The Complete and Definitive Text - The Interpretation of Dreams

This is a new translation (2006) of Freud's Interpretation of Dreams. I hope someone qualified might soon comment on the merits or significance of this new translation. Meanwhile, the Editorial Review information offered for this book comes from an earlier edition of a different translation of Freud's work, FWIW. And the second paragraph in the editorial review prelim is entirely inappropriate--it's for another book altogether.

I give Freud's book (not the translation) a low rating because it is misleading. It's not about the interpretation of dreams in general, but more specifically it's, covertly of course, about Freud's own dreams. More basically, it's about "infantile memories" he claimed dreams concealed. (For more explanation of this point, one could consult "If Freud's Theory Be True..." in Psychological Reports (1992, 70, 611-620), which would explain how Freud himself tells us his book is not about what it appears to be about.

Years ago, I tried picking up this book and reading it so I could become educated about dreams and their interpretations. Back then, I lost interest within the first hundred pages. This time, as I prepare to write my own fictional series of books about dreams and the parallel world they inhabit, I was much more focused and able to finish this daunting book. While many will say what they will about Freud and his theories, this book was the definitive and groundbreaking work that helped us all understand a little more of what influences our dreams.

Written mostly as an academic examination of the influencing factors of dreams, Freud includes a plentitude of examples from his patients and his own life to help prove his point. This can be a little tedious at times, as it feels like he’s banging the reader over the head with multiple examples that don’t add much to the explanation. Of course, Freud does go on to reference these examples in later sections of the book, which is why they are so heavily weighted toward the front of the text.

While this book isn’t meant to be used as a reference to understand the direct meanings of specific dream elements, it does provide some thoughtful reasoning behind some of the most common ones like falling, appearing naked in public, and the “school dream.” That being said, the more I read, the more I realized we truly know nothing about dreams. Analysts have to rely on the fallible memory of the dreamer, and Freud often tries to explain away inconsistencies by “reversing” the dream’s symbolism. I also found Freud’s penchant to regularly resort to sexual meanings behind dreams seems to be a case of “if you have a hammer/phallus, every problem is a nail/phallus.”

A proper examination of the basics of dream interpretation, I give The Interpretation of Dreams 3.5 stars out of 5.

This is the most landmark work ever written in the field of dream interpretation. That doesn't mean that Freud was necessarily right about everything, but this is the book which provides the "benchmark" for all of the subsequent monographs on dream interpretation which have come since 1900. One could even say that the book was a benchmark for itself as it underwent a great many revisions between 1900-1920 or so. Welcome to modern day psychology: the realm of Sigmund Freud.

The work contains Freud's theory on manifest vs. latent dream content and Freud argues that sometimes the latter is more important than the former in understanding our dreamscapes. The idea of dreams being a form of wish fulfillment is interesting, although I remain unconvinced that this applies to all dreams (some of Freud's polemics, for me, seemed a little strained in this area). Freud details a great many "specimen" dreams for the reader; some are Freud's own while others are the visions of his patients.

People who are interested in Freud will also be likely to enjoy Freud, Adler, and Jung: Freud, Alder, and Jung: Discovering the Mind (Discovering the Mind S) by Princeton's own Walter Kaufmann. Kaufmann explores the sometimes contentious relationships that Freud had with 2 of his disciples, Jung & Adler. While Kaufmann's handling of Jung is rather brutal, I would also recommend Jung's own works for further reading. In any case, for any & all persons who are interested in having a sort of communion with their subconscious, the present book by Freud is THE best place to start!!

The Interpretation of Dreams is one of the many important psychology works published by Freud. It's primary purpose was to figure out and deduce the purpose of dreams and how conscious material makes it's way into dreams.

He draws his evidence from large body of work starting with his own dreams as well as the dreams of many different case studies he researched. He also compares his research to that of the current psychological work published at the time.

He uses the dream framework to put forward his ideas of the unconscious and the preconscious and how they work together to form dreams. This is theorized possible by transitioning left over thoughts in the preconscious with repressed or unconscious thoughts to form dreams. That is a rough outline of the theory but if you want to know more you're going to have to read the book.

Now to the point of the review, up until the time period of Freud there wasn't any form of treatment of the mentally ill, they were for the most part put in asylums, jailed or housed out of the public eye. Because of Freud's one on one work with patients we get the groundwork for psychological treatment. He was not the first to think but his constant use of it effectively helped codify it's use a place in history.

Psychological treatment is now often thought of as something you can get with a counselor, psychiatrist, or psychologist. But in ancient times it was a religious disease, medieval times were put away, jailed or killed. Now we have a system in place as well as a litany of psychological diseases on record.

There is still a negative stigma for the mentally ill and the system is by no means perfect but without the work of Freud and others like him we would not where we are today as we attempt to help people.

The is written very much like a college textbook of the 19th century. Some of the language and terms are not in common uses anymore but can be figured out with a good amount of thought.

The pacing is meant more for study, learning and reconfiguring, because even in the end Freud was saying that this was only the beginning and more work needed to be done.

I would recommend this book to anyone who is remotely interested in psychology, especially the history of psychological theory. But regardless of whether it is read or not it has a solid place in history and needs to be understood as ushering in a new paradigm of psychological ideas.

