In the Library
The Interpretation of Dreams
Sigmund Freud, 1913
- Form
- Form Philosophy
- Difficulty
- Difficulty Demanding
- Reading time
- Reading time 14 hours
- Translated by
- Translated by A. A. Brill
- Original
- Original de
- Chapters
- Chapters 10
- Length
- Length 186k words
£1.99
Read in the app, yours for good. Not yet by post.
The book unlocks on your account as soon as you buy it, so the 14-day right to cancel ends once it is unlocked.
At any rate the interpretation of dreams is the via regia to a knowledge of the unconscious in the psychic life.
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The reading guide, in the app
How to Read The Interpretation of Dreams
The science has aged unevenly, but what has not aged is the reading experience itself, which is that of watching one of the most brilliant minds of the nineteenth century trying to understand something it can only partly see.
The temptation is to read this book either as a historical document of errors now corrected, or as a guide to what your dreams actually mean, and both approaches miss what is most interesting about it. Freud is not primarily right about dreams; the specific mechanisms he proposes, the wish-fulfillment hypothesis, the particular role of the Oedipus complex, have not survived the century of research that followed him. But he is doing something in this book that is genuinely extraordinary, which is constructing, from the raw material of his own dreams and those of his patients, a systematic account of the way the unconscious mind works, and that construction, however much the individual bricks have since been replaced, remains one of the most influential intellectual projects in modern history.
If you like this, try
The Metamorphosis
Franz Kafka
Kafka turned Freud's dream logic into fiction, and Gregor Samsa is the nightmare the interpretation cannot reach.
£1.99
Mrs Dalloway
Virginia Woolf
Woolf builds a novel from the same interior territory Freud was mapping, where the unconscious shapes every surface.
£1.99
Hamlet
William Shakespeare
Shakespeare wrote the case study Freud spent his career interpreting, and the Oedipus complex starts here.
£1.99
About the book
The first dream Sigmund Freud takes apart in these pages is one of his own, a patient's throat examined, an illness that might be his doing, a guilt he refuses to simply sleep off. He dismantles it syllable by syllable, until the dread resolves into a wish too shameful to admit while awake. This is the book's gambit: a dream is never nonsense but a coded letter from the part of us that wants what it must not, smuggled past the inner censor by a dreamwork that condenses and displaces until the desire is unrecognizable even to the dreamer. To prove it, Freud offers the strangest evidence any science ever ran on, his own sleep, his ambitions and rivalries and small humiliations laid open as specimens. Here, reading Sophocles, Freud first lays out the desire he will later call the Oedipus complex, and hands the next century its language for the hidden self. The dream, he writes, is the royal road. Walk it once and you will not look at your own mind the same way again.