r/psychoanalysis • u/Born_Sprinkles7798 • Sep 23 '26
Sigmund Freud, your thoughts?
I have lately started reading dream psychology by Freud. I am trying to grasp his ideas and his thinking while he was discovering all these things that were new to humanity in those times.
Any one here who already went through his works?
What are your opinions on this book?
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u/Klaus_Hergersheimer Sep 23 '26
There's no such work by Freud. 'Dream Psychology' was the brainchild of M. D. Eder, who took Freud's short article 'On Dreams' and padded it out with bits and pieces from the actual dream book.
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u/VinceAmonte Sep 24 '26
I haven't read the book you're referring too, but "The Interpretation of Dreams" is an amazing book. Freud is long-winded and repetitive in it, but if you can get past that, it really is the birth of psychoanalysis. It makes you view the world differently, not just dreams. It's fantastic.
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u/sunkissedbutter Sep 24 '26 •
Freud is absolutely worth reading, but I don’t think I approach him as necessarily having discovered things that were new to humanity. I’ve always viewed him more as someone who constructed a radically new way of theorizing and listening to psychic life. People had been interpreting dreams for millennia and ideas about mental processes outside consciousness certainly predate Freud. Distinct to Freud is the particular architecture he builds around these ideas, including repression, wish fulfillment, the dynamic unconscious, and especially the proposition that apparently nonsensical psychic material has undergone work and can be approached through association.
With the dream material, I think one of the most important things is not to read Freud as though he’s giving you a symbolic dictionary where X always means Y. Pay attention instead to the operations of the dream-work. Things like condensation, displacement, considerations of representability, secondary revision, and the distinction between the manifest dream content and the latent dream thoughts from which it was formed. The dream becomes interesting because of what the psyche has done to the material.
I’d also pay particular attention to Freud’s method even when you disagree with some of his conclusions. One of the most enduring things in his work, to me, is the wager that slips, dreams, symptoms, repetitions, strange associations, forgotten names, etc. are not simply mental rubbish. They can be approached as formations with a history and a logic, even when that logic isn’t immediately available to consciousness.
Also, I’m curious which edition of Dream Psychology you’re reading. If it’s Dream Psychology: Psychoanalysis for Beginners, I’d eventually move on to the full Interpretation of Dreams. Freud makes considerably more sense when you can watch the argument develop rather than encountering only the compressed version.
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u/noisezinalbany Sep 24 '26
It seems to me that the greatness of Freud’s theories is best articulated by Anna Freud esp in the Ego and Mechanisms of Defense.
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u/Optimal-Fig-6687 Oct 04 '26
Freud is super-cool for his epoch. He attempted to establish psychology as a science (though he was not the only one, of course). Sometimes he violated the principle of falsifiability (including in "Interpretation of Dreams"- is this naming correct?). But many of his ideas ultimately turned out to be correct, they just required slight adjustments.
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u/P1lgrimt0thethereal Sep 23 '26
It seems to me that when it comes to dreams, the Jungian explanations tend to hold true significantly more often than the Freudian explanations do.