Dream Psychology

DREAM PSYCHOLOGY

_PSYCHOANALYSIS FOR BEGINNERS_

BY
PROF. DR. SIGMUND FREUD

AUTHORIZED ENGLISH TRANSLATION
BY
M.D. EDER

WITH AN INTRODUCTION BY
ANDRE TRIDON
Author of "Psychoanalysis, its History, Theory and Practice."
"Psychoanalysis and Behavior" and "Psychoanalysis, Sleep and Dreams"

NEW YORK
THE JAMES A. McCANN COMPANY
1920




THE JAMES A. McCANN COMPANY

PRINTED IN THE U.S.A.




INTRODUCTION


The medical profession is justly conservative. Human life should not be
considered as the proper material for wild experiments.

Conservatism, however, is too often a welcome excuse for lazy minds,
loath to adapt themselves to fast changing conditions.

Remember the scornful reception which first was accorded to Freud's
discoveries in the domain of the unconscious.

When after years of patient observations, he finally decided to appear
before medical bodies to tell them modestly of some facts which always
recurred in his dream and his patients' dreams, he was first laughed at
and then avoided as a crank.

The words "dream interpretation" were and still are indeed fraught with
unpleasant, unscientific associations. They remind one of all sorts of
childish, superstitious notions, which make up the thread and woof of
dream books, read by none but the ignorant and the primitive.

The wealth of detail, the infinite care never to let anything pass
unexplained, with which he presented to the public the result of his
investigations, are impressing more and more serious-minded scientists,
but the examination of his evidential data demands arduous work and
presupposes an absolutely open mind.

This is why we still encounter men, totally unfamiliar with Freud's
writings, men who were not even interested enough in the subject to
attempt an interpretation of their dreams or their patients' dreams,
deriding Freud's theories and combatting them with the help of
statements which he never made.

Some of them, like Professor Boris Sidis, reach at times conclusions
which are strangely similar to Freud's, but in their ignorance of
psychoanalytic literature, they fail to credit Freud for observations
antedating theirs.

Besides those who sneer at dream study, because they have never looked
into the subject, there are those who do not dare to face the facts
revealed by dream study. Dreams tell us many an unpleasant biological
truth about ourselves and only very free minds can thrive on such a
diet. Self-deception is a plant which withers fast in the pellucid
atmosphere of dream investigation.

The weakling and the neurotic attached to his neurosis are not anxious
to turn such a powerful searchlight upon the dark corners of their
psychology.

Freud's theories are anything but theoretical.

He was moved by the fact that there always seemed to be a close
connection between his patients' dreams and their mental abnormalities,
to collect thousands of dreams and to compare them with the case
histories in his possession.

He did not start out with a preconceived bias, hoping to find evidence
which might support his views. He looked at facts a thousand times
"until they began to tell him something."

His attitude toward dream study was, in other words, that of a
statistician who does not know, and has no means of foreseeing, what
conclusions will be forced on him by the information he is gathering,
but who is fully prepared to accept those unavoidable conclusions.

This was indeed a novel way in psychology. Psychologists had always been