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The [[dream, guardian of sleep, ]] provides disguised [[satisfaction ]] for wishes [[wish]]es that are [[repression|repressed ]] while we are awake; dream . [[Dream]] [[interpretation ]] is the "royal road that leads to knowledge of the unconscious in psychic life." Such, in highly condensed form, is [[Freud]]'s theory as set forth in the founding work of [[psychoanalysis]], ''[[The Interpretation of Dreams ]]'' (1900a). As [[Freud ]] himself pointed out, this was a revolutionary thesis.
The only scientists interested in dreams during the late nineteenth century were psychologists looking for "elements" of mental activity or psychiatrists interested in hysteria and hypnosis. All of them saw dreams as nothing more than degraded products of a weak and thus dissociated psyche. Freud's approach was a radical departure for he claimed that hysterical symptoms were the expression of "conflicts," and that dreams were the product of a "dream work." In both cases there was no weakening of psychic activity but quite the opposite, an intense activity driven by the opposition between wishes and psychic defense mechanisms. The radical nature of Freud's position was illuminated by his divergence from Josef Breuer, who saw hysteria as the product of "hypnoid states" brought on by a weakening of organizing mental activity and a concomitant decrease in what Pierre Janet called "mental tension" (Freud and Breuer, 1895d).
[[Freud ]] conceived his theory of dreams [[dream]]s very early. His exposure to the work of Charcot and later to that of Bernheim was undoubtedly a contributing factor. In 1892 he noted that many dreams "spin out further associations which have been rejected or broken off during the day. I have based on this fact the theory of 'hysterical counter-will' which embraces a good number of hysterical symptoms" (1892-94a, p. 138). ("Counter-will," meaning an opposition to the satisfaction of desire for moral reasons, was a conceptual forerunner of repression.) The "Project for a Scientific Psychology" (1950c [1895]) introduced a number of ideas about dreams that were later expanded and refined.
Between 1897 and 1900 Freud, with moral support from his correspondent Wilhelm Fliess, conducted the self-analysis that gave birth to psychoanalysis. For the most part, that self-analysis drew on Freud's own dreams (Anzieu, 1975/1984), and in due course those same dreams supplied a large portion of the material of The Interpretation of Dreams.
