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    On Dreams
    On Dreams
    On Dreams
    Ebook79 pages2 hours

    On Dreams

    By Sigmund Freud

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    About this ebook

    This early work by Sigmund Freud was originally published in 1901 and we are now republishing it with a brand new introductory biography. 'On Dreams' is a psychological work on the causes and function of dreaming. Sigismund Schlomo Freud was born on 6th May 1856, in the Moravian town of Príbor, now part of the Czech Republic. He studied a variety of subjects, including philosophy, physiology, and zoology, graduating with an MD in 1881. Freud made a huge and lasting contribution to the field of psychology with many of his methods still being used in modern psychoanalysis. He inspired much discussion on the wealth of theories he produced and the reactions to his works began a century of great psychological investigation.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherRead Books Ltd.
    Release dateNov 11, 2014
    ISBN9781473396326

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    Reviews for On Dreams

    3.5/5

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    • 3/5
      What a goofball. The parts where he talks about his own dreams are really great!
    • 4/5
      At 45 pages this is a rather concise and accessible version of his longer The interpretation of Dreams.At fisrt I was a bit dissapointed what my 6 euro's bought me, but after reading it I was actually content.Een mooie en korte uiteenzetting van Freud's theorien over dromen. Helder geschreven en volkomen duidelijk. Of het allemaal waar is is een tweede, maar ja.....

    Book preview

    On Dreams - Sigmund Freud

    179304.jpg

    On Dreams

    by

    Sigmund Freud

    Copyright © 2013 Read Books Ltd.

    This book is copyright and may not be

    reproduced or copied in any way without

    the express permission of the publisher in writing

    British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data

    A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

    Contents

    On Dreams

    Sigmund Freud

    On Dreams (1901)

    I

    II

    III

    IV

    V

    VI

    VII

    VIII

    IX

    X

    XI

    XII

    XIII

    Sigmund Freud

    Sigismund Schlomo Freud was born on 6th May 1856, in the Moravian town of Příbor, now part of the Czech Republic.

    Sigmund was the eldest of eight children to Jewish Galician parents, Jacob and Amalia Freud. After Freud’s father lost his business as a result of the Panic of 1857, the family were forced to move to Leipzig and then Vienna to avoid poverty. It was in Vienna that the nine-year-old Sigmund enrolled at the Leopoldstädter Kommunal-Realgymnasium before beginning his medical training at the University of Vienna in 1873, at the age of just 17. He studied a variety of subjects, including philosophy, physiology, and zoology, graduating with an MD in 1881.

    The following year, Freud began his medical career in Theodor Meynert’s psychiatric clinic at the Vienna General Hospital. He worked there until 1886 when he set up in private practice and began specialising in nervous disorders. In the same year he married Merth Bernays, with whom he had 6 children between 1887 and 1895.

    In the period between 1896 and 1901, Freud isolated himself from his colleagues and began work on developing the basics of his psychoanalytic theory. He published The Interpretation of Dreams, in 1899, to a lacklustre reception, but continued to produce works such as The Psychopathology of Everyday Life (1901) and Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality (1905). He held a weekly meeting at his home known as the Wednesday Psychological Society which eventually developed into the Vienna Psycho-Analytic Society. His ideas gained momentum and by the end of the decade his methods were being used internationally by neurologists and psychiatrists.

    Freud made a huge and lasting contribution to the field of psychology with many of his methods still being used in modern psychoanalysis. He inspired much discussion on the wealth of theories he produced and the reactions to his works began a century of great psychological investigation.

    In 1930 Freud fled Vienna due to rise of Nazism and resided in England until his death from mouth cancer on 23rd September 1939.

    On Dreams (1901)

    I

    During the epoch which may be described as pre-scientific, men had no difficulty in finding an explanation of dreams. When they remembered a dream after waking up, they regarded it as either a favourable or a hostile manifestation by higher powers, daemonic and divine. When modes of thought belonging to natural science began to flourish, all this ingenious mythology was transformed into psychology, and to-day only a small minority of educated people doubt that dreams are a product of the dreamer’s own mind.

    Since the rejection of the mythological hypothesis, however, dreams have stood in need of explanation. The conditions of their origin, their relation to waking mental life, their dependence upon stimuli which force their way upon perception during the state of sleep, the many peculiarities of their content which are repugnant to waking thought, the inconsistency between their ideational images and the affects attaching to them, and lastly their transitory character, the manner in which waking thought pushes them on one side as something alien to it, and mutilates or extinguishes them in memory - all of these and other problems besides have been awaiting clarification for many hundreds of years, and till now no satisfactory solution of them has been advanced. But what stands in the foreground of our interest is the question of the significance of dreams, a question which bears a double sense. It enquires in the first place as to the psychical significance of dreaming, as to the relation of dreams to other mental processes, and as to any biological function that they may have; in the second place it seeks to discover whether dreams can be interpreted, whether the content of individual dreams has a ‘meaning’, such as we are accustomed to find in other psychical structures.

    In the assessment of the significance of dreams three lines of thought can be distinguished. One of these, which echoes, as it were, the ancient overvaluation of dreams, is expressed in the writings of certain philosophers. They consider that the basis of dream-life is a peculiar state of mental activity, and even go so far as to acclaim that state as an elevation to a higher level. For instance, Schubert declares that dreams are a liberation of the spirit from the power of external nature, and a freeing of the soul from the bonds of the senses. Other thinkers, without going so far as this, insist nevertheless that dreams arise essentially from mental impulses and represent manifestations of mental forces which have been prevented from expanding freely during the daytime. (Cf. the ‘dream imagination’ of Scherner and Volkelt.) A large number of observers agree in attributing to dream-life a capacity for superior functioning in certain departments at least (e.g. in memory).

    In sharp contrast to this, the majority of medical writers adopt a view according to which dreams scarcely reach the level of being psychical phenomena at all. On their theory, the sole instigators of dreams are the sensory and somatic stimuli which either impinge upon the sleeper from outside or become active accidentally in his internal organs. What is dreamt, they contend, has no more claim to sense and meaning than, for instance, the sounds which would be produced if ‘the ten fingers of a man who knows nothing of music were wandering over the keys of a piano.’ Dreams are described by Binz as being no more than ‘somatic processes which are in every case useless and

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