[.ca] The Interpretation of Dreams (ISBN 1595479368)

Amazon.com Review:
Whether we love or hate Sigmund Freud, we all have to admit that he revolutionized the way we think about ourselves. Much of this revolution can be traced to The Interpretation of Dreams, the turn-of-the-century tour de force that outlined his theory of unconscious forces in the context of dream analysis. Introducing the id, the superego, and their problem child, the ego, Freud advanced scientific understanding of the mind immeasurably by exposing motivations normally invisible to our consciousness. While there's no question that his own biases and neuroses influenced his observations, the details are less important than the paradigm shift as a whole. After Freud, our interior lives became richer and vastly more mysterious. These mysteries clearly bothered him--he went to great (often absurd) lengths to explain dream imagery in terms of childhood sexual trauma, a component of his theory jettisoned mid-century, though now popular among recovered-memory therapists. His dispassionate analyses of his own dreams are excellent studies for cognitive scientists wishing to learn how to sacrifice their vanities for the cause of learning. Freud said of the work contained in The Interpretation of Dreams, "Insight such as this falls to one's lot but once in a lifetime." One would have to feel quite fortunate to shake the world even once. --Rob Lightner

The First step in the Discovery of the Machinery of the Mind:
Freud believed that every dream would reveal itself as a psychological structure, full of latent significance, often beyond the accessibility of normal consciousness. It was in fact belief in this assumption about a hidden psychological structure that eventually led to the discovery of the unconscious and to the later mapping of the architecture of the mind. The discovery of the unconscious had monumental ripples across the intellectual landscape, especially in psychology and the aesthetic arts. It opened the gateways to the complexity of the mind and made it respectable to speak of the mind's hidden dimensions and their effects on both normal and abnormal psychological functioning. Here using subjects, with now famous pseudonyms, Feud describes how their "dream-content," and the overt images of their dreams are in fact but the coded residue of latent thoughts and unresolved subconscious processing: Indeed, how they are little more than symbolic representations of deeply hidden ideas, feeling, and conflicts in these cases mostly of a sexual nature that have been unconsciously repressed, compressed, or suppressed beneath consciousness. The book demonstrates how dream content is deciphered under proper psychoanalytic techniques and conditions, and what those techniques and conditions should be. When the techniques are applied properly, the blocked content is gradually recovered, examined and made manifest to the patient under clinical control. The goal of the analysis is to allow this "recovery process" and the exposure to the patient of the blocked items - that is exposure to "what lies beneath consciousness" -- to give the patient relief from psychological stress, tension, and conflicts. Although many of Freud's theories have since come under careful scrutiny and sometimes withering criticism, "The Interpretation of Dreams" has remained one of his more enduing of his works. Because it is so cleanly written, as is true of all of Freud's works, and because it is Freud: Five Stars

nice:
i did a report on this book about 11 years ago. i am still excited by the book although it is not the original more like a summary. i still enjoyed reading.

Just what I needed!:
Naturally, I required this book for my comparison of Freud and Adler's dream analysis theories. Freud was one of a kind!

A must for anyone interested in Freud and psychoanalysis.:
This is indispensable for any student of Freud or psychoanalysis. It reads almost like an autobiography of Freud. A note of caution, it may be hard to get the dream interpretation material without the assistance of an instructor.

A New Translation:
This is a new translation (2006) of Freud's Interpretation of Dreams. I hope someone qualified might soon comment on the merits or significance of this new translation. Meanwhile, the Editorial Review information offered for this book comes from an earlier edition of a different translation of Freud's work, FWIW. And the second paragraph in the editorial review prelim is entirely inappropriate--it's for another book altogether. I give Freud's book (not the translation) a low rating because it is misleading. It's not about the interpretation of dreams in general, but more specifically it's, covertly of course, about Freud's own dreams. More basically, it's about "infantile memories" he claimed dreams concealed. (For more explanation of this point, one could consult "If Freud's Theory Be True..." in Psychological Reports (1992, 70, 611-620), which would explain how Freud himself tells us his book is not about what it appears to be about.