The Dream Sourcebook: A Guide to the Theory and Interpretation of Dreams Read Free Page B

virtually universal, meaning essentially the same thing to every dreamer. He still insisted, however, that every dream has some connection to an event in the dreamer's own personal history. Freud concluded that dreams are a direct route to understanding an individual's unconscious motivations, calling dreams ''the royal road to a knowledge of the unconscious activities of the mind."
It is interesting to consider that Freud began his dream research at the end of the Victorian era, which is known for its intense sexual repression. The normal sexual and aggressive urges had to go somewhere, it seems, and the unconscious seemed to Freud to be the logical place. But these views made Freud one of the most unpopular and criticized members of the scientific community in Germany at the time. Against enormous opposition, however, Freud persisted in emphasizing the importance of sexuality in dreams and psychological development. In his preface to the second edition of The Interpretation of Dreams (1909), Freud expressed frustration that his fellow psychiatrists were resistant to his views: "My colleagues seem to have taken no trouble to overcome the initial bewilderment created by my new approach to dreams," he wrote. "The professional philosophers . . . have evidently failed to notice that we have something here from which a number of inferences can be drawn that are bound to transform our psychological theories."
In 1902, together with psychiatrists Alfred Adler, William Stekel, and Carl Jung, among others, Freud established the Wednesday Psychological Group, a regular gathering of professionals that in time became the Vienna Psycho-Analytical Society. Little more than a decade later, Stekel, Adler, and Jung ended their affiliation with Freud. These early dream theorists

 

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developed their own theories, which differed from Freud's beliefs about the individual unconscious.
Sigmund Freud
The father of modern psychiatry, Sigmund Freud was born May 6, 1856, in what was formerly Czechoslovakia, the first of eight children born to Jewish wool merchant Jakob Freud and his wife, the former Amalie Nathanson.
When he was six, his family moved to Vienna, Austria, where he would grow up and attend medical school, entering the University of Vienna in 1873. His interests in science led him to study histology and neurophysiology.
Freud was among the first to examine the effects of cocaine on the nervous system, finding it to be an effective anesthetic. It was study at a Paris asylum that inspired his interest in the workings of the human mind.
As a neuropathologist, he continued to explore the workings of the physical brain, trying to determine the extent to which neuroses were chemically based.
Freud created the term psychoanalysis to describe the revolutionary free association technique he had developed to help disturbed patients reveal and confront repressed memories of emotional trauma. His focus on repressed sexual and aggressive urges as the primary content of dreams and the cause of neuroses made him an extraordinarily controversial figure in early post-Victorian Europe.
Still, through organizations such as the Wednesday Psychological Group, the Vienna Psycho-Analytical Society, and others, he influenced a generation of psychiatric professionals whose work is the basis for contemporary mental health theory and practice.

 

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In addition to his landmark book The Interpretation of Dreams (1900), Freud is the author of numerous works, among them Beyond the Pleasure Principle (1920), The Analysis of the Ego (1920), The Ego and the Id (1923), Inhibitions, Symptoms, and Anxiety (1923), his Autobiography (1926), and Civilization and Its Discontents (1929).
Freud died of cancer in 1939.

Carl Jung
Carl Jung (18751961), one of the most renowned dream theorists of modern times, worked with Freud for several years before the two scientists had a dispute over the existence of a "disguise function" in dreams that supposedly suppresses