ABSTRACT
In the famous book that launched psychoanalysis in 1900, Freud set out a novel thesis about the scientific potential of dreams. Controversially and brilliantly, The Interpretation of Dreams drew upon – even as it profoundly recast – elements of folk-wisdom: belief in the psychic significance and the symbolic weight of even our most bizarre nocturnal visions. Freud observed differences in the way dreams had been understood across the ages – referring, for instance, to certain Victorian researches into ancient ideas – but he had other fish to fry, and thus declared that he would reluctantly have to leave these arcane matters aside.1 His interest here was not primarily historical. This was not to be an archaeology of forgotten cultural beliefs but, rather, the foundation for a new psychology based on the concept of repression. Psychoanalysis was to be centred on the exploration of the unconscious: a domain of the mind, he later wrote, in which the dictates of time did not operate.2 So much for history. Through the interpretation of dreams, Freud proposed to expose a fundamental psychic mystery and to reveal the dynamic nature of mental life itself, a dynamic that was itself partly unconscious.