This book has, as everyone knows, a singular place in the history of literature, philosophy and science. It's both a tremendously pleasurable reading experience and a keystone moment in development of Freud's theory , filled with insight into the shadows of mind, and which forms a major part of our everyday vocabulary for talking about ourselves. What I found intensely uncomfortable is not Freud's work, but the cynical and pedantic essay by Ritchie Robertson that opens this edition.I wondered why Oxford would decide to publish a nice, readable new translation with this unappreciative introductory essay? The introduction is written by a narrow, neo-romantic Jungian who claims to know best (he asks, "why should not the manifest content be meaningfully related to problems and tensions that preoccupy the dreamer?") quoting one source after another expressing "why Freud was wrong" without effective understanding of the hermeneutic originality of Freud's theorizing. If some of Freud's opinions are bound by his historical moment and personal shortcomings, it does little good to dwell on those at the expense of failing to perceive the moment of Freud's profound discovery and its enduring impact. The introduction, in my view, should instead have focused the reader's attention on what continues to be of value, and the underappreciated (because tamed and misconstrued by many) radicalism of Freud's amazing work. I was dismayed to read this introduction in an OUP book!

As a psychotherapist I recognize that dreams are not the doorway to the unconscious but rather the window to the unconscious mind, its desires, impulses, and motivations. People like to give their egos and conscious minds too much credit for the decisions and actions in their daily lives. One must take into consideration that the average person has about 80,000 thoughts per day and according to most psychologists about 95% of those are repetitive thoughts that also occurred in their conscious mind yesterday or the day before. This helps to illustrate that we are, for the most part, driving on auto pilot in our daily lives. This begs the question of who is in charge, or as biologist Bruce Lipton has phrased it, "who is the wizard behind the curtain" in our choices and actions in our lives? The answer to this is question is that our unconscious minds are the real driver and pilot navigating our lives and not our conscious mind that is thinking redundant thoughts, like a broken record, throughout most of our day.

In order to gain a better understanding of the `wizard behind the curtain"--the pilot of our lives-- we must be willing to take an honest and uncensored examination and assessment of our dreams. It is in our dreams, when our conscious mind is unable to censor our true desires and motivations, that the "wizard" is revealed to us. Strachey's translation of Freud's "The Interpretation of Dreams: The Complete and Definitive Text" provides an excellent and comprehensive foundation to the topic of understanding, deciphering, and interpreting and understanding how our unconscious reveals itself to us via our dreams.

While some reviewers have stated that Strachey's translation is hard to read and has too many "archaic words" and lengthy sentences, I would have to disagree. I have found this text to be an extremely accessible translation of Freud's work and feel that Strachey helps to bridge the communication gap that exists between Freud and the twenty-first century reader. Freud's work doesn't get any more accessible than this.

Like all of Freud's writings he is very much present in this text with his own biases clearly showing throughout the book. Freud was a big bold thinker; after all, that's in part why he is an iconic figure. He was also a man of his time and one must take that in consideration when reading this text. During his time Freud was the leader, and father, of the psychoanalysis movement and his rather misogynistic views must be placed in the historical and cultural context of his own personal life and the time in which he lived. Yes, like most of Freud's writings there is a lot to get past, however, when you are able to remove Freud's biases from the work you are left with a comprehensive overview of the subject of dreams and their interpretation.

Is this the only book that one should read if they have an interest in the topic and want to gain a better understanding of the dreams and the unconscious? Of course, the answer is "no." The fields of psychology and dream research have grown and changed immensely over the last one hundred years and most (not to say all) theorists have gone as far away from Freud's views as one possibly can. However, no psychologist or dream researcher can ever completely get away from Freud's work as he did provide the groundwork for understanding this topic.

Is this a book that one needs to read if they wanted to gain a thorough and comprehensive understanding of dreams and their interpretation? Absolutely. This work is the foundation to the field and if one wants to gain a comprehensive understanding of the topic they need to start here. Strachey's translation of this text is a must have for the serious student of psychology, dream researcher, or lay person who desires a better understanding of their dreams and what they mean.

In a letter to his confidant and friend, Wilhelm Fleiss, the then middle aged neurologist, Sigmund Freud, was in the midst of researching and writing his beloved 'dream book'. He wrote the following:
"Now I have finished and am thinking about the dream book again. I have been looking into the literature and feel like a Celtic imp."Oh, how I am glad that no one, no one knows..." No one suspects that the dream is not nonsense but wish fulfillment."
Indeed, this is the premise of Freud's entire thesis: dreams are no more than repressed unconscious wishes, battling for expression and consummation.
In his own words, Freud had 'dared' to rally against the 'objections of severe science, to take the part of the ancients and of superstition.' In 1900, the official year of the book's publication, its reception, despite its provoctive title, was tepid, and in the course of six years, only sold 351 copies. Freud never gave up hope, and 30 years later, in the preface of the third English edition, he wrote, "It contains, even according to my present day judgement, the most valuable of all the discoveries it has been my good fortune to make. Insight such as this falls to one's lot but once a lifetime.' In present day, one can question any Freud scholar about ~The Interpretation of Dreams~ and they will say the same thing: the book contains everything that 'is' psychoanalysis.
Anyone interested in the history of psychoanalysis and the mind of Sigmund Freud, reading this book is an absolute must. The reading runs along too, quite easily, as Freud was an excellent writer: his unique prose style even shines through some clumsy translations.
If you are interested in the book's process of development, I would suggest reading ~The Complete Letters of Sigmund Freud and Wilhelm Fliess~; another gold mine for understanding the growth of psychoanalysis.

