On Dreams by Sigmund Freud

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


Freud's first major work was the epic Interpretation of Dreams, published right at the turn of the century (1899, that is). What I didn't know until recently was that the work was a pretty major commercial flop. It only sold something like 600 copies in total over the first few years.

Freud thought his work was very important, so about a year later he wrote and published "On Dreams," a much shorter, much simpler work, intended for a wider audience. It leaves out much of the dense material that makes IoD a slow read -- the survey of the history of dream interpretation, the detailed analyses of multiple dreams. It also leaves out Freud's explication of his theory of mind. But, it does include a succinct and easily digestible overview of what I always found to be most interesting about IoD: the description of the dream-work. While the symbologies Freud devises always seem to me a bit too precise, his identification of the processes by which the "latent" dream content becomes the "manifest" content is useful and provocative, especially from a literary perspective. As I said, he doesn't explicitly describe his theory of mental topography, but it is implied, and I think this work provides a useful intro for those people who would like to get a window into Freud's early work. It can be a helpful starter work before one jumps into IoD, giving one a handle on Freud's basic understanding of mental operations and work as a guide to the longer, more complicated work.



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