This was, by self-assessment, Freud 's greatest work. By showing how parts of dreams suggest the whole range of personal issues in the individual 's past and present experiences, Freud lays out a plan for a new brand of psychology, and much of his later studies on psychoanalysis and talk therapy.
Though The Interpretation of Dreams was Freud 's most important work, it took the original 600 copies printed in 1900 eight years to be sold. For these eight years, it was largely ignored, though psychological journals published crushing criticisms of the theories expressed in the book.
Although Freud argues that repressed thoughts that show themselves unconsciously in dreams generally have something to do with sexual feelings unresolved from one 's childhood because dreams are important and concern themselves only with matters that one cannot resolve by conscious deliberation and action, he allows for the dream satisfaction of other wishes that have not been allowed in one 's waking life. There are many desires that cannot be acted upon in reality, such as wishing for the affection and attention from a loved one that has passed on, wanting to return to one 's childhood, wishing to sleep one 's life away in order to avoid the struggles of real world, and the desire for revenge that cannot be acted …show more content…
Freud himself has said, “only the context can furnish the correct meaning” of the symbols in a dream (enotes). All dreamers utilize the material of their own experience in their own way, and only by careful analysis, obscured by the symbolism seen in the dream, is it possible to analyze the particular use of symbols in one 's dream. It is worth noting Freud admits that many symbols appear with much the same intent in many dreams of different people. The way the symbols are seen does rely on cultural limitations; it can be easy to apply limitations of one 's imagination into the material