Freud's Interpretation of Dreams

In the winter of 1885 to 1886 Sigmund Freud, a young Viennese neurologist, spent 19 weeks at the Salpêtrière in Paris watching Jean-Martin Charcot link hysterical symptoms, such as a paralysed limb, to hypnotic suggestion. Back in Vienna he worked with the physician Josef Breuer. Breuer's patient Bertha Pappenheim, known in print as Anna O., had seemed to gain relief by talking about the first appearance of each symptom, although later scholarship has doubted that the relief lasted. The two men published a preliminary report in 1893 and Studies on Hysteria in 1895.

Freud's next claim concerned ordinary sleep. On the night of 23 to 24 July 1895 he dreamt about a patient he called Irma, whose treatment had been broken off with her only partly better, and wrote the dream down on waking. From it and many other dreams he argued that a dream is the fulfilment of a wish, disguised to get past an inner censorship, and that analysis could recover its meaning. Die Traumdeutung came out from Franz Deuticke in Leipzig and Vienna with 1900 on its title page. Freud later wrote that the book had been part of his self-analysis, a reaction to the death of his father.

It was slow to find readers. Nine years passed before a second edition, in whose preface Freud complained that his colleagues in psychiatry had made no effort to get past their first surprise. A third edition followed little more than a year later, and an English translation in 1913. By then Jung, Abraham, Stekel, Rank and other physicians using his method were publishing dream interpretations of their own. Freud called the interpretation of dreams the royal road to the unconscious.

The philosopher Karl Popper, who had worked briefly in one of Alfred Adler's clinics in Vienna, argued that psychoanalytic theories could accommodate any behaviour and therefore could not be tested or refuted. Short-term psychodynamic therapies have been developed and tested since the mid-1970s. A 2014 Cochrane review of 33 trials, with 2,173 adults, found that short-term psychodynamic psychotherapy for common mental disorders produced modest to large gains, but warned that the data were limited and varied enough to need caution.

In 1938, as hostility toward Jews grew in Vienna, Freud and his family fled to England. He died in London on 23 September 1939.