Freud believed that every dream would reveal itself as a psychological structure, full of latent significance, often beyond the accessibility of normal consciousness. It was in fact belief in this assumption about a hidden psychological structure that eventually led to the discovery of the unconscious and to the later mapping of the architecture of the mind.

The discovery of the unconscious had monumental ripples across the intellectual landscape, especially in psychology and the aesthetic arts. It opened the gateways to the complexity of the mind and made it respectable to speak of the mind's hidden dimensions and their effects on both normal and abnormal psychological functioning.

Here using subjects, with now famous pseudonyms, Feud describes how their "dream-content," and the overt images of their dreams are in fact but the coded residue of latent thoughts and unresolved subconscious processing: Indeed, how they are little more than symbolic representations of deeply hidden ideas, feeling, and conflicts in these cases mostly of a sexual nature that have been unconsciously repressed, compressed, or suppressed beneath consciousness.

The book demonstrates how dream content is deciphered under proper psychoanalytic techniques and conditions, and what those techniques and conditions should be. When the techniques are applied properly, the blocked content is gradually recovered, examined and made manifest to the patient under clinical control. The goal of the analysis is to allow this "recovery process" and the exposure to the patient of the blocked items - that is exposure to "what lies beneath consciousness" -- to give the patient relief from psychological stress, tension, and conflicts.

Although many of Freud's theories have since come under careful scrutiny and sometimes withering criticism, "The Interpretation of Dreams" has remained one of his more enduing of his works. Because it is so cleanly written, as is true of all of Freud's works, and because it is Freud:

Five Stars

My version of this book has a translation by Joyce Crick (ISBN 0192823523). She gives an insightful introduction to Freud that is well referenced. However, her style is absolutely monotonous and was far more difficult to complete than Freud's writing which was to follow. What Crick has done well with this version is that she has retained certain significant or vague tests in German (original) with their translations as parentheses, footnotes, or explantory notes. She has also added value to the version with an extensive package of explanatory notes after Freud's work. In addition, her translation of Freud's work "captures the lightness and pace of Freud's style, freed from the jargon and Victorian elaborations of James Strachey's famous version."

On Freud's work itself, The Interpretation of Dreams was a revoluationary paper of its time, discussing for the first time, concepts such as the Oedipus complex and the practice of psychoanalysis. Freud explores his personal life with this paper, enriching the reader with his self-analyses. However, I felt he over did the case studies, presenting several examples of a single concept, which was for me perhaps a little long-winded and tiring to read, especially if his first examples were good ones, and presented the concept/s acutely.

The pace of the paper picks up at the start of each new concept and tends to wind down and even drag at the middle or end portions. Towards the end however, his pace dramatically picks up (and no, it's not a placebo effect), as he summarises and pulls all his concepts together in an attempt to hold on to the reader and deliver his final call to action. Overall this is an outstanding read that delivers esteemed perceptivity to the faculty of psychoanalysis, how we perceive and interpret the arts and literature, and on the variety of complex languages with which we do so. However, be prepared for an intense read, but remain assured that upon completion of this work, you will be duly facinated, inspired, and impelled to re-examine your psyche.

Easy to read and perfectly inteligible for the average
non-professional reader like me. This is the most important book written by Sigmund Freud and is in the Freudian tradition of writting some books which focus on difficult issues with a rather simple to understand language and fine style. The purpose of the author, in his own words, was to disturb the sleep of mankind.
This is the kind of book that will help you a lot in understand the mechanisms behind one's dreams and all the relationship between what Freud calls your "waking life" and your "dream-life". Before going on interpreting a lot of his and his patients dreams, something that took a lot of personal sacrifice to someone so jealous of his private life as Freud, the author introduces us to the then (1899) accepted theories of dreams, which basically took the dreams as irrational and confuse manifstations that didn't have nothing to do with our real or waking life.
The rationale Freud uses to demolish the anti-Freudian myths is powerful and convincing and he even suggests that reading the book will have some effect on our immediate dream life (it happened to me). Despite quite voluminous (700 pages) it deservs the attention and the effort of all of us who want to understand what dreams are all about. Here also, one reads the first paragraphs Freuds devotes to the Oedipus complex, and one has the opportunity to explore along with Freud the mechanisms of the UCS (unconscious) and of our Conscious activities, which some decades latter would lead to the concepts of Ego, Super-Ego and Id.
As a trademark the text is always polemical, remembering this same quality one faces in Marxists texts.

While Freud has been called many things, what IS agreed upon is the weight of his contributions (we wouldn't be talking about or reading him if he weren't still relevant).

If you're curious about what Freud was really all about, I suggest you read this book. It's understandable, it's simple: you don't have to have a degree in psychology to get it. It's actually quite entertaining and while it and Freud can't tell you what YOUR particular dreams mean, you will find a rather useful guide in beginning to understand what your brain does while you're asleep.

