Work · Science & Human Sciences
The Interpretation of Dreams
A dream is the fulfillment of a repressed wish.
Introduction
Freud’s book appeared in November 1899, though the publisher dated it 1900. Its method rests largely on the analysis of his own dreams, beginning with the “dream of Irma’s injection”, alongside those of his patients. Freud distinguishes a dream’s manifest content from its latent thoughts and describes the dream-work that turns one into the other through condensation, displacement and representation in images. The book also contains his first account of the Oedipus complex, with reference to Sophocles and Hamlet. Sales were slow at first; Freud revised it through eight editions and later said that an insight like this falls to one’s lot but once in a lifetime.
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Connections
Taken up in
- Civilization and Its Discontents1930 · Sigmund Freud
- Freud and Philosophy: An Essay on Interpretation1965 · Paul Ricœur
- Écrits1966 · Jacques Lacan
- Knowledge and Human Interests1968 · Jürgen Habermas
Criticized in
- The Second Sex1949 · Simone de Beauvoir
- Anti-Oedipus1972 · Gilles Deleuze
- Speculum of the Other Woman1974 · Luce Irigaray
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