When was interpretation of dreams written

Return to Book Page. The Interpretation of Dreams by Sigmund Freud. Freud's discovery that the dream is the means by which the unconscious can be explored is undoubtedly the most revolutionary step forward in the entire history of psychology.

Dreams, according to his theory, represent the hidden fulfillment of our unconscious wishes. Get A Copy. Hardcover , pages. More Details Original Title. Schlegel-Tieck Prize for Joyce Crick Other Editions Friend Reviews.

To see what your friends thought of this book, please sign up. To ask other readers questions about The Interpretation of Dreams , please sign up. Linda He was a genius. The first to discover levels of consciousness below our awareness - the preconscious and the unconscious he did not use the term sub …more He was a genius. The first to discover levels of consciousness below our awareness - the preconscious and the unconscious he did not use the term subconscious.

Modern critics challenge terms such as 'penis envy' but he was still a genius. Roland Cucicea I am currently reading it, I find it a little hard to read but it might be because the way Freud expresses ideas is too literate for me.. Took a break …more I am currently reading it, I find it a little hard to read but it might be because the way Freud expresses ideas is too literate for me..

Took a break from reading, like 4 years and now I'm catching up, might not be a good book to pick if you can't handle the big words yet. See all 9 questions about The Interpretation of Dreams…. Lists with This Book. Community Reviews. Showing Average rating 3.

Rating details. More filters. Sort order. Start your review of The Interpretation of Dreams. Dec 05, Justin Tate rated it really liked it. A daunting classic with plenty of awkward moments, but absolutely worth reading.

Bucketlist material, for sure. Special thanks to Michael Page who narrated the unabridged audio version. His narration is absolutely pitch-perfect, the total embodiment of an analytical psychologist. Without the audio I probably wouldn't have read it, and that would be a shame.

What I love most is the endless analysis. Yes, some of Freud's theories are pretty wild--and I'll get to that--but there's a lot to lea Whew! Yes, some of Freud's theories are pretty wild--and I'll get to that--but there's a lot to learn about the human condition, both in its sleeping and waking states. Freud analyzes every possible dream from so many angles it boggles the mind. But, being a constant dreamer, his theories kept me in rapt attention. My dreams are often varying and multi-faceted.

Freud talks about them all and many others. The examples he gives of dreams that manifest out of reality are particularly interesting. This happens to me often. Only the real sound isn't a train, it happens to be my alarm clock. How the hell is that possible? My dreaming state can plot itself out to the millisecond so that the climax coincides with my alarm ringing? It's miraculous, unexplainable. And yet, Freud explains it.

Or tries to at least. And Freud himself says that two people can dream the exact same thing and it have completely different meanings based on context. For example, falling. If you've dreamed of falling from a large height, it could be a bodily reaction to a foot hanging loose off the mattress. Or, surprise surprise, it could be about sex. According to Freud, a woman may manifest a dream of falling as a symbolic reflection of her unconscious feeling of being--or desiring to be--a "fallen woman.

There's his expected theory on phallic symbolism, of course. If you dream about corn stalks or cucumbers, we all know what you're really dreaming about. But objects that pun with sexual objects are also in play. Such as the "fallen woman. Because it was in vogue to refer to the male member as 'little man,' Freud concludes that dreaming of a child is often the subconscious using symbolism.

And if you dream of beating the child? Well, obviously that must mean your subconscious is expressing a wish to masturbate. Freud is a controversial figure because of ideas like these, but it would be loss to not recognize how many of this theories are crucial to understanding psychology. And for those who accuse him of being a sex-obsessed maniac, we should remember that all living things are sex-obsessed maniacs.

From the trees who fill the spring air with their pollen, to the male black widow who gives up his life for the sake of biological need. And yes, humans too. Whether or not you want to admit it, we're built to think like that, and Freud's continual return to sex comes across less like the cocaine-loving ramblings of a nympho, and more like someone who understands what makes a human tick.