Basically, what Freud says is that all dreams are wish-fulfilments and it makes sense. What, to me, sounded far-fetched was his almost comical insistence on signaling out objects in the dream as representations of sexual organs. It is safe to say nowadays that Freud was pretty hung up on this side of human behavior and it shows.

I wanted badly to read this book because I have strong recurring dreams that I go crazy trying to figure out. And this book has shed some light on them. But other things just didn't add up in my particular case. And the final verdict is precisely that: you have to take dreams on a case-by-case basis. There's too much information in everyone's daily life for any single person to be able to come up with a general magic formula for the interpretation of dreams.

Meanwhile, I suggest you crack this book open and find yourself in many of the dreams Freud relates.

This is the book that started the revolution in our view of human psychology: it uncovered the (always disputed) existence of the unconscious mind as well as created an entirely new mode of thinking about the human psyche.
Strangely enough, it is also a fun and very informative read: there are great case studies of patients, charming autobiographical asides, and a rigorous snapshot of the science of dreams at the time. It is also beautifully written: ironically, though never the recipient of the Nobel prize, Freud did win the Goethe prize in Germany for his writing style. As Walter Kaufman said so eloquently, with his rich ironies and attention to the individual, Freud offered a way to reintroduce poetry into science.
Certainly, much of what Freud thought is now disputed and discredited. Like Copernicus, whose model of our solar system failed in many respects, Freud also made fundamental errors, in particular his notorious over-emphasis of sexuality and the phallus. But we do not blame Copernicus for not seeing what Kepler, Newton, and later Einstein discovered: we value him as a step towards the unknown, as a pioneer, however timid. Freud will come to be seen the same way, as the discoverer of the unconscious mind.
Warmly recommended.

This edition of "Interpretation of Dreams" hits all the marks-it has extensive introductory notes, bibliography, and a more than adequate index. Moreover, specific dreams in the text are referenced in a separate index. They also have the English translations of the foreign-language footnotes, which is always helful for those of us who only speak three and not seven languages. The editors understand all facets of "user friendly," which means that this book not only friendly to the user, but friendly for use. It has every bell and whistle that any student, scholar, or savant could want in a book, which is a rare thing.
Moreover, the cover art is very eye catching, since the blurred water-color profiles have a dream-like quality about them, reinforcing, but not distracting from the books subject and contents. In many ways, the book is the cover.
I admire the heavy secondary research Freud put into his book. Keeping in mind Freud's ideas were gestating in the late 1800's, when there was none of the perfected scientific research and research methods that we have today. Like Darwin, Galileo, or Newton, Freud did so much with so little in the way of technological gizmos. This adds even a greater luster to his genius.
However, there are two issues I have with Dr. Freud's methodology. First, his has a very odd universe of sampling, namely himself and his neurotic patients (136, 138). First of all, relying on his own dreams for analysis tends to make his research solipsistic, which is to say we may be looking more at Freud than his research and conclusions. Moreover, relying on neurotic patients does not yield statistically balanced data. His skewed sampling leads to a skewed conclusion.
Secondly, Freud comes to the reductionist conclusion that all dreams are wish fulfillment. Keeping in mind the strange and limited universe of sampling, it is no wonder that Freud came to this rather odd conclusion. Part of the problem is that Freud completely ignored the creativity aspect of dreams. The classic example of the creativity in dreams is Elias Howe's invention of the sewing machine needle. He was an English inventor trying to invent the sewing machine. He had all the parts in place expect the needle, which was giving him problems. He fell asleep at his inventor's table and dreamt cannibals were chasing him, whose spears that had holes in the tops. He woke up and put the hole in the top of the machine needle, and presto! A new industry.
I recognize that this book is an essential the historical literature of psychology. And I have no qualms about typical and ubiquitous Freudian sexology. Sex, or better yet reproduction, is a power drive in humanity, although I do not concede that it is the one and only drive.

