Re-reading classics: Sigmund Freud’s ‘The Interpretation of Dreams’ gave us psychoanalysis
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Sigmund Freud published The Interpretation of Dreams late in 1899. It has outsized importance among his writings, as arguably the founding document of psychoanalysis. In his own estimation, the book contains “the most valuable of all the discoveries it has been my good fortune to make”.
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When I first became interested in psychoanalysis, the Pelican Freud Library was the mother lode. Launched in 1973, this first English-language paperback edition of Freud’s major writings was intended for a general readership. Its colourful covers brightened many a student’s bookshelf.
Psychoanalysts and bookshelves no longer have the same cachet among students, and the general reader has other priorities. But Joyce Crick’s 1999 translation has now been published in the Oxford World Classics series, certifying the book as a literary masterwork – and it deserves that status.
Though it is a treatise on dreams, Freud’s book introduced a new way of thinking about the mind that reverberated through the 20th century. Although the impact of psychoanalysis has dwindled in the Anglosphere, its ideas continue to shape how we understand mental health, therapy and human nature itself.
Dream theories and ‘psychical strangeness’
Freud opens his book with an extended review of dream theories, from the ancient Greeks to more recent psychologists and philosophers. These theories speculate on...