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When I first read The Interpretation of Dreams something like 30 years ago I seized on it with excitement. It seemed to speak to me with great immediacy about my own internal processes. Returning to it recently as a student of psychoanalytic theory, I have been struck by its elusiveness, its resistance to any simple understanding. My first encounter with the book was, perhaps, something in the nature of an expeditionary raid from which, ignoring what seemed obscure or alien, I returned with the plunder that attracted me. My later encounter has been more like a settlement, an attempt to inhabit it and understand it in its own terms.
This enterprise is not easy, because inscribed in the texture of the book is an indecision about the very nature of psychoanalysis, an indecision that has become the subject of longstanding debate: is it a science or does it ally itself more easily with the humanities? Are the truths it seeks to establish historical or narrative? In the first part of this paper I shall show how this indecision appears in Freud's attitude to science, and leads to ambiguities in his notions of meaning and interpretation. I shall also argue that such ambiguities were probably historically inevitable, and have been fruitful to the subject. The second part of the paper will have a more practical emphasis and I will consider the usefulness of Freud's ideas of interpretation to the understanding of dreams of patients.
In his preface to the third English edition of The Interpretation of Dreams Freud wrote, ‘Insight such as this falls to one's lot but once in a lifetime’. That the insight was significant, and fertile for Freud as well as his readers, is indicated, not only by the number of editions of the book, but also by the way in which it retained its life for him. Of the 10 German editions eight are described in the Penguin edition as being enlarged and revised. The book, as we have it at the end of its career, is a palimpsest rather than a completely unified