Most reviewers see the value of this great work, which lays out the dynamics of the unconscious mind. Others have a variety of misconceptions: first, he was not a cocaine addict. He misunderstood cocaine [as most people did] and, briefly, recommended it to others, including his fiancee. When his close friend died of it, Freud realized his error.
Second, one reader states that you can't find "measurements" to prove anything about dreams. As one who has practiced in the field, I can say that the reader can measure the truth of Freud's theory by using it to understand him or herself, by analyzing one's own dreams.
The dynamics of dreams are:
first, dreams are phylogenetic, i.e., inherited as a species; they are not ontogenetic, i.e., created by environmental factors.
R.E.M. studies have shown for fifty years that our eyes move rapidly while dreaming as is we were watching a film. However, all of the people in a dream are different fragments of ourselves, of our wishes, of our interests.
Second: this phylogenetic inheritance includes an innate propensity to think in pictures. Moving up the scale of consciousness, in Ucs. [unconsciousness, thinking is mostly pictorial but sometimes verbal]; in Pcs. [preconsciousness, i.e., in daydreaming, thinking is pictorial and verbal and partly in our control]; in Cs. [consciousness, thinking is mostly verbal but partly pictorial].
Dreams have two main dynamics: one, displacement [in which the mind protects itself by displacing the troubling thought with a symbol]; two, condensation [in which the mind places symbols on top of one another in layers in order to make the troubling thought hard to find].
Schizophrenics are hard to understand because much of their thinking is dominated by displacement and condensation while they are awake. Their speech has numerous layers of symbols - condensation.
In displacement, there is a manifest meaning [that which appears evident] and a latent meaning [that which one has to dig for by piercing the condensation of the displacements.
Any thinker, who chooses to simply understand, should avoid preconceptions or anger or a need to disdain or to repress. He or she should merely use the dynamics of dreaming to unravel his or her own dreams and daydreams [which can be analyzed with the same dynamics, except it is much easier because condensation is not as severe].
Freud was originally sceptical of his own insights and, as a result, he sat on this work for about a year, being reluctant to believe himself. He finally realized he was being defensive, that he was trying to repress disturbing truths about himself that were also true of us as a species.
In analysis, the analyst doesn't speak much because the best person in a position to understand himself is the patient . . . just as the best person in a position to understand his/her dream is the dreamer. Further, an analyst doesn't talk because he wants the patient to speak until he/she finally understands him/herself. That takes time.
It takes time for a person to crack the layers of condensation in his/her own thinking and to see all of the displacements.
After 100 years, Freud's book remains one of the great gifts anyone ever gave men and women to understand themselves.

This book is a watershed in human intellectual history. In it Freud undermines the picture of mankind as primarily a being of reason, and presents the idea that we are all creatures of our wishes, our inner unconscious lives. Dreams are not nothing, and they are not in Freud's eyes rare religious gifts, but rather to the key to our own mental life. Freud in this book presents a vast world of examples and interpretations .

I am not a psychologist and do not consider myself competent to really judge how much of what Freud presents here is valid or even capable of scientific testing. I do know that this work is one which like a great literary masterpiece has inspired countless interpretations and reinterpretations.

Understanding human Intellectual History is now impossible without knowing this work.

The best translation available is by J. Strachey. Don't get the one by Brill. This books is no light reading, even for those accustomed to reading serious books. Freud's style presents no difficulties, but moral courage is needed. Nevertheless for those courageous enough there is also enormous entertainment here. Personally I find it extremely difficult to read it often. It's too dense and challenging. And much of it is also deeply flawed because the author was overly confident. Despite all this, this may well be the greatest book of the 20th century, and those who want to take the challenge ought to try it. My pragmatic advice is to skip the first chapter, which is a rather dated review of literature.

Freud may or may not have been a creative genius. Whatever else he was, however, he was enormously clever and remarkably well informed, with access to an astonishingly broad and diverse range of references. Moreover, he had an uncanny ability to pluck as needed from his well-stocked head a suitable allusion, concept, image, or idea to make whatever point he wanted to make. He was a prodigiously skillful ethnographer of the psyche, an activity that included the interpretation of dreams.

Freud worked as one steeped in classical scholarship and also thoroughly knowledgeable in the science and practice of the medicine of his time. The latter body of knowledge included more scholarly material and sustained research concerning mental illness than many of us realize. Freud, moreover, was a capable practitioner who brought relief and even recovery to those suffering from a variety of neurotic symptoms, or so he reports, and I see no reason to doubt him, though he does seem unwaveringly committed to the notion that he's always right, a characteristic that might diminish his effectiveness just a bit.

Nevertheless, I found The Interpretation of Dreams to be very disappointing. This may be due to the fact that my previous knowledge of Freud was limited to textbook accounts, which are often unreliable and seldom capable of capturing the genuinely brilliant insights of world-class scientists and scholars. Perhaps I was unprepared to appreciate Freud in anything stronger than a textbook distillation.

I think, however, that there is a more serious problem, one that is intrinsic to Freud's work and pervasive in mainstream social and behavioral science even today. Freud was a functionalist. In this instance that means that once he concluded that all dreams were instances of wish-fulfillment, he unduly constrained his interpretations, and he made excruciatingly heavy demands on his interpretative powers. Otherwise, he wouldn't have been able to maintain the claim that all dreams functioned to serve this one end.

By way of analogy, imagine that Freud was a contemporary ethnographer interested in the way schools work rather than what dreams mean. Imagine further that he proceeds from the assumption that all schools are organized in a merit-based way, producing young people who have been selected, sorted, educated, and allocated in accordance with their innate intelligence. There would be no surprise, then, when observing an elementary school classroom, his practiced eye and fine-tuned ear affirmed that assignment to ability groups was indeed made according to what Freud took to be intelligence. His meritocratic assumption seems correct.

However, suppose another observer of the same classroom noted that there was also a very close connection between family income and ability group placement. This might be construed as suggesting that money brings advantages that may make affluent students seem smarter than they are, while the intelligence of students from families with little money is masked. Just like that, Freud's assumption that elementary schools function in a merit-based way is faced with a plausible alternative.

