Wish, Conflict, and Awareness

Abstract

Freud’s study The Interpretation of Dreams (1900), often referred to as the “Dream Book,” remains a controversial work even a century after its publication. In this work Sigmund Freud (1856–1939) both demonstrates a technique for understanding subjectivity and elaborates a theory for understanding mental life. However, it was founded on perspectives from the neurosciences (Sulloway 1979), and there has been considerable critical discussion regarding Freud’s theory of dream formation (Fiss 2000, Hobson 1988, Hartmann 1998; Pribram and Gill 1976). Recognizing the validity of this critique (which Freud himself, as a biologist of the mind [Sulloway, 1979], would likely have endorsed), the “Dream Book” still remains Freud’s most systematic and programmatic statement of a theory of mental life, informing his subsequent work across half a century and providing an approach to the study of mental life that has had a major influence on contemporary culture (Freud 1930).

Revision of paper presented at St. John’s College, Annapolis, Maryland, and Santa Fe, New Mexico, and at the University of Chicago. Discussion of issues presented here with students and staff of the general education course entitled “Self, Culture and Society” at the University of Chicago has been particularly helpful in understanding Freud’s “Dream Book.” I am particularly indebted to Yaokov Jackson’s careful reading and important suggestions for revision of the chapter. For the sake of consistency with the corpus of secondary literature, references in the present text are to the James Stra-chey translation (one-volume paperback edition), a part of the so-called Standard Edition, a twenty-three volume English translation of all of Freud’s psychoanalytic writings, complete with detailed bibliographic notes, and based on the often-revised text through the eighth printing of the book in 1930. However, the Joyce Crick translation, based on the first edition, including important historical notes by Ritchie Robertson that clarify many textual allusions that would have been familiar to the reader in Vienna at the time the book was published, and taking into account critiques of the Strachey translation (Bettelheim 1983; Ornston 1992), is in many ways more readable than the Strachey translation. Unencumbered by Freud’s later efforts to clarify and amend his earlier claims, the Crick translation is useful in understanding Freud’s initial claims regarding his theory of dreams.