At the very least, all of the passages about medicinal cocaine and sex symbolism makes this an infinitely more entertaining read than it might be otherwise. Overall, I would easily mark this as a must-read classic. Where else can you find a thick textbook that's actually engaging?

It will make you think, question yourself, and understand yourself. If nothing else, it's made me hyper aware of my dreams. View all 15 comments. Mar 24, Ahmad Sharabiani rated it really liked it Shelves: psychology , non-fiction , philosophy , german , theory , classics , literature , science , 19th-century , european. Freud revised the book at least eight times and, in the third edition, added an extensive section which treated dream symbolism very literally, following the influence of Wilhelm Stekel.

Freud said of this work, "Insight such as this falls to one's lot but once in a lifetime. View all 13 comments. May 16, Alok Mishra rated it liked it. I have read various editions of various books claiming to interpret the dreams we see while we are unconscious or subconscious. However, the book by Freud is different.

Being a psychologist and a famous one, his interpretations are mostly based on popular beliefs, culture and analysis.

In the Indian context, much of it cannot be exemplified. Still, the book is fine and noteworthy even today. View all 3 comments. Mar 25, Trevor I sometimes get notified of comments rated it it was amazing Shelves: psychology. This was a much more interesting book than I thought it might be.

The nature of dreams is something that is hard not to find fascinating. The thing is that we spend quite a bit of time dreaming — not the third of our lives we spend sleeping, but enough time to make us wonder why we dream at all. It seems incomprehensible that our dreams would be completely meaningless. But then, they can be so bizarre it is hard to know just what they might mean.

Freud starts with a quick run through how dreams This was a much more interesting book than I thought it might be. Freud starts with a quick run through how dreams have been interpreted in the past — from Aristotle on. Aristotle is a good place to start, as he says we dream about things that have been left unresolved from the day — and this is a core idea that Freud also includes in his theory of dreams. Essentially, Freud sees dreams as playing a key role in helping us to process stuff that happened during the day.

But dreams are a truth that likes to hide. Their meaning covers itself in remarkable allusions and images that are often amusingly apt, but sometimes it is as if we are determined to hide the true meaning of our dreams even from ourselves.

To Freud it is impossible to understand and interpret dreams from a list of standard symbols. Symbols develop their own meanings within the text that is the dream. And the dream is relevant to the immediate life of the dreamer. It is generally a response to what happened that day — even if the imagery used may well refer back to the childhood of the dreamer so that the deeper significance is a life's work. The other remarkable conclusion Freud draws is that dreams are wish fulfilments.

Now, this seems anything but obvious. Sure, when we have dreams we are having sex with super-models it is pretty obvious that Freud is onto something. It is here that Freud discusses the Oedipal Complex — how our first sexual attraction is toward the parent of the opposite sex to ourselves and therefore we desire to remove one parent from the scene so as to take their place.

While we are children the full implications of this desire are obscure to us — but as we grow older the taboo associated with this desire helps suppress our recognition of these desires, or repress them, rather — but only from the conscious mind.

The subconscious mind still remembers what we might prefer to forget and so uses these images, as the first images of our awakening desires, as potent images in our dreams. Time for a story. I once worked with a woman called Frances Nolan. But every morning I would be walking to the train station and when I got to a certain part of Church Street she would suddenly jump into my head as large as life. I was starting to think that I must have been starting to fall for her — it was the strangest feeling, and quite confusing.

Until one day I realised that there is a shoe shop in Church Street that is called Frances Nolan Shoes — and the sign is huge and I would walk under it every day. This book is interesting as I had assumed it would be a much harder read than it turned out to be — I also thought it would be a much sillier book than it turned out too. It is extremely well written. My main problems with his theory have to do with Sherlock Holmes.

It even gets to the stage where he says that sometimes things mean the opposite of what they seem to mean in the dream. When that is the case then any interpretation is basically about imposing ones preconceptions on the meaning of the symbols in the dream. And whether it is dream images or tarot cards or ink dots on paper — our making sense of random images says interesting things about us.