At this point, Freud can either acknowledge that his functionalist deductions may have been wrong, or he can creatively argue that income is a good proxy for intelligence, say after the fashion of Herrnstein and Murray in their much celebrated and much maligned book The Bell Curve. Eventually, moreover, Freud will be forced to do the same kind of intellectual contortions with regard to race, gender, number of parents in the home, ethnicity, region of the country, urban or rural residence, and a whole host of other factors that are confounded with merit in the form of innate ability. Why should these seemingly extraneous factors serve as disguised indicators of brain power? Exactly the sort of conundrum that mainstream sociologists of education and educational psychologists find themselves facing today.

Given Freud's demonstrated ability to come up with a seemingly endless collection of self-serving interpretations, however strained, stretched, and willfully contrived they may have been, he'd probably do quite well. The fact remains, however, that once he makes an all-embracing assumption -- that dreams function as wish-fulfillment, that schools function as meritocracies, that religion functions to assure social solidarity, ... -- he has boxed himself in. His interpretations have to serve the function he has assigned them. If his assumption was correct, it's all to the good, narrowing the scope of material with which he must deal. If he was wrong, however, he's in trouble.

I found many of Freud's dream interpretations tortured, twisted, convoluted, wildly implausible, and unregulated in any way as to what constitutes suitable evidence. If Freud had been less clever and his cultivated intelligence had been less well stocked with variegated substance from every domain of knowledge imaginable, I think he would have been forced to concede that he was wrong. But Freud made what I take to be an erroneous assumption and then outsmarted himself, giving incorrect interpretations to dreams because of his initial dubious assumption as to the function of wish-fulfillment.

Freud is to be commended for introducing extremely interesting and useful concepts such as censoring, resistance, over-determination, condensation, displacement, and dream work, and for helping us understand how these notions mediate the connections between the manifest and latent content of dreams. Nevertheless, his bottomless grab bag of obscure references, abetted by his too-often stream-of-consciousness writing style, enabled him to make a case that all dreams function as wish-fulfillment. The case was often very weak, however, and his technique was inconsistent, sometimes using the dreams of psycho-neurotics and other times discounting them as aberrant. Truth be told, Freud's method of dream interpretation was constrained only by his unbridled functionalist cleverness.

Yes, some dreams may function as wish-fulfillment, but it seems abundantly clear that many do not. Why Freud tied his brilliance to this dubious assumption escapes me. In any case, I give him credit for stubborn determination and boundless ingenuity.

The science of interpretting the hidden meaning of one's dreams is the key to unlocking the door to our unconscious psychic life. Sigmund Freud was the one who discovered that through our dreams we can explore our unconscious, which means that if we can unravel what our dreams mean, we can find out what our mind secretly wants and desires. These wants and desires are otherwise hidden and suppressed by our conscious mind because of our moral and social inhibitions and tensions. In fact, Sigmund Freud theories invented a whole new branch of treatment for neurosis. Freud's "Interprettation of Dreams" has its flaws, and his theories have been constantly modified and improved upon in accordance with new discoveries in contemporary psychology, but it was Freud who first put the wheels in spin.
David Rehak
author of "Love and Madness"

It does not really matter whether we love or hate Sigmund Freud. What is important to acknowledge is that he revolutionized the way we think about ourselves. Some of this revolution can be traced back to The Interpretation of Dreams, the turn of the century masterpiece that outlined his theory of unconscious forces in the context of dream analysis. Joyce Crick's groundbreaking new translation is based on the original text published in November 1899 and it is clearly a more readable and accurate picture of Freud's original work.
It is apparent that Freud concentrates to a larger extent on the use of words in dreams and on the difficulty of deciphering them. Freud's ideas of dreams as wish-fulfillment, his ideas of the retelling of the dream as a continuation, as well as the dream's manifest and latent content, are covered much more clearly than in any of the later editions of the same text. The fact that Joyce Crick's translation is faster-moving and definitively lighter than previous versions enhances the understanding of the material and engages the reader. It established a sense of dialogue with the reader.
While reading Joyce Crick's translation the author of the review remembered her first encounter with Freud's original German version Die Traumdeutung while she was an undergraduate student. The German version was definitely much more difficult to read and caused some confusion for the reader. The author valued Freud's elaboration on the symbols of dreams, but viewed the statement that all psychopathic phenomena derive from the suppression of sexual desires as difficult to comprehend (for an undergraduate student). However when comparing The Interpretation of Dreams with Freud's discussion of dreams in his work Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis it has to be pointed out that the latter is probably an easier way of gaining insight into his views about dreams. Dreams are covered in Part II of the Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis, which Freud delivered in two successive winter terms (running from October to March) in 1915-16 and 1916-17 at the University of Vienna. The new translation is targeted at the psychoanalytically minded postgraduate student or psychiatric registrar who had previous exposure and an understanding of basic concepts such as the preconscious, unconscious and conscious as well as the id, ego and superego. However some explanation about these concepts is provided at the end of the book.
Freud's work on dreaming has recently regained interest because among many other opportunities, the ability to conduct studies in sleep laboratories and the neuropsychological assessment of brain-injured patients has assisted us in finding some scientific evidence for some of his theories. Neuroscience has proven that dreaming can be switched on or off by a neurochemical pathway whose main function is to "instigate goal-seeking behaviors and an organism's appetitive interaction with the world" (Panksepp, 1985, p. 273). This means that neuroscience has contributed to the evidence of a radical hypothesis that is more than 100 years old (i.e. that dreams are motivated phenomena, driven by our wishes and the dopamigergic mechanisms, the appetitive (i.e. libidinal) 'command system' of the brain (Panksepp, 1985, 1998)). The Interpretation of Dreams edited by Ritchie Robertson is meeting the challenge for psychoanalysis to refresh Freudian theory, "which now has an unpalatable and distinctly post-Victorian flavor for many" (Panksepp, 1999, p.35). It assists in moving psychoanalysis towards a modern and dynamic mode of thought that continues to be rejuvenated by the accumulating evidence in neuroscience, thus consolidating its presence in the twenty-first century.
References Freud, S. (1900). Die Traumdeutung. GW Bd 2-3, 1-642.
Freud, S. (1966). New Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis 1933. In Strachey (Ed & Trans). The complete introductory lectures on psychoanalysis (pp. 471-646). New York: Norton. (Original work published in 1933).
Panksepp, J. (1985). Mood changes. In P. Vinken, C Bruyn, H. Klawans (Eds) Handbook of Clinical Neurology, Vol. 45 (pp.271-285). Amsterdam: Elsevier.
Panksepp, J. (1998) Affective Neuroscience. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Panksepp, J. (1999) Emotions as Viewed by Psychoanalysis and Neuroscience: An Exercise in Consilience, Neuropsychoanalysis, 1,1, 15-37.

