Dream Psychology (Psychoanalysis for Beginners) is a book written by the famed neuroscientist and psychoanalyst, Sigmund Freud. The book introduced the concept of dream interpretation as the process of understanding one’s unconscious thoughts during sleep.
Freud was born in 1856 in Moravia and sought refuge in London after Hitler’s invasion of Austria in 1938. He began his career as a physician, covering neurosurgery and anatomy, before he eventually turned to psychology. Here, he worked on mental health patients and attempted to ‘cure’ their minds through psychoanalysis, his original work, which became the basis of many of his other theories.
Major topics covered in the book are that of the unconscious and conscious mind. Freud argues that the unconscious mind represents the repressed innate desires we harbor within ourselves. This is why in sleep, when we are most vulnerable, the unconscious mind takes over and reveals itself through our dreams. Freud states that the dreams themselves can be split into two, with one layer being the parts of the dream we remember upon waking and the other part which we cannot being due the fact that these thoughts are forbidden or repressed to us.
