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Many years after the publication of The Interpretation of Dreams (1900), Freud (1914a, p. 19) wrote that he habitually studied things before consulting books about them.1 His letters to Fliess confirm that Freud wrote most of The Interpretation of Dreams before studying the literature on dreams in detail. After one bout of reading, he found it difficult to retain his sense of the originality of his own work, ‘I often cannot remember what I have found that is new, and yet everything about it is new’ (Freud 1985, p. 335; 5 December 1898). But a few months later he told Fliess that the literature contained nothing of value and declared that none of his own works had been so ‘autochthonous’ (Freud 1985, p. 353; 28 May ).
No doubt about the originality of his theory appears in The Interpretation of Dreams, and Freud's followers accepted his presentation of himself as the only scientist among his contemporaries who believed that dreams are interpretable. Ernest Jones, for example, asserts, ‘It is Freud's most original work. The main conclusions in it were entirely novel and unexpected’ (Jones 1953, p. 350).2 Since Ellenberger's pathbreaking Discovery