The interpretation of dreams

About this book: Die Traumdeutung, published in 1900, is now more than a hundred years old. In a metaphorical sense, too, it is a book of the century; through the systematic decoding of dream language, Freud for the first time fully measured the dimension of the unconscious and brought it into our self-perception. With the understanding of dreams, psychoanalysis, which had emerged from the study of neurotic symptoms, expanded into a general psychology encompassing pathological and normal phenomena. The author himself had a high opinion of his work: "The interpretation of dreams is in reality the via regia to knowledge of the unconscious, the surest foundation of psychoanalysis. His overturning insights had come to him primarily through self-analysis. Contrary to the conventions of the bourgeois academic world and ruthless towards himself, he had published his own dreams and their often unflattering interpretations. The book not only presents a poetic raw material of psychoanalysis, the dream webs, as well as the revolutionary theory about the psychic events expressed in them - it is also an inexhaustible quasi-autobiographical source work. In his epilogue, Hermann Beland vividly characterizes the thought breakthroughs that Freud achieved in his magnum opus and pays tribute to the contributions of post-Freudian science - the results of physiological-experimental sleep-dream research as well as the more recent psychoanalytical conceptualizations. He recognizes "the enormous theoretical energy" of the interpretation of dreams not least in the powerful intellectual challenge that this basic human science text presents for each new generation.