Read this if you…
- want the most famous book on psychology/psychoanalysis ever
- are interested in what the hell is going on when we dream
- are interested in literary criticism (low key, his theories fit lit more than actual scientific view of dreams)
- want a nuts cocaine fueled man coming up w crazy theories
Skip this if you…
- are expecting science that holds up today
- are weirded out by how insane and sexual his theories are
The 
Take
Frued really got carried away but in a cool way. To me, his theories are more just an exercise in post-rationalization which is a great exercise, when doesn’t make it seem like a science. Definitely maps to literary criticism better than dream analysis. Thoroughly unscientific yet interesting ideas and his love of literature bleeds through into his beliefs
The lineage through The Interpretation of Dreams
- Oedipus Rex by Sophocles. The Interpretation of Dreams built on it. - The complex is named for a play — Sophocles' *Oedipus Rex*, which Freud watched staged in Vienna and never shook - Freud quotes it directly ("It is the fate of all of us...") and reads the audience's horror as proof that the tragedy touches something universal - Read the play first: Freud is responding to its specific power as theater, not just its plot
- The Aeneid by Virgil. The Interpretation of Dreams built on it. - Open *The Interpretation of Dreams* and Virgil greets you — Freud's epigraph is a line from the *Aeneid*, "Flectere si nequeo superos, Acheronta movebo" - He chose it deliberately, to picture the repressed impulses forcing their way up — the unconscious as an underworld stirred - The whole metaphor borrows the *Aeneid*'s map of the dead; knowing where the line comes from sharpens what Freud meant by it
- The Brothers Karamazov by Fyodor Dostoevsky. The Interpretation of Dreams built on it. - Standing behind Freud's parricide thesis is Dostoevsky — Freud cites *The Brothers Karamazov* by name inside *The Interpretation of Dreams* - He ranks it with *Oedipus Rex* and *Hamlet* as the three masterpieces all turning on the same subject: the killing of the father - Reading the novel first shows you what Freud was theorizing — the sons' guilt and desire toward Fyodor Karamazov, rendered as drama before it became doctrine
- The Origin of Species by Charles Darwin. The Interpretation of Dreams built on it. - Freud bought Darwin's *Origin* as a student, and named "Darwin's doctrine" among the powers that drew him to science in the first place - It gave him the lens he'd train on the dream: a person is shaped by an instinctual, animal inheritance working under conscious life - Read it first and Freud's project reads as the next step inward — natural history of the body extended into a natural history of the mind
- Faust, First Part by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe. The Interpretation of Dreams built on it. - *The Interpretation of Dreams* leans on Goethe's *Faust* harder than on any other literary work — Freud quotes it some thirteen times to characterize the dream-work - He drew most from Mephistopheles, borrowing the devil's lines to describe how dreams cloak their wishes in disguise - Read *Faust* first and you'll hear Freud's own voice forming — the play supplied the language he needed for the unconscious
Depicted in Art
A woman sprawls unconscious on a bed; an incubus crouches on her chest, and a wild-eyed horse pushes through the curtains behind her.
Henry Fuseli, 1781
Freud in three-quarter view, bearded, suited, holding a cigar — the most reproduced photograph of him.
Max Halberstadt, 1921
Etching of an older Freud seated in profile, head bent in thought against a dark ground.
Ferdinand Schmutzer, 1926
Recommended Editions
Joyce Crick
Oxford World's Classics · 1999
Joyce Crick's Oxford is the modern English standard, fresher and more accurate than the old Strachey, with notes that actually help. Reads like prose instead of dictation.
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Notable Quotes
The interpretation of dreams is the royal road to a knowledge of the unconscious activities of the mind.
Screen & Stage
Also adapted: The Interpretation of Dreams (2020, stage)
Posters via The Movie Database (TMDB)
- Alfred Hitchcock, filmmaker, 1899-1980: Built Spellbound around Freudian psychoanalysis and dream interpretation, then brought in Salvador Dalí to give the film's key dream sequence a sharper surrealist grammar.
- Carl Gustav Jung, Swiss psychiatrist, founder of analytical psychology, 1875-1961: For the young Jung, Freud's dream book was the breakthrough text: the unconscious made legible, dangerous, and suddenly unavoidable.
- Salvador Dalí, Spanish surrealist painter, 1904-1989: "One of the capital discoveries in my life."
- Thomas Mann, German novelist, Nobel laureate, 1875-1955: "The cornerstone for the building of a new anthropology … the future dwelling of a wiser and freer humanity."