How Freud wrote and revised his Interpretation of Dreams:

It would take us too far afield were we to look, even in outline, at all the intellectual breakthroughs Freud made in this one book alone. Anyone reading the running heads in the first German edition attentively2 will discover, in a kind of self-commentary by the author, a series of what may be called keywords, and will at the same time sense something, very directly, of the tone or flair of the great book. Time and again, Freud includes the titles of subsections in these running heads: ‘Infantile material as a source of dreams’, ‘The work of condensation in dream-formation’, ‘Regression’. Other running heads mark out new terms: ‘Secondary revision’, ‘Collective and composite figures’, ‘Day’s residues’. Elsewhere, hypotheses are succinctly summarized: ‘Unconscious wishes as the driving force of dreams’, ‘The abnormal processes are the primitive ones’, ‘The overestimation of consciousness’. Yet other running heads are used for additional emphasis, lending the text a musical touch. The only place in the book where the right-hand running head, which normally changes with every page, is continued over numerous pages – being, as it were, repeated as an unmistakable, continuous note – occurs in the second chapter: the dream of Irma’s injection together with its analysis is presented under a single running head – ‘The dream of Irma’s injection’ – which continues to the end of the chapter. Freud, as is well known, was convinced that on 24 July 1895 he had succeeded in discovering the wish-fulfilling function of dreaming in the analysis of his own dream about Irma. This second chapter then ends with the striking statement:

For the moment I am satisfied with the achievement of this one piece of fresh knowledge. If we adopt the method of interpreting dreams I have indicated here, we shall find that dreams really have a meaning and are

far from being the expression of a fragmentary activity of the brain [ . . . ]. When the work of interpretation has been completed, we perceive that a dream is the fulfilment of a wish.3