The Interpretation of Dreams

Freud's most important book, published at the turn of 1900, argues that dreams are not random but the disguised fulfilment of wishes, and that they can be interpreted. He distinguishes the remembered dream from its hidden thoughts and explains the work of condensation and displacement that turns one into the other, using many of his own dreams as examples, starting with the famous dream of Irma's injection.

Freud called the interpretation of dreams the royal road to the unconscious. The book sold only a few hundred copies at first but went on to shape psychology, literature and film. Modern science has questioned much of it; as the founding text of psychoanalysis, it remains essential.

Sigmund Freud (1856–1939) grew up in Vienna in a Jewish family and trained as a neurologist. After studying hypnosis with the famous Charcot in Paris, he began listening to his patients talk freely about their dreams and memories, and developed from this practice a new theory of the mind and a new kind of treatment: psychoanalysis.

From his consulting room at Berggasse 19 he published The Interpretation of Dreams and a stream of books that changed psychology, literature and everyday language. In 1938, after the Nazis took over Austria, he fled to London, where he died the following year. A General Introduction to Psychoanalysis is the best place to begin.