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By general consensus The Interpretation of Dreams was Freud's major work, the one by which his name will probably be longest remembered. Freud's own opinion would seem to have agreed with this judgment. As he wrote in his preface to the third English edition, ‘Insight such as this falls to one's lot but once in a lifetime.’ It was a perfect example of serendipity, for the discovery of what dreams mean was made quite incidentally—one might almost say accidentally—when Freud was engaged in exploring the meaning of the psychoneuroses.
I asked him once which were his favourites among his writings, and he fetched from the shelves The Interpretation of Dreams and the Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality,1 saying: ‘I hope this one will soon be out of date through being generally accepted, but that one should last longer.’ Then, with a quiet smile, he added: ‘It seems to be my fate to discover only the obvious: that children have sexual feelings, which every nursemaid knows; and that night dreams are just as much a wishfulfilment as day dreams.’ Shall we call this a catachrestic meiosis?
The reasons for this general judgement of the book are not far to seek. It is Freud's most original work. The main conclusions in it were entirely novel and unexpected. This applies to the theme proper, that of dream structure, and to many that appear incidentally. The most important of the latter is the description of the now familiar ‘Oedipus Complex’; the erotic and the hostile relations of child to parent are frankly exposed. Together with this goes the appreciation of infantile life and its overwhelming’ importance for all the innumerable developments that make up the adult human being. Above all, it affords not only a secure basis for the theory of the unconscious in man, but provides one of the best modes of approach to this