A Study Guide for Sigmund Freud's "The Interpretation of Dreams"

By Gale and Cengage

A Study Guide for Sigmund Freud's "The Interpretation of Dreams," excerpted from Gale's acclaimed Nonfiction Classics for Students. This concise study guide includes plot summary; character analysis; author biography; study questions; historical context; suggestions for further reading; and much more. For any literature project, trust Nonfiction Classics for Students for all of your research needs.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Cengage Learning - Gale
• Release date: Sep 20, 2016
• ISBN: 9781535837576

Book preview

1

The Interpretation of Dreams

Sigmund Freud

1899

Introduction

Sigmund Freud (1856-1939) is universally considered the father of psychoanalysis, and many date the birth of psychoanalytic theory from the 1899 publication of The Interpretation of Dreams (copyright 1900). Although Freudian theory, since its inception, has been relentlessly attacked from all sides, critics and proponents alike agree that Freud's ideas have exerted a profound influence on twentieth-century thought and culture.

Throughout The Interpretation of Dreams, Freud analyzes his own dreams as examples to prove his new theory of the psychology of dreams. Freud makes a distinction between the manifest, or surface-level, dream content and the latent, or unconscious, dream thoughts expressed through the special language of dreams. He posits that all dreams represent the fulfillment of a wish on the part of the dreamer and maintains that even anxiety dreams and nightmares are expressions of unconscious desires. Freud explains that the process of censorship in dreams causes a distortion of the dream content; thus, what appears to be trivial nonsense in a dream, can, through the process of analysis, be shown to express a coherent set of ideas. The dream work is the process by which the mind condenses, distorts, and translates dream thoughts into dream content. Freud proposes that the ultimate value of dream analysis may be in revealing the hidden workings of the unconscious mind.

The Interpretation of Dreams presents Freud's early theories in regard to the nature of the unconscious dream psychology, the significance of childhood experiences, the psychic process of censorship, the hieroglyphic language of dreams, and the method he called psychoanalysis.

Author Biography

Sigismund Solomon Freud was born into a Jewish family in Freiberg, Moravia, on May 6, 1856. His father, Jacob, was a wool merchant, and his mother, Amalie Nathansohn, was Jacob's second wife. When Sigmund was born, his father was forty and his mother only twenty. The family moved to Leipzig in 1859 and to Vienna a year later where Freud remained until a year before his death.

In 1873, Freud enrolled in the University of Vienna to study medicine. Upon completing his degree, he obtained a position as lecturer in neuropathology at the University of Vienna and set up a private medical practice in an office adjoining his home. In 1895, he co-published Studies in Hysteria with Joseph Breuer in which they described their new method of the talking cure. In 1886, he married Martha Bernays with whom he had six children.

A watershed event in Freud's life was the death of his father in 1896 to which he responded by embarking on several years of rigorous self-analysis of his feelings toward his father. In the process, he developed a new method of interpreting dreams as an expression of unconscious feelings. The result of this self-analysis was The Interpretation of Dreams, which was first published in 1899 and which marks the birth of psychoanalysis.

A series of publications followed as Freud's reputation grew and in spite of the amount of controversy