The Interpretation of Dreams consists of seven chapters and is the book where some of Freud’s most famous ideas – dreams as wish-fulfilments and “royal roads to the unconscious,” psychoanalysis, the Oedipus complex – are first proposed and examined. In fact, in a 1931 preface to a later edition of this book – Freud revised his magnum opus eight times during his life – he explicitly stated that “Insight such as this falls to one’s lot but once in a lifetime.” Literally.įreud died four decades after having written the chapter above and even on his deathbed he still believed that his most significant contribution to the history of ideas is the theories presented in The Interpretation of Dreams.

So, put simply, Freud unabashedly claims that in The Interpretation of Dreams he uncovers to the world the skeleton key to all dreams moreover, he also claims that he has discovered the precise stuff dreams are made of. This accomplished, my investigation will terminate, as it will have reached the point where the problem of the dream meets with broader problems, the solution of which must be attempted through other material. I shall furthermore endeavor to explain the processes which give rise to the strangeness and obscurity of the dream, and to discover through them the nature of the psychic forces which operate, whether in combination or in opposition, to produce the dream. “In the following pages” – thus begins Sigmund Freud’s masterwork, The Interpretation of Dreams – “I shall prove that there exists a psychological technique by which dreams may be interpreted and that upon the application of this method every dream will show itself to be a senseful psychological structure which may be introduced into an assignable place in the psychic activity of the waking state.” “The Interpretation of Dreams PDF Summary” In 1938, he left Austria to escape the Nazis and died the next year in the United Kingdom at the age of 83.Įven though widely criticized today, Freud was one of the first people to explore the unconscious and to develop a more complex model of being, which scorned the idea of humans as rational beings and introduced the concept of a divided self: id, ego, and super-ego.įreud won the Goethe Prize in 1930 and was a towering influence over a whole new generation of psychologists even while alive.

Sigmund Freud was an Austrian neurologist, widely considered the father of psychoanalysis and one of the most important intellectuals of the modern age.īorn to Jewish parents in present-day Czech Republic (then part of the Austrian Empire), Freud became a professor of neuropathology in 1902 at the University of Vienna, the city in which he spent all, but the last year of his life.

Fathoms the world in the whale