The Interpretation of Dreams

The dream of Irma's injection

Freud opens the argument with a dream of his own. In the summer of 1895 he had treated a young woman he calls Irma, a family friend, and the treatment had ended with her only partly better. A colleague, Otto, visited her at her summer resort and reported that she was better but not altogether well. Freud heard a reproach in the remark. That evening he wrote up her case to justify himself to a senior colleague, Dr. M. The dream came the same night, 23 to 24 July 1895.

In the dream Freud receives guests in a great hall, takes Irma aside and blames her for not accepting his solution. He looks into her throat and finds white patches and grey scabs. Dr. M. examines her and says something absurd. Otto, it turns out, had given her an injection with a dirty syringe. Freud then walks through the dream phrase by phrase, asking what each element brings to mind. Every path leads to the same place: the dream shifts the blame for Irma's illness onto Otto and onto Irma herself. He concludes that the content of the dream is the fulfilment of a wish, and that its motive is a wish.

Five years later Freud wrote to his friend Wilhelm Fliess and joked that a marble tablet might one day mark the house where, on 24 July 1895, the secret of dreams was revealed to him. The house, the Bellevue outside Vienna, was demolished in 1963, and a plaque with that wording now stands on the site. Later readers have pointed out how much the dream leaves out, including the surgery Fliess himself had botched on the real patient. Freud's own reading is the one the book gives.

How a wish gets past the censor

The wish theory has an obvious problem, and Freud raises it himself in chapter IV. Many dreams are unpleasant, and some are frightening. His answer is to split the dream in two. The dream as remembered, which he calls the manifest content, is a disguise. Underneath sits what the dream actually means, the latent dream-thoughts, and the wish lives there. Between the two stands a censor, a part of the mind that will not let certain wishes appear undisguised.

Freud's comparison is political. A writer under a strict government cannot say what he means, so he says it sideways, in allusions and jokes, and the censor lets the piece through because it looks harmless. A dream does the same. The unpleasant feeling in a bad dream, on Freud's account, belongs to the censoring side, which is distressed that a forbidden wish has come so close to the surface. Critics from the start have called the move unfalsifiable, since any dream that fails to look like a wish can be read as a wish in disguise. Freud's reply is that the disguise can be undone by association, and the book is his attempt to show that at length.

The dream-work: condensation and displacement

Chapter VI is where the book does its most detailed work. Freud asks how the dream-thoughts become the dream, and he answers with a set of operations. The first is condensation. Set the written-out dream beside the associations it produces, and the dream is short while the associations run to pages. One figure in a dream turns out to stand for three or four people at once. A made-up word turns out to be several real words fused together.

The second is displacement. The dream puts its emphasis somewhere the dream-thoughts did not, so that the trivial detail is vivid and the thing that matters is barely there. Freud treats this as the censor's main instrument. The third he calls regard for representability: the dream must show its thoughts as pictures, so an abstract idea is replaced by something that can be drawn. The fourth, secondary elaboration, smooths the pictures into a passable story after the fact. The 1914 edition added a long section on fixed symbols, houses and staircases and the like, which Freud had at first resisted and which later became the most quoted and most mocked part of the book.

Chapter VII and the road to the unconscious

The last chapter turns from dreams to the mind that makes them. Freud draws the mind as an apparatus with a direction of flow, from perception at one end to movement at the other, with memory systems in between. In sleep the path to movement is closed, so the excitation runs backwards toward perception and becomes a picture. That is his explanation for why a dream is seen rather than thought. He uses the same model to distinguish two ways of thinking: a primary process that follows wishes and ignores contradiction, and a secondary process that reasons.

The chapter contains the book's most quoted line. In Brill's 1913 rendering, the interpretation of dreams is the via regia to a knowledge of the unconscious in the psychic life; Strachey later made it the royal road. The phrase claims a lot. Freud is saying that dreams are not merely interesting but are the best available evidence for a part of the mind a person cannot see into directly. Whether the model in chapter VII describes anything real is exactly what later psychology has argued about. What the chapter shows is Freud's ambition: a book about dreams that ends as a theory of the whole mind.