Sigmund Freud - The Interpretation of Dreams

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Praise for Sigmund Freuds The Interpretation of Dreams

Freuds classic. Freud has been a dominant force in Western thinking and heres the book that started it all.

[An] epoch-making book.

Today, those practicing quicker therapies and psychopharmacology outnumber psychoanalysts, but Dr. Freud is indisputably with us, informing the very way we think about being human.

Life magazine

Freuds achievement was to give a name to the fears of his age.

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

Sigmund Freuds The Interpretation of Dreams sold fewer than 400 copies in its first six years, but the fires it lit are still blazing.

Brooke Gladstone, co-host and managing editor, NPRs On the Media

THE present edition is a reprint of that included in Vols. IV and V of the Standard Edition, London, 1953 (The Hogarth Press and The Institute of Psycho-Analysis). A few additional notes will be found on p. 623. The editor is deeply indebted to Miss Anna Freud for her unfailing help and criticism at every stage of the work.

The present, entirely new, translation is by James Strachey.

ACTUALLY Die Traumdeutung made its first appearance in 1899. The fact is mentioned by Freud at the beginning of his second paper on Josef Popper (1932c): It was in the winter of 1899 that my book on the interpretation of dreams (though its title-page was post-dated into the new century) at length lay before me. But we now have more precise information from his correspondence with Wilhelm Fliess (Freud, 1950a). In his letter of November 5, 1899 (Letter 123), Freud announces that yesterday at length the book appeared; and from the preceding letter it seems that Freud himself had received two advance copies about a fortnight earlier, one of which he had sent to Fliess as a birthday present.

The Interpretation of Dreams was one of the two booksthe Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality (1905d ) was the otherwhich Freud kept more or less systematically up to date as they passed through their series of editions. After the third edition of the present work, the changes in it were not indicated in any way; and this produced a somewhat confusing effect on the reader of the later editions, since the new material sometimes implied a knowledge of modifications in Freuds views dating from times long subsequent to the period at which the book was originally written. In an attempt to get over this difficulty, the editors of the first collected edition of Freuds works (the Gesammelte Schriften) reprinted the first edition of The Interpretation of Dreams in its original form in one volume, and put into a second volume all the material that had been added subsequently. Unfortunately, however, the work was not carried out very systematically, for the additions themselves were not dated and thereby much of the advantage of the plan was sacrificed. In subsequent editions a return was made to the old, undifferentiated single volume.

By far the greater number of additions dealing with any single subject are those concerned with symbolism in dreams. Freud explains in his History of the Psycho-Analytic Movement (1914d), as well as at the beginning of Chapter VI, Section E (p. 363), of the present work, that he arrived late at a full realization of the importance of this side of the subject. In the first edition, the discussion of symbolism was limited to a few pages and a single specimen dream (giving instances of sexual symbolism) at the end of the Section on Considerations of Representability in Chapter VI. In the second edition (1909), nothing was added to this Section; but, on the other hand, several pages on sexual symbolism were inserted at the end of the Section on Typical Dreams in Chapter V. These were very considerably expanded in the third edition (1911), while the original passage in Chapter VI still remained unaltered. A reorganization was evidently overdue, and in the fourth edition (1914) an entirely new Section on Symbolism was introduced into Chapter VI, and into this the material on the subject that had accumulated in Chapter V was now transplanted, together with a quantity of entirely fresh material. No changes in the structure of the book were made in later editions, though much further matter was added. After the two-volume version (1925)that is, in the eighth edition (1930)some passages in the Section on Typical Dreams in Chapter V, which had been altogether dropped at an earlier stage, were re-inserted.

In the fourth, fifth, sixth and seventh editions (that is from 1914 to 1922), two essays by Otto Rank (on Dreams and Creative Writing and Dreams and Myths) were printed at the end of Chapter V_, but were subsequently omitted.

There remain the bibliographies. The first edition contained a list of some eighty books, to the great majority of which Freud refers in the text. This was left unchanged in the second and third editions, but in the third a second list was added, of some forty books written since 1900. Thereafter both lists began to increase rapidly, till in the eighth edition the first list contained some 260 works and the second over 200. At this stage only a minority of the titles in the first (pre-1900) list were of books actually mentioned in Freuds text; while, on the other hand, the second (post- 1900) list (as may be gathered from Freuds own remarks in his various prefaces) could not really keep pace with the production of analytic or quasi-analytic writings on the subject. Furthermore, quite a number of works quoted by Freud in the text were not to be found in