ABSTRACT
The use of psychoanalysis as a method of treatment, in the mind of the man in the street, is Freud's theory of dreams, and the closely related Psychopathology of Everyday Life. Freud himself considered The Interpretation of Dreams his most important work, and he was emphatic in stating that 'the interpretation of dreams is the via regia to knowledge of the unconscious element in our psychic life'. The dream was the model on which Freud constructed the theory of the neuroses, using as an intermediary the method of free association he had borrowed from Sir Francis Galton. And starting from elements of the dream, or from the accidental errors, forgettings and misinterpretations that occur in the conscious state. Freud makes a clear distinction between the apparent content of the dream and its latent content. The actual dream, as reported, is produced by the dream-work, which changes the latent meaning into the manifest dream.
