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It was in the winter of 1899 that my book on the Interpretation of Dreams (though its title-page was post-dated into the new century) at length lay before me. This work was the product of the labours of four or five years and its origin was unusual. Holding a lectureship in Nervous Diseases at the University, I had attempted to support myself and my rapidly increasing family by a medical practice among the so-called 'neurotics' of whom there were only too many in our society. But the task proved harder than I had expected. The ordinary methods of treatment clearly offered little or no help: other paths must be followed. And how was it remotely possible to give patients any help when one understood nothing of their illness, nothing of the causes of their sufferings or of the meaning of their complaints? So I eagerly sought direction and instruction from Charcot, the master, in Paris and from Bernheim at Nancy; finally, an observation made by my teacher and friend, Josef Breuer of Vienna, seemed to open a new prospect for understanding and therapeutic success.
For these new experiments made it a certainty that the patients whom we described as neurotic were in some sense suffering from mental disturbances and ought therefore to be treated by psychological methods. Our interest therefore necessarily turned to psychology. The psychology which ruled at that time in the academic schools of philosophy had very little to offer and nothing at all for our purposes: we had to discover afresh both our methods and the theoretical hypotheses behind them. So I worked in this direction, first in collaboration with Breuer and afterwards independently of him. Finally I hit upon the technical device of requiring my patients to tell me without criticism whatever occurred to their minds, even if they were ideas which did not seem to make sense or which it was painful to report.
When they fell in with my instructions they told me amongst other things their dreams, as though the