Freud offers here the healing of people by understanding their dreams, it really opens the door to our inner Self. Neurosis of inefficiency can be changed into a happy life of success. Often it's forgotten he uses one perfect method. From the past with healing with hands, from hypnosis to suggestion, this interpretation is new, since 1900 for all times to come. One can see this as an introduction into "One Self". Like Joseph explained the dreams of Pharao, the reader can learn to read his inner Self by his dreams. Buy and read this book!

Freud's thesis, The Interpretation of Dreams, can be summed up as follows - all dreams are the mind's subconscious effort at wish fulfillment. For some dreams this is obvious - if you eat salty foods before going to bed, you may then dream that you are drinking water. This is a simple example of you wanting something and your subconscious trying to fulfill that wish. For most dreams, quite a bit more analysis is required to undercover what exactly you are wishing for, and Freud dedicates the bulk of his book to giving examples of such analysis. Freud argues that dreams are distorted because the upper layer of the mind is trying to censor what the lower layers of the mind are wishing for - usually out of embarrassment, guilt, etc. For example, I may be envious of my friend's success, so I will dream that my friend fails, but I am also embarrassed at wishing ill will on my friend, so the dream is distorted - perhaps the activity that he fails at will be obscure, twisted, strange, etc. Freud also makes the point that all dreams have their trigger in the preceding day's events, and once triggered the dream has access to all the experiences a person has gathered during his lifetime, as long as the experiences can be linked back somehow to the trigger event. Since the mind thinks in terms of symbols, the dreams must by analyzed by trying to understand how the various symbols can be translated into wishes, or the suppression of wishes. Thus the inner layers of the mind, or the Ego (prime desires), will generate a basic wish based on the experiences of the previous day. The Super Ego (refined sense of culture, guilt, morality, consciousness, etc.) then regulates the Ego's basic wish to fit within the mind's framework of right and wrong behavior. The greater the conflict between the Ego and Super Ego, the more distorted the dream becomes. All dreams are wish fulfillment, without exception.

Freud successfully makes his point within the first 75 pages of the book - the remaining 400 pages are a dry, archaic, tiresome, and in my opinion are not worth the time to read. Much of the book is dedicated to analysis of the dreams of either Freud or Freud's patients. Since Freud lived in early twentieth century Germany, the dreams described are anachronisms and for the most part are irrelevant. Also, I think a lot of meaning is lost in the translation from German to English.

Bottom line, Freud successfully explains the fundamental truth on dreams, put this pioneering analysis is archaic and difficult to read by today's standards. For the layman, I would look for something more current.

This 2005 publication is A.A.Brill's revised translation of Freud's masterpiece, its 3rd German ed. (1911). There were five more editions (to 1929), which are integrated in the standard edition translation by James Strachey (Avon/Discus pb 1965). This one, however, benefits from a creative intro by Daniel O'Hara and Gina MacKenzie, who correct some of the translation in an appendix, adding endnotes, comments, questions and valuable suggestions for further reading.

*Yaaaawn* I decided to read this book because it is the foundational text of the psychoanalytic school of literary criticism. T.S. Eliot, among others, lists it as an inspiration. Since lit crit is my bag, I thought I might as well read it. Yes, it is an important book about the reason why we dream and the processes that take place. It's ideas of displacement, condensation, wish-fulfillment, etc. are all important to literature, but this is the driest book I've ever read. Despite the clear, easy writing, it was a very difficult book to get through.

