ABSTRACT
Freud presented his work on dreams in the monumental Interpretation of Dreams, a book that, although published late in 1899, bore the imprint of 1900 at Freud's request, in order to suggest the dawning of a new era. The Interpretation of Dreams executes three tasks. It provides a detailed model of the mind, derived from the speculations contained in Freud's "Project for a Scientific Psychology". It provides a theory of dreaming—that is, an account of how and why dreams are formed. It provides a method for interpreting dreams, an activity that at the time was generally regarded as based on superstition at best and charlatanery at worst. The model of the mind presented in The Interpretation of Dreams is conventionally described as the "topographical model" or "first topography". Topography is the discipline of map-making. Freud's model is therefore intended as a map of the mind. Freud's model describes the functional relationship between hypothetical systems.
