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    On Dreams
    On Dreams
    On Dreams
    Ebook87 pages2 hours

    On Dreams

    By Sigmund Freud

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    Central to Sigmund Freud’s philosophy on psychoanalysis is the idea that dreams give a window into one’s unconscious desires. This is the principal argument of his groundbreaking work “The Interpretation of Dreams”, published in 1899. However, realizing the incredibly technical and dense nature of that more detailed work, Freud felt that a simpler and more accessible derivation of his theories was necessary in order to popularize his ideas and to make them more understandable to the average person. “On Dreams”, published in 1901 and translated into English in 1914, is the result of that endeavor and it is executed with masterful effect. “On Dreams” is a straightforward and simplified explanation of Freud’s theories on dreams and their meanings, such as condensation, dramatization, displacement, repression, the three classes of dreams, and how dreams are affected by the events of the previous day. “On Dreams” serves as a great place to start for those who wish to learn more about the meanings of their own dreams, as well as how Freud’s influential and important ideas helped to form the field of psychoanalysis.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherDigireads.com Publishing
    Release dateDec 23, 2019
    ISBN9781420965285

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    3.5/5

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    • 3/5
      What a goofball. The parts where he talks about his own dreams are really great!
    • 4/5
      At 45 pages this is a rather concise and accessible version of his longer The interpretation of Dreams.At fisrt I was a bit dissapointed what my 6 euro's bought me, but after reading it I was actually content.Een mooie en korte uiteenzetting van Freud's theorien over dromen. Helder geschreven en volkomen duidelijk. Of het allemaal waar is is een tweede, maar ja.....

    Book preview

    On Dreams - Sigmund Freud

    cover.jpg

    ON DREAMS

    By SIGMUND FREUD

    Translated by M. D. EDER

    Introduction by

    W. LESLIE MACKENZIE

    On Dreams

    By Sigmund Freud

    Translated by M. D. Eder

    Introduction by W. Leslie Mackenzie

    Print ISBN 13: 978-1-4209-6527-8

    eBook ISBN 13: 978-1-4209-6528-5

    This edition copyright © 2019. Digireads.com Publishing.

    All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording, or other electronic or mechanical methods, without the prior written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical reviews and certain other noncommercial uses permitted by copyright law.

    Cover Image: a detail of The Nightmare, by Henry Fuseli, c. 1781 (oil on canvas) / Founders Society Purchase with funds from Mr. and Mrs. Bert L. Smokler and Mr. and Mrs. Lawrence A. Fleischman / Bridgeman Images.

    Please visit www.digireads.com

    CONTENTS

    Introduction

    I.

    II.

    III.

    IV.

    V.

    VI.

    VII.

    VIII.

    IX.

    X.

    XI.

    XII.

    XIII.

    Literature

    Introduction

    The interpretation of dreams, says Professor Freud in one place, is the royal road to a knowledge of the part the unconscious plays in the mental life.

    Even standing alone this statement is sufficiently striking; it is at once a theory and a challenge. But it does not stand alone. It comes at the end of many years of research among every class of mental diseases. It comes, therefore, with the authentication of experience. It is not to be lightly set aside; it claims our study; and the study of it will not go unrewarded. The short essay here translated by Dr. Eder is but an introduction to the vast field opened up by Professor Sigm. Freud and his colleagues. Already the journals of clinical psychology, normal or morbid, are full of the discussions of Professor Freud’s methods and results. There is a Freud School. That alone is a proof that the method is novel if not new. There are, of course, violent opponents and critical students. The opponents may provoke, but it is to the critical students that Professor Freud will prefer to speak. The condemnation, said Hegel, that a great man lays upon the world is to force it to explain him. Of a new method, either of research or of treatment—and the Freud method is both—the same may be said. It is certain that, whatever our prejudice against details may be, the theory of psycho-analysis and the treatment based upon it deserves, if only as a mental exercise, our critical consideration. But Professor Freud is not alone in the world of morbid psychology. Let me digress for a moment.

    Over twenty years ago it was my special business to study and criticise several textbooks on insanity. To the study of these textbooks I came after many years of discipline in normal psychology and the related sciences. When I came to insanity proper, I found that practically not a single textbook made any systematic effort to show how the morbid symptoms we classified as mental diseases had their roots in the mental processes of the normal mind. In his small book, Sanity and Insanity, Dr. Charles Mercier did make an effort to lay out, as it were, the institutes of insanity, the normal groundwork out of which the insanities grew, the groups of ideas that to-day serve to direct our conduct and to-morrow lose their adjustment to any but a specially adapted environment. In his later works, particularly in Psychology, Normal and Morbid, Dr. Mercier has followed up the central ideas of the early study. All the more recent textbooks in English contain efforts in the same direction; but with a few striking exceptions they are studies rather of physical symptoms associated with mental processes than of morbid psychology proper. It was not until there came from across the Channel Dr. Pierre Janet’s carefully elaborated studies on Hysteria that I realised what a wealth of psychological material had remained hidden in our asylums, in our nervous homes, even in our ordinary hospitals, and in the multitudes of strange cases that occur in private practice. Janet, a pupil of the Charcot School—Charcot, who made la Salpetrière famous—pushed the minute analysis of morbid mental states into regions practically hitherto untouched. He was not alone. His colleague, Professor Raymond, and others in France and Germany, all work with the same main ideas. Janet’s books read like romances. His studies on Psychological Automatism, the Mental State of Hystericals, Neuroses and Fixed Ideas, and many others on the part played by the unconscious, were such rich mines of fact and suggestion that Professor William James, in his Principles of Psychology, said of them: All these facts taken together, form unquestionably the beginning of an inquiry which is destined to throw a new light into the very abysses of our nature. Curiously, not in this country—the country of great psychologists, Locke, Berkeley, Hume, Hartley, Thomas Reid, Dugald Stewart, Adam Smith, James Mill, John Stuart Mill, Bain, Spencer, among the dead, and whole schools of distinguished psychologists among the living—not in this country, but in America, was the value of the new material seriously considered. Here and there, within recent years, in this country, Janet’s elaborate studies have not been fruitless; but I could not readily name any clinician in this country that has produced similar studies. It is to the continents of Europe and America, which in this field are in intimate touch, that we must go if we are to see the rich outgrowths of morbid psychology. I do not say that the work done by our English students of insanity is not, of its kind, as great and as important as any done in the world, but it is none the less true that, until a few years ago, the methods of Janet, Raymond, Bernheim, Beaunis, not to speak of Moll, Forel, and Oppenheim, were practically unstudied here. In America it has been entirely different. Even the names of the men are now familiar in our English magazines—Muensterberg, Morton Prince, Boris Sidis, Ernest Jones, J. Mark Baldwin, not to mention William James and Stanley Hall. It looks as if every new idea unearthed in the Old World is put to the test by someone in the new. Britain remains curiously cold.

    It would be interesting to ask the reason. Is it our metaphysical training? Is it the failure of the philosophical schools to realize the value of all this new raw material of

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