Dream Psychology

Freud wrote this short book to bring the ideas of his dense masterwork The Interpretation of Dreams within reach of ordinary readers. In plain terms he lays out his central claim that dreams are not nonsense but disguised wishes, coded messages from a hidden part of the mind. Working through examples, many of them his own dreams, he explains the gap between what a dream seems to say and what it really means, and introduces the mechanisms of condensation, displacement, and symbolism that his followers would make famous. Whatever one makes of his conclusions, this remains the clearest doorway into the thinking that founded psychoanalysis. Free to download as a PDF or EPUB.