The Interpretation of Dreams
 | Average Customer Rating: Recommend One hundred years ago Sigmund Freud published The Interpretations of Dreams, a book that, like Darwin's The Origin of Species, revolutionized our understanding of human nature. Now this groundbreaking new translation--the first to be based on the original text published in November 1899--brings us a more readable, more accurate, and more coherent picture of Freud's masterpiece. The first edition of The Interpretation of Dreams is much shorter than its subsequent editions; each time the… Product details and pricing info |
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37 Customer Reviews Posted
- A must for anyone interested in Freud and psychoanalysis.
- This is indispensable for any student of Freud or psychoanalysis. It reads almost like an autobiography of Freud. A note of caution, it may be hard to get the dream interpretation material without the assistance of an instructor.
- 2008-12-02, 0 of 0 people found this review helpful, Rated:
- Just what I needed!
- Naturally, I required this book for my comparison of Freud and Adler's dream analysis theories. Freud was one of a kind!
- 2008-09-16, 0 of 1 people found this review helpful, Rated:
- nice
- i did a report on this book about 11 years ago. i am still excited by the book although it is not the original more like a summary. i still enjoyed reading.
- 2008-05-13, 0 of 1 people found this review helpful, Rated:
- The First step in the Discovery of the Machinery of the Mind
- Freud believed that every dream would reveal itself as a psychological structure, full of latent significance, often beyond the accessibility of normal consciousness. It was in fact belief in this assumption about a hidden psychological structure that eventually led to the discovery of the unconscious and to the later mapping of the architecture of the mind.
The discovery of the unconscious had monumental ripples across the intellectual landscape, especially in psychology and the aesthetic arts. It opened the gateways to the complexity of the mind and made it respectable to speak of the mind's hidden dimensions and their effects on both normal and abnormal psychological functioning.
Here using subjects, with now famous pseudonyms, Feud describes how their "dream-content," and the overt images of their dreams are in fact but the coded residue of latent thoughts and unresolved subconscious processing: Indeed, how they are little more than symbolic representations of deeply hidden ideas, feeling, and conflicts in these cases mostly of a sexual nature that have been unconsciously repressed, compressed, or suppressed beneath consciousness.
The book demonstrates how dream content is deciphered under proper psychoanalytic techniques and conditions, and what those techniques and conditions should be. When the techniques are applied properly, the blocked content is gradually recovered, examined and made manifest to the patient under clinical control. The goal of the analysis is to allow this "recovery process" and the exposure to the patient of the blocked items - that is exposure to "what lies beneath consciousness" -- to give the patient relief from psychological stress, tension, and conflicts.
Although many of Freud's theories have since come under careful scrutiny and sometimes withering criticism, "The Interpretation of Dreams" has remained one of his more enduing of his works. Because it is so cleanly written, as is true of all of Freud's works, and because it is Freud:
Five Stars - 2008-03-30, 4 of 5 people found this review helpful, Rated:
- A New Translation
- This is a new translation (2006) of Freud's Interpretation of Dreams. I hope someone qualified might soon comment on the merits or significance of this new translation. Meanwhile, the Editorial Review information offered for this book comes from an earlier edition of a different translation of Freud's work, FWIW. And the second paragraph in the editorial review prelim is entirely inappropriate--it's for another book altogether.
I give Freud's book (not the translation) a low rating because it is misleading. It's not about the interpretation of dreams in general, but more specifically it's, covertly of course, about Freud's own dreams. More basically, it's about "infantile memories" he claimed dreams concealed. (For more explanation of this point, one could consult "If Freud's Theory Be True..." in Psychological Reports (1992, 70, 611-620), which would explain how Freud himself tells us his book is not about what it appears to be about. - 2007-10-09, 0 of 4 people found this review helpful, Rated:
