This premium quality large print edition contains the complete and unabridged text of Sigmund Freud's exposition of his theory of dream interpretation as a tool of psychoanalysis, intended to be understood by the average reader and not as a scholarly or technical text. Printed on heavy, bright white 60# paper in a large 6"x9" format with a fully laminated full-color cover featuring an original design, the text has been edited and formatted by human editors, not computer scanned and generated.

From the Introduction to this volume:

The words "dream interpretation" were and still are indeed fraught with unpleasant, unscientific associations. They remind one of all sorts of childish, superstitious notions, which make up the thread and woof of dream books, read by none but the ignorant and the primitive.

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[Freud] was moved by the fact that there always seemed to be a close connection between his patients' dreams and their mental abnormalities to collect thousands of dreams and to compare them with the case histories in his possession.

He did not start out with a preconceived bias, hoping to find evidence which might support his views. He looked at facts a thousand times "until they began to tell him something."

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One fact which cannot be too emphatically stated, however, is that but for Freud's wish fulfillment theory of dreams, neither Jung's "energic theory," nor Adler's theory of "organ inferiority and compensation," nor Kempf's "dynamic mechanism" might have been formulated. Freud is the father of modern abnormal psychology and he established the psychoanalytical point of view.

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Freud himself, however, realized the magnitude of the task which the reading of his magnum opus imposed upon those who have not been prepared for it by long psychological and scientific training and he abstracted from that gigantic work the parts which constitute the essential of his discoveries.

Sigmund Freud

Born May 6, 1856, in Freiberg, Moravia, in the Austro-Hungarian Empire, Sigmund Freud was a neurologist by training and education. He became the father of modern abnormal psychology and established the psychoanalytical point of view.

Freud studied medicine at the University of Vienna. In 1882 he became a clinical assistant at the General Hospital in Vienna, and in 1885 was appointed lecturer in neuropathology. Pursuing his studies in Paris, Freud came to believe that psychological disorders might originate in the mind rather than the brain. Returning to Vienna in 1886 he began a long association with the physician Josef Breuer, employing a methodology in which the patient talked about the manifestations of symptoms.

Believing that "the talking cure" released pent-up emotional blockage, Freud eventually arrived at the revolutionary technique of free association, theorizing that by expressing random thoughts that came to mind the patient could uncover material from the unconscious which, because of conflicts with other thoughts, was normally unavailable to the conscious mind. Freud called these "blockages" resistance, which when broken down, revealed hidden conflicts. Bringing such conflicts to conscious awareness through free association was a crucial step on the road to relieving the symptoms, which could be understood as a subconscious compromise between unconscious desire and the defense.

Forced to flee when Hitler annexed Austria, Freud's books were among the first to be burned, as corrupt "Jewish science." Freud died on September 23, 1939, in London, but his ideas lived on as Freudian schools of thought emerged and developed psychoanalysis along divergent paths, and despite relentless, often compelling and sometimes valid challenges to virtually all of his ideas, the continuing vitality of psychoanalysis is largely due to the sweep of Freud's vision and the power of his intellectual legacy.