SIGMUND FREUD: The Interpretation of Dreams – Translated and edited by James Strachey pdf 

THE INTERPRETATION OF DREAMS

In the pages that follow I shall bring forward proof that there is a psychological technique which makes it possible to interpret dreams, and that, if that procedure is employed, every dream reveals itself as a psychical structure which has a meaning and which can be inserted at an assignable point in the mental activities of waking life.

I shall further endeavour to elucidate the processes to which the strangeness and obscurity of dreams are due and to deduce from those processes the nature of the psychical forces by whose concurrent or mutually opposing action dreams are generated. Having gone thus far, my description will break off, for it will have reached a point at which the problem of dreams merges into more comprehensive problems, the solution of which must be approached upon the basis of material of another kind.

I shall give by way of preface a review of the work done by earlier writers on the subject as well as of the present position of the problems of dreams in the world of science, since in the course of my discussion I shall not often have occasion to revert to those topics.

For, in spite of many thousands of years of effort, the scientific understanding of dreams has made very little advance—a fact so generally admitted in the literature that it seems unnecessary to quote instances in support of it. In these writings, of which a list appears at the end of my work, many stimulating observations are to be found and a quantity of interesting material bearing upon our theme, but little or nothing that touches upon the essential nature of dreams or that offers a final solution of any of their enigmas. And still less, of course, has passed into the knowledge of educated laymen.

It may be asked what view was taken of dreams in prehistoric times by primitive races of men and what effect dreams may have had upon the formation of their conceptions of the world and of the soul; and this is a subject of such great interest that it is only with much reluctance that I refrain from dealing with it in this connection. I must refer my readers to the standard works of Sir John Lubbock, Herbert Spencer, E. B. Tylor and others, and I will only add that we shall not be able to appreciate the wide range of these problems and speculations until we have dealt with the task that lies before us here—the interpretation of dreams.

“At the beginning of our century, the publication of The Interpretation of Dreams changed our everyday perception of that essential component of human existence.”
—The Daily Mail

CONTENTS

Editor’s Introduction
Preface to the First Edition
Preface to the Second Edition
Preface to the Third Edition
Preface to the Fourth Edition
Preface to the Fifth Edition
Preface to the Sixth Edition
Preface to the Eighth Edition
Preface to the Third (Revised) English Edition

Chapters

I THE SCIENTIFIC LITERATURE DEALING WITH THE PROBLEMS OF DREAMS
II THE METHOD OF INTERPRETING DREAMS: AN ANALYSIS OF A SPECIMEN DREAM
III A DREAM IS THE FULFILMENT OF A WISH
IV DISTORTION IN DREAMS
V THE MATERIAL AND SOURCES OF DREAMS
VI THE DREAM-WORK
VII THE PSYCHOLOGY OF THE DREAM-PROCESSES

Language: English
Format: epub
Pages: 675