How Freud Wrote and Revised His Interpretation of Dreams: Conflicts around the Subjective Origins of the Book of the Century

Sigmund Freud's centennial book, The Interpretation of Dreams, has recently, on the threshold of the twenty-first century, seen its hundredth anniversary. As its author himself put it: ‘Psychoanalysis may be said to have been born with the twentieth century; for the publication in which it emerged before the world as something new—my Interpretation of Dreams—bears the date “1900”.’1

It would take us too far afield were we to look, even in outline, at all the intellectual breakthroughs Freud made in this one book alone. Anyone attentively reading the running heads in the first German edition2 will discover, in a kind of self-commentary by the author, a series of what may be called keywords, and will at the same time sense something, very directly, of the tone or flair of the great book. Time and again, Freud includes the titles of subsections in these running heads: ‘Infantile material as a source of dreams’, ‘The work of condensation in dream-formation’, ‘Regression’. Other running heads mark out new terms: ‘Secondary revision’, ‘Collective and composite figures’, ‘Day's residues’. Elsewhere, hypotheses are succinctly summarized: ‘Unconscious wishes as the driving force of dreams’, ‘The abnormal processes are the primitive ones’, ‘The overestimation of consciousness’. Yet other running heads are used for additional emphasis, lending the text a musical touch. The only place in the book, where the