1,108 definitions
The book's index
The Interpretation of Dreams
506 concepts · 1,108 definitions
- absence2
- abstraction1
- absurdity2
- action2
- adulthood1
- advertisement1
- affair1
- affect11
- affection2
- afterlife2
- afterthought1
- agoraphobia2
- alarm1
- alarm clock1
- alibi1
- allegory1
- altruism1
- amateur1
- ambiguity1
- ambition4
- ambivalence1
- analogy1
- analyst1
- ancestry1
- angel2
- animal1
- anticathexis1
- antithesis1
- anxiety7
- apparition1
- appearance1
- arbitrary1
- archaic heritage1
- aristocracy1
- association6
- asylum1
- attention2
- autoerotism1
- avarice1
- awakening1
- bed-wetting1
- being buried alive1
- bell1
- bereavement1
- bibliophile1
- birth2
- blindness1
- body1
- Boogeyman1
- breakfast1
- breast1
- brother1
- calculation1
- carpe diem1
- castration4
- categorical imperative1
- cathexis1
- censor2
- censorship15
- centaur1
- certainty1
- character2
- cheerfulness1
- child2
- child psychology1
- childhood7
- childhood dream1
- childhood memory5
- civilization1
- coincidence1
- collector1
- comfort1
- comic1
- common sense2
- commonplace1
- complaint1
- compromise formation1
- condensation7
- condition1
- condom1
- confession1
- conjunction1
- conscience3
- consciousness7
- consolation3
- contagion1
- contradiction1
- conviction1
- courage1
- creative writing1
- creativity2
- critic2
A Dream (n.) has at least one spot that cannot be plumbed — a navel, where it touches the unknown.
A Dream (n.) exists to show us our hidden natures — not what we are, but what we might have been had we been brought up differently.
A Dream (n.) is never innocent; apparently harmless dreams are wolves in sheep's clothing, for we do not let our sleep be disturbed by trifles.
A Dream (n.) is always poorer in feeling than the thoughts it came from; it is the peace over a battlefield strewn with corpses, with no trace of the struggle that raged there.
The Dream-work (n.) knows the abstract word was once a picture and need only give it back its former, full meaning — 'restrict yourself' becomes a brother shut in a cupboard.
The Dream-work (n.) cannot express either-or at all: the alternatives appear side by side as though equally valid, all fulfilled at once.
The Dream-work (n.) performs no judgment: a judgment in a dream is lifted ready-made from the dream-thoughts — and even our waking verdicts on a dream belong to its hidden content.
The Dream-work (n.) does not think, calculate or judge at all; it restricts itself to giving things a new form.
Sleep (n.) is a convenient subterfuge: 'Are you asleep?' 'No.' 'Then lend me ten florins.' 'I'm asleep.'
Sleep (n.) fights for itself: the louder the child screams, the more insistently the nurse's dream assures her all is well — his trickle swells into a river floating a liner.
Sleep (n.) defends itself with dreams: the student told to get to the hospital dreams he is already a patient there, and turns over.
Sleep (n.) is not the mind coming apart but the mind concentrating all its daytime command on a single wish: to sleep.
Censorship (n.) breeds ingenuity: the stricter it is, the more far-reaching the disguise and the cleverer the hints that put the reader on the scent.
Censorship (n.) by its very nature lets untrue forbidden things be said rather than true ones.
Censorship (n.) has its esprit d'escalier in 'this is only a dream' — caught napping by a dream already let through, it lulls itself so that sleep can go on.
Censorship (n.) is the watchman of our mental health — and if it dozes at night, it is safe, because sleep also locks the door to movement.
Dream interpretation (n.) is the royal road to knowing the mind's unconscious activities.
Dream interpretation (n.) cannot proceed without the trivial detail; Freud treated as Holy Writ what others dismissed as hasty improvisation.
Dream interpretation (n.) is an eye for similarities: dream-pictures, like reflections on water, are pulled out of shape by movement, and the best interpreter sees the truth in the misshapen image.
Dream interpretation (n.) watches the retelling: the words the dreamer changes on the second telling mark the weak spot, like the embroidered mark on Siegfried's cloak.
Dream symbolism (n.) is imagination's dislike of showing an object by its proper image, preferring a foreign image that expresses only the one attribute it wants.
Dream symbolism (n.) makes the burglar in the night the father who once came to wake the child so it would not wet the bed; ghosts are women in white night-gowns.
Dream symbolism (n.) explains dreams with a dental stimulus: in men their motive force is nothing other than the masturbatory desires of puberty — which is why they met such strong resistance.
Dream symbolism (n.) lays a stack of meanings into water over a life: urine, then semen, then amniotic fluid.
Repression (n.) leaves the repressed idea like an American dentist in Austria: forbidden to practise unless a licensed doctor lends his name as a cover — and it is never the busiest doctors who agree.
Repression (n.) works on a thought as on a tourist on the Great Pyramid: pushed from below by the censor, pulled from above by the unconscious.
Repression (n.) is kept silent by day because its contradictions are settled, one side thrown out; by night, wanting compromise, it forces its way into consciousness.
Repression (n.) goes on existing in normal people as in the sick, still capable of functioning — dreams are the proof.
Wish fulfillment (n.) even in the counter-wish dream fulfils the wish that the analyst be wrong: dreaming the thing she dreaded proves his theory false.
Wish fulfillment (n.) is what dreams and psychoses have in common — and in this fact lies the key to a psychological theory of both.
Wish fulfillment (n.) must bring pleasure — but to whom? Not to the dreamer who repudiates the wish; for him its fulfilment arrives as anxiety.
Wish fulfillment (n.) begins with a dream-wish that grows up where the meshwork of thought is densest, like a mushroom out of its mycelium.
Resistance (n.) makes doubt about a dream its last outpost: it never attacks the vivid elements, only the faint ones — and a faint element doubted is a sure sign of a forbidden thought.
Resistance (n.) will gladly sacrifice one's own wish in a dream, if only the wish that the theorist be wrong is fulfilled.
Resistance (n.) is whatever interrupts the progress of analytic work — even a father's death or a war, in the eagerness with which the patient seizes on it.
Resistance (n.) can sound as plain as 'Frankly, I had no desire to penetrate more deeply at this point.'
Affect (n.) survives the dream unaltered while its ideas are displaced — which is why one may be calm in horror and terrified at something harmless.
Affect (n.) resists the dream's reversals: a dream can turn the idea into its opposite but not always the feeling attached to it.
Affect (n.) is over-determined in a dream: a permitted satisfaction lets a forbidden one slip in under its wing.
Affect (n.) can be reversed: one dreams of the greatest affection for a friend precisely because the dream-thoughts call him a simpleton.