Chapter 6. Freud's Theory of the Psychical Apparatus in the Interpretation of Dreams and his Further Discoveries

‘[My mood] is fluctuating; but, as you see, as it says on the coat of arms of our dear Paris:

Fluctuat nec mergitur

[It floats but it does not sink]’

(, September 21, 1899, 374)

Its Genre

The Interpretation of Dreams prompts a question which has not, to the best of my knowledge, been examined: to what genre does the book belong?

It is more than a learned monograph or an essay on metapsychology. It is not merely a collection of (very exhaustively analysed) observations. Although its author is clearly very keen to convince his readers and careful to adduce evidence in support of his arguments, it is neither a systematic treatise for specialists nor a more generally informative work for the educated public. It has something of the novel, or rather what was to become known much later as the nouveau roman. It also has something of the autobiography. But the scene it sets is peopled by such a huge cast of characters – the friends and patients whose dreams Freud describes – that the resulting tableau of daily life in Vienna at the turn of the century anticipates, in its intricate, interwoven complexity, the world of Proust's A la recherche du temps perdu.

Like all pioneering works, The Interpretation of Dreams cannot easily be slotted into any classification of genres. It is literature at least as much as it is science. It is a diary, but it also contains reflections on the human condition, like Montaigne's Essais or Pascal's Pensées. It is the account of an imaginary or extraordinary journey in the course of which an adventurer of