Introduction

This book appeared in November 1899, but its publisher dated it 1900, as if to mark the beginning of a new century. Dreams, Freud argues, are not meaningless fancies but meaningful mental acts: 'a dream is the fulfilment of a wish', and often of a repressed wish that cannot be admitted. To evade the 'censorship' of consciousness, these wishes pass through the 'dream-work' of condensation, displacement and symbolisation and are disguised as an apparently absurd 'manifest content'; by free association it can be traced back to the 'latent content' hidden behind it. He analyses a great many dreams, his own and his patients', and here first introduces the 'Oedipus complex'. 'The interpretation of dreams', he wrote, 'is the royal road to a knowledge of the unconscious.' The founding work of psychoanalysis, it profoundly changed twentieth-century thought, literature and art. The work is translated in several volumes.