

     DE
  7. 1913 Totem and Taboo (Totem und Tabu)

    The first of Freud's books on society and religion, where he moves from the patient to the human species; Group Psychology, The Future of an Illusion and his last book, on Moses, all build on its story of the murdered father.

     DE
  8. 1914 On Narcissism: An Introduction (Zur Einführung des Narzißmus)

    A short essay written as Jung was breaking with Freud, and the hinge between his early theory of the drives and the later picture of ego and super-ego.

     DE
  9. 1915 Instincts and their Vicissitudes (Triebe und Triebschicksale)

    The paper that opens Freud's 1915 theoretical series by defining its basic term; the companion essays on repression and on the unconscious build on it.

     DE
  10. 1915 Schriften aus dem Weltkrieg

    Freud's direct responses to the First World War, gathered in one volume on this site: a long essay of 1915 on disillusionment and death, and a short one of 1916 on transience and mourning.

     DE
  11. 1915 The Unconscious (Das Unbewußte)

    Freud's fullest account of what he meant by the unconscious, written in wartime Vienna eight years before The Ego and the Id redrew his map of the mind.

     DE
  12. 1917 Introductory Lectures on Psycho-Analysis (Vorlesungen zur Einführung in die Psychoanalyse)

    Freud's own introduction to his work, and the closest thing he wrote to a textbook: his books on dreams and on everyday slips retold for listeners, then carried on into a general theory of neurosis.

     DE
  13. 1919 The 'Uncanny' (Das Unheimliche)

    A rare venture by Freud into aesthetics, a field he says psychoanalysts seldom feel drawn to, written in 1919 beside the first draft of Beyond the Pleasure Principle.

     DE
  14. 1920 Beyond the Pleasure Principle (Jenseits des Lustprinzips)

    The hinge of Freud's later work: the 1920 book that introduces the death drive, followed within three years by the new map of the mind in The Ego and the Id.

     DE
  15. 1921 Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego (Massenpsychologie und Ich-Analyse)

    The bridge between Freud's speculations on prehistory and his new model of the mind: its chapter on a "grade in the ego" sets out the ego ideal that The Ego and the Id would rename two years later.

     DE
  16. 1923 The Ego and the Id (Das Ich und das Es)

    The book in which Freud's later model of the mind takes its final shape; the essays and books that follow it, on anxiety, religion and civilisation, all speak its language of ego, id and super-ego.

     DE
  17. 1924 Späte Schriften zur Ich-Psychologie

    Three short papers of the mid-1920s, gathered here in one volume, in which Freud tests the model of The Ego and the Id on psychosis, on memory and on laughter.

     DE
  18. 1926 Inhibitions, Symptoms and Anxiety (Hemmung, Symptom und Angst)

    Written three years after The Ego and the Id, it rebuilds the theory of neurotic symptoms in that book's terms, starting from the difference between a symptom and an inhibition, a restriction the ego places on itself.

     DE
  19. 1927 The Future of an Illusion (Die Zukunft einer Illusion)

    Freud's most direct case against religion, written fourteen years after Totem and Taboo had traced it to the murdered father, and the opening of the late cultural writings that continue in Civilization and Its Discontents.

     DE
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