Interpreting Dreams 梦的解析 9780141187082

The first edition of The Interpretation of Dreams is much shorter than its subsequent editions; each time the text was reissued, from 1909 onwards, Freud added to it. The most significant, and in many ways the most unfortunate addition, is a 50-page section devoted to the kind of mechanical reading of dream symbolism--long objects equal male genitalia, etc.--that has gained popular currency and partially obscured Freud's more profound insights into dreams. In the original version presented here, Freud's emphasis falls more clearly on the use of words in dreams and on the difficulty of deciphering them. Without the strata of later additions, readers will find here a clearer development of Freud's central ideas--of dream as wish-fulfillment, of the dream's manifest and latent content, of the retelling of dreams as a continuation of the dreamwork, and much more. Joyce Crick's translation is lighter and faster-moving than previous versions, enhancing the sense of dialogue with the reader, one of Freud's syllogistic strengths, and allowing us to follow Freud's theory as it evolved through difficult cases, apparently intractable counter-examples, and fascinating analyses of Freud's own dreams.

Sigmund Freud was born in 1856 at Freiburg in Moravia and died in London in 1939. He embarked on medical studies in Vienna, working at the same time at the Institute for Cerebral Anatomy. Financial circumstances compelled him to postpone his prime interest, pure research, and he became a clinical neurologist. In 1884 he was introduced by Dr. Josef Breuer, a Viennese physician, to the "cathartic" method of treatment of hysteria, which was the starting point of what later became psychoanalysis. Studies in Hysteria was the result of Freud's and Breuer's collaboration in this area. Freud then went on alone to work at "psychoanalysis," examining the structure, nature, and diseases of the mind. As a result of his studies in literature, art, mythology, and religion, he found further evidence to support the revolutionary theories he had discovered in therapeutic practice. The Interpretation of Dreams was first published in 1900. Freud wrote of it in 1931: "It contains, even according to my present-day judgment, the most valuable of all the discoveries it has been my good fortune to make. Insight such as this falls to one's lot but once in a lifetime."