Book
The Interpretation of Dreams
Die Traumdeutung
Freud's book on dreams, issued by Deuticke in November 1899 with the imprint date 1900, argues that a dream is the disguised fulfilment of a repressed wish. It sets out a method of interpreting dreams through the dreamer's associations and distinguishes the manifest content of a dream from the latent dream-thoughts. The dream-work turns the latter into the former through condensation, displacement, considerations of representability and secondary revision. The seventh chapter proposes a model of the psychical apparatus made up of the systems unconscious, preconscious and conscious, with a censorship between them and two modes of functioning, the primary and the secondary process. The book is also the first printed statement of the theme Freud later named the Oedipus complex. Freud enlarged it in many later editions.
Main ideas
- A dream is the disguised fulfilment of a repressed wish.
- Dreams are interpreted through the dreamer's associations, which lead from the manifest content to the latent dream-thoughts.
- The dream-work operates through condensation, displacement, considerations of representability and secondary revision.
- The psychical apparatus comprises the systems unconscious, preconscious and conscious, separated by censorship and working by primary and secondary processes.
- The book first states in print the theme later called the Oedipus complex.
What it shows
- 1900
Sigmund Freud introduced Dream-work
Freud set out the mechanism of dream formation in Die Traumdeutung (1900). In the Dora case history he refers back to that book's rule that every dream represents a wish as fulfilled, in disguise when the wish is repressed, and tests it against Dora's first dream; he calls the dream a detour around repression, a means of indirect representation.
- 1900
Sigmund Freud introduced Condensation
In Die Traumdeutung Freud names condensation (Verdichtung) as the first operation of the dream-work: the manifest dream is brief and meagre beside the wealth of latent thoughts it compresses, so that each of its elements is overdetermined, standing for several dream-thoughts at once.
- 1900
Sigmund Freud introduced Displacement
In Die Traumdeutung Freud describes displacement (Verschiebung) as the second great operation of the dream-work: psychical intensity is shifted from the essential dream-thoughts onto indifferent elements, so that the dream is centred elsewhere than its latent content, a distortion he attributes to the censorship.
- 1900
Sigmund Freud introduced Wish-fulfilment
The thesis that a dream is the (disguised) fulfilment of a (suppressed or repressed) wish is the central claim of Die Traumdeutung, stated after the analysis of the Irma dream and defended against apparent counter-examples such as anxiety dreams.
- 1900
Sigmund Freud introduced Primary process
Freud first sketched the distinction in his unpublished Project of 1895; in the last chapter of Die Traumdeutung he names the primary process as the mode of the unconscious system, in which excitation flows freely towards discharge by condensation and displacement, as seen in the dream-work.
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- 1900
Sigmund Freud introduced Secondary process
In the last chapter of Die Traumdeutung Freud sets a second, inhibiting process of the preconscious system against the primary process: excitation is bound, discharge is delayed, and thought can explore paths to satisfaction. In 1911 he tied it to the reality principle.
- 1900
Sigmund Freud introduced Topographical model
Die Traumdeutung pictures the psychical apparatus as a series of systems, unconscious, preconscious and conscious, through which excitation passes as through a compound instrument; regression in dreams is a backward movement through them. Das Unbewußte (1915) sets the model out in its fullest form, with the systems Ucs., Pcs. and Cs.
- 1900
Sigmund Freud introduced Censorship
To explain why dreams are distorted, Freud posits in Die Traumdeutung two psychical forces, one forming the wish and the other exercising a censorship over it, and compares the dream to a political writer who must disguise what he says to get past the censor.
- 1900
Sigmund Freud introduced Psychical reality
The closing pages of Die Traumdeutung speak of psychical reality as a particular form of existence not to be confused with material reality. In the Introductory Lectures (Lecture XXIII) Freud states that in the world of the neuroses psychical reality is the decisive kind.
- 1900
Sigmund Freud introduced Oedipus complex
After hinting at it to Fliess in 1897, Freud first published the idea in Die Traumdeutung, reading Sophocles' Oedipus Rex and Hamlet as expressions of the child's love for one parent and death-wish against the other. The term 'Ödipuskomplex' itself appears in print only in 1910; in 1924 he described how the complex is dissolved.
- 1900
Sigmund Freud introduced Identification
Freud first gave identification a psychoanalytic meaning in Die Traumdeutung, where hysterical identification, putting oneself in another's place on the ground of a shared unconscious element, explains a patient's dream and the spread of symptoms among patients.
- 1915
Sigmund Freud developed Unconscious
Das Unbewußte justifies the assumption of unconscious mental processes and sets out the special characteristics of the system Ucs.: freedom from contradiction, the primary process with its mobile cathexes, timelessness, and the replacement of external by psychical reality.
- 1900
Secondary process opposes Primary process
The two processes are defined against each other: in the primary process energy is free and seeks immediate discharge by the shortest path, by way of condensation and displacement; in the secondary process it is bound, discharge is postponed, and thinking can test the paths to satisfaction against reality.