The Interpretation of Dreams

Freud lays out a method for reading dreams as disguised fulfilments of repressed wishes. He separates the manifest dream, the images as remembered, from the latent dream-thoughts beneath them, and names the operations that translate one into the other: condensation, displacement, considerations of representability, and secondary revision. Free association carries the work backward, from the reported image to the wish it conceals. Freud tests the method largely on his own dreams, beginning with the specimen dream of Irma's injection, and argues that the dream serves as the guardian of sleep.

For the clinician the value is the interpretive procedure itself. The dream-work Freud describes follows the same logic of disguise and compromise that shapes symptoms and slips, so the reading he models extends well past sleep. This translation follows the 1899 first edition, before Freud added the later apparatus of fixed symbols, and keeps his attention on words and on the labour of deciphering them.