The Interpretation of Dreams

Freud's landmark work proposes that dreams are not random nonsense but meaningful expressions of hidden wishes. Drawing on his own dreams and those of his patients, he describes how the mind disguises its desires through condensation, displacement and symbol, and how a dream can be read like a coded text. The book also lays out his first model of the unconscious mind. It is part scientific argument, part personal confession, and it marks the real beginning of psychoanalysis as a theory. Whatever one thinks of its conclusions, it changed how people think about sleep, memory and the inner life.