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For nearly twenty years it has been something of a scandal that one of the most interesting works of the foremost English-speaking exponent of psycho-analysis (for no one will deny Ernest Jones this title) has not been available in English. Der Alptraum was originally published as one of the valuable Schriften zur angewandten Seelenkunde in 1912, and is incorporated (with alterations and additions) in the present book, in which it makes its first appearance in an English dress. It is doubtless a sign of the relatively slow realization of the sociological importance of psycho-analysis that it should have had to wait so long, for those who knew the work could scarcely fail to recognize that it was one of the most impressive contributions of psycho-analysis to social and historical science. In spite of its wealth of erudition and its restraint of expression (in the field that easily lends itself to a somewhat exaggerated emotionalism), it is yet in its way inevitably something of a 'thriller'; it fascinates (as any adequate treatment of its theme must do), inasmuch as the things it deals with, like the nightmare itself, are essentially compounded of attractive and repulsive elements. The Alptraum portion of the book is preceded by the essay on the Pathology of the Nightmare, originally published in the American Journal of Insanity in 1910. This now forms a general introductory section. The book also contains a new and hitherto unpublished part dealing with certain philological aspects of the subject; while the short conclusion formerly attached to the Alptraum now brings the whole work to an end.
The major portion of the book was thus written a considerable time ago, as the history of psycho-analysis is reckoned, and it is interesting in itself to note that subsequent analytic discoveries have in no way invalidated the main theme as then propounded, i.e. that the terror dream and the various allied fears of waking life are the result of an intense repression of ve