On Dreams

Freud's major work, The Interpretation of Dreams (Die Traumdeutung, 1900a), was published in November of 1899, and he was disappointed that the book initially met with little success. His friend Wilhelm Fliess suggested that he publish a more easily-accessible, abridged version, but Freud resisted the idea, as he was already working on The Psychopathology of Everyday Life (1901b). However, he soon got to work on the project, which he considered to be strictly utilitarian drudgery. The essay appeared in 1901.

By its very nature, the book is a summary that adds nothing to The Interpretation of Dreams, but in thirteen short, untitled chapters, Freud did lay out the essentials of his theory of dreams:

• The analysis of dreams, the "royal road" to the elucidation of unconscious processes, aims at extracting the latent meaning from the manifest text of the dream (the dream narrative).
• Every dream represents the fulfillment of a wish.
• The dream work proceeds in two stages, the first being that of primary processes (condensations, displacements, representation by images) and the second being that of secondary processes that set up the "façade" of the dream; the satisfaction that is aimed at in a dream is thus possible because of the disguise of its latent content.
• Dreams involve symbolic processes that must be deciphered on a case-by-case basis; but there are also "typical dreams" that are in some sense universal, and the meaning of these can be taken as immediately apparent.

In this short work, Freud added the narrative and analysis of six new dreams, of which the best known is that of the "company at table d'hôte" (pp. 636-640). He also completed the analysis of the dream of "Goethe's attack on Herr M." (pp. 662-63), in which he revealed his aggressive feelings toward Wilhelm Fliess, whose friendship with Freud was soon to come to an end.

Source Citation

Freud, Sigmund. (1901a).Über den Traum. In L. Löwenfeld, and H. Kurella (Eds.) Grenzfragen des Nerven- und Seelenlebens (pp. 307-344). Wiesbaden, Germany: J.-F. Bergmann; GW, 2-3: 643-700; On dreams. SE, 5: 629-685.

Bibliography

Freud, Sigmund. (1900a). The interpretation of dreams. Part I, SE, 4: 1-338; Part II, SE, 5: 339-625.

—ROGER PERRON