Freud's "The Interpretation of Dreams" is a unique book. His treatise on human dreams is truly a product of a brilliant mind. But neither the process of creation itself nor not the results and findings it brought out are the true wonders of this book. The great achievement of Freud's theory is its immunity to criticism. In other words, it is virtually impossible to criticize the results and propositions inserted in this book. His main tenet - a dream is a fulfillment of a desire - cannot be attacked in any intelligible way. If one says for instance that an unpleasant dream or a bloody nightmare is clearly not the fulfillment of a desire, Freud would promptly mention masochism or self punishment. Or, if one finally brings forth a dream that is surely not a desire fulfilled, he might nonetheless say there is at least a desire accomplished, viz: the desire to destroy Freud's dream theory.

Please be aware before you purchase this Kindle edition that it DOES NOT HAVE A TABLE OF CONTENTS. If you are reading this book for pleasure, starting at the beginning and proceeding directly, this may not be a problem. If, however, like me, you are using it for a course and/or in conjunction with a hard copy edition, this makes it virtually impossible to locate anything in the book or to navigate from chapter to chapter. You have to use successive approximations of the location number every time you want/need to change locations. Consequently, this Kindle edition is useless to me.

"Interpretation of Dreams" is the classic book by the great man, Sigmund Freud, who started "talk therapy" which is now known as psychotherapy. Although his follower, Carl Jung, later developed his own dream interpretation theory and practice which surpassed Freud's method, Sigmund Freud will always be remembered as the first person to really understand the extent to which the subconscious rules the world. Steven G. Fox, Ph.D., psychologist and author of "Dreams: Guide to the Soul."

I just got my 2007 edition copy of "Interpretation of Dreams" in the mail so I haven't had a chance to read it. So this rating is only on the particular edition that is published by NuVision. They did not include an index or any information about who translated this version. Also, the table of contents is nearly worthless; no detail what-so-ever about the chapters, not even titles of the chapters, just Chapter 1 etc. and a page number. Even though you may think a newer publication is better, this one is much much worse and more expensive. Go with the 1980 publication. I'm returning the book to the store (who gets 5 stars for customer service!)

What is amazing about Freud is that his ability to write beautiful literature as well as explain his psychoanalytic research and it is results spectacularly. He gives many examples from his research and analyzes every little detail to reach a conclusion. People who are interested in psychoanalysis have to read this work.

This book changed my life in a profound way. Freud taught me that everything is connected. He used dreams to illustrate this. During the few weeks I was reading this book, I began looking at everything around me as possibly symbolic and/or connected. It is amazing what is available when you are receptive to this information. Freud can teach you to see the meaning in your dreams, but these lessons apply to all of life.
Freud also has such a disarming way of writing that I felt as if I knew the man as a friend once I was done reading.

I have downloaded a sample of the penguin kindle edition, and while all the reviews refer to a new, and it would seem generally well regarded new translation by Joyce Crick, the actual listed translator of the ebook is J.A. Underwood.

While this may be OK for the casual reader, this is not OK for someone approaching these texts in any kind of rigorous fashion.

Whatever carelessness accounts for this error, it is enough to make me opt for a good old fashioned paperback instead.

Fix it!

This is a revised edition of A. Brill translation adapted into American English. This is a widely accepted translation and the reader should trust the translation. I did not see any typo. The book is great as Freud's geniality and ideas are. I love Freud, he is greater than Einstein and many others. His coutribute to humankind is priceless.

Freud stated in the Foreword to the Third English Edition of this book (his first major "solo" effort, after his co-authoship with Josef Breuer of Studies On Hysteria (Basic Books Classics)), "This book, with the new contribution to psychology which surprised the world when it was published (1900), remains essentially unaltered. It contains, even according to my present-day judgment, the most valuable of all the discoveries it has been my good fortune to make. Insight such as this falls to one's lot but once in a lifetime."

Here are some representative quotations from the book:

"I have already subjected perhaps more than a thousand dreams to interpretation, but I do not wish to use this material now as an introduction to the technique of dream-interpretation. For ... I should lay myself open to the objection that these are the dreams of neuropaths, so that the conclusions drawn from them would not apply to the dreams of healthy persons..."
"We should then assume that in every human being there exist, as the primary cause of dream-formation, two psychic forces (tendencies or systems), one of which forms the wish expressed by the dream, while the other exercises a censorship over this dream-wish, thereby enforcing on it a distortion. The question is, what is the nature of this second agency by virtue of which it is able to exercise its censorship?"
"In the psychic life there exist, as we have seen, repressed wishes, which belong to the first system, and to whose fulfillment the second system is opposed."
"But while psychoanalysis recognizes no essential distinctions, but only quantitative differences, between the psychic life of the normal person and that of the neurotic, the analysis of those dreams in which, in sound and sick persons alike, the repressed complexes display the same activity, reveals the absolute identity of the mechanism as well as of the symbolism."
"It is precisely the wish-fulfillment that has already caused us to divide all dreams into two groups. We have found dreams which were plainly wish-fulfillments; and others in which the wish-fulfillment was unrecognizable and was often concealed by every available means."
"At any rate, the interpretation of dreams is the via regia to a knowledge of the unconscious element in our psychic life."
"What role is now left ... to the phenomenon of consciousness, once so all-powerful and over-shadowing all else? None other than that of a sense-organ for the perception of psychic qualities."

I am a Psychology student and purchased this book to futher my education on dream analysis. This a well bound quality paperback version of Sigmund Freud's work, as well as cost efficient. I would definitely recommend it.