But we should go gently into this stuff. We should go on tip-toes. Because stories have lives of their own and we are weaker than a good story and always will be. I once read a book called Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain. I think in that book she says that lines have a momentum that is very hard to control — but controlling the momentum of lines is a large part of what drawing is about.

Stories also have a momentum that is very hard to control. The narratives we tell about ourselves are one thing — the narrative we tell about our dreams are quite another. Personally, I think I prefer Freudian readings of novels to Freudian readings of people — but I can certainly see why this book made such an impact. If the problem with the book is Freud playing Holmes, it is only a problem because he is so damn clever he gets away with it.

It is a fascinating read, even if it has left me somewhat less than convinced. View all 52 comments. I dreamt that I had written a huge modern rewrite of Moby-Dick , except instead of a whale they were hunting a badger.

Instead of the Pequod, Ahab and the narrator cycled through the forest on a tandem bicycle, studying tracks and peering through the I dreamt that I had written a huge modern rewrite of Moby-Dick , except instead of a whale they were hunting a badger. Instead of the Pequod, Ahab and the narrator cycled through the forest on a tandem bicycle, studying tracks and peering through the shrubs. The white badger! In my mind this was a serious literary project.

Unfortunately I have never finished Moby-Dick , and so the book just devolved into chapters full of interminable facts about badger biology, lifestyle and cultural history, and the foundational role they play in the mythology of countless woodland societies which is not true.

If anyone can interpret this for me, I am all ears. In the meantime, if you'll excuse me I now have , words to write about badger-hunting. Aug Another strange dream, also animal related. I was staying in an old house in the countryside around Lago Maggiore. It was a big crumbling mansion, surrounded by marshes and woodland like something from Edgar Allen Poe.

It was twilight. In a dark creek nearby, we found a shark and caught it in a net. It was explained to me that this was a very rare kind of shark that was only found in the swampland of this area, and that it was called Mercer's cat-shark.

We tipped it out onto the ground. It had a small body and a wide snout, and was completely covered in short dark fur. Mar View all 32 comments. Jan 02, Glenn Russell rated it it was amazing. When he speaks about dreams and their interpretation, I am reminded of a microfiction I had published years ago where the editor told me it was the weirdest story he has ever read and that a Freudian psychoanalyst would have a field day interpreting.

Here it is below. In , however, Freud's overall work was becoming better known and a second edition was printed. There would be six more in Freud's lifetime, the last in He changed very little in the book, only adding illustrations, elaborating certain ideas, and adding to the portions on symbolism. The book was translated into English and Russian in , and into six more languages by Though he was a prolific writer, The Interpretation of Dreams remained Freud's most original work.

Unusually for a scientific monograph, The Interpretation of Dreams is a deeply personal book. It closely follows how Freud builds his argument in The Interpretation of Dreams. Please support us An independent charity, we receive no public or government funding. Chapter 3 Wish Fulfilment Freud's basic claim is that a dream is the fulfilment of a wish. Chapter 4 Dream Distortion A censor is at work!

Freud argues that dreams are disguised to get around censorship. Chapter 5 The Dream-work Dreams follow their own kind of logic that Freud calls the 'dream-work'.

Freud's dream interpretation: A different perspective based on the self-organization theory of dreaming. Front Psychol. Freud Museum London. The Interpretation of Dreams: A guide to Sigmund Freud's theory of dreams and his method for dream interpretation. Public Broadcasting System. People and discoveries: Freud's book, The Interpretation of Dreams , released Your Privacy Rights. To change or withdraw your consent choices for VerywellMind.

At any time, you can update your settings through the "EU Privacy" link at the bottom of any page. These choices will be signaled globally to our partners and will not affect browsing data.

We and our partners process data to: Actively scan device characteristics for identification. I Accept Show Purposes. Pros The classic text on the subject Freud's writing is engaging and intriguing Case studies allow a look at his psychoanalytic work. Cons Research lacks scientific rigor Many ideas not substantiated by current research Theories haven't fared well over time.

Was this page helpful? Thanks for your feedback! Sign Up.