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Freud’s The Interpretation of Dreams both painstakingly builds the case for a revolutionary theory of dreams and lays the foundation for Freud’s general theory of the mind, the latter an undertaking he believed necessary to account for dreams. He identified as the real breakthrough of the treatise his discovery that dreams fulfill wishes, a wish-fulfillment embodying a condition of relief, whether expressly desired or otherwise welcome.

The argument contains a gap absent from Freud’s account of other phenomena. The central problem—that even a successful dream analysis does not thereby translate, in reverse, into an account of how the dream formed – though observed before, warrants scrutiny in the context of Freud’s full argument and in comparison with his arguments elsewhere.

Accordingly, the book reconstructs Freud’s treatise, in preparation for an evaluation of his argument, after which it compares the account of dreams with his explanation of other experiences and with his avowedly speculative work.

Freud always regarded The Interpretation of Dreams, and in particular its thesis that dreams fulfill wishes, as his landmark contribution and the scaffolding of his subsequent work. Susan Sugarman, after carefully examining the text and scrutinizing a range of Freud's other works, shows that the dreams book is not and cannot be that scaffolding. For, not only does his argument on dreams falter, but his reasoning elsewhere – in his case histories, his accounts of phenomena of ordinary waking life, and even his avowedly speculative writing – displays a strength and precision his account of dreams lacks. She concludes by exploring what is then left of the dreams theory and Freud's overall vision of the mind.

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Freud’s Interpretation of Dreams

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Freud’s Interpretation of Dreams