dreams

foregoing introduction; to have continued this would have cost me a great deal of effort and would not have been particularly useful or
instructive. For the interval in question - a period of nine years - has yielded nothing new or valuable as regards the conception of dreams, either
in actual material or in novel points of view. In most of the literature which has appeared since the publication of my own work the latter has not
been mentioned or discussed; it has, of course, received the least attention from the so-called "research-workers on dreams," who have thus
afforded a brilliant example of the aversion to learning anything new so characteristic of the scientist. "Les savants ne sont pas curieux,"[56] said
the scoffer Anatole France. If there were such a thing in science as the right of revenge, I in my turn should be justified in ignoring the literature
which has appeared since the publication of this book. The few reviews which have appeared in the scientific journals are so full of
misconceptions and lack of comprehension that my only possible answer to my critics would be a request that they should read this book over
again - or perhaps merely that they should read it!
In the works of those physicians who make use of the psycho-analytic method of treatment a great many dreams have been recorded and
interpreted in accordance with my directions. In so far as these works go beyond the confirmation of my own assertions, I have noted their results
in the context of my exposition. A supplementary bibliography at the end of this volume comprises the most important of these new publications.
The comprehensive work on the dream by Sante de Sanctis, of which a German translation appeared soon after its publication, was produced
simultaneously with my own, so that I could not review his results, nor could he comment upon mine. I am sorry to have to express the opinion
that this laborious work is exceedingly poor in ideas, so poor that one could never divine from it the possibility of the problems which I have
treated in these pages.
I can think of only two publications which touch on my own treatment of the dream-problems. A young philosopher, H. Swoboda, who has
ventured to extend W. Fliess's discovery of biological periodicity (in series of twenty-three and twenty-eight days) to the psychic field, has
produced an imaginative essay,[57] in which, among other things, he has used this key to solve the riddle of dreams. Such a solution, however,
would be an inadequate estimate of the significance of dreams. The material content of dreams would be explained by the coincidence of all those
memories which, on the night of the dream, complete one of these biological periods for the first or the nth time. A personal communication of
the author's led me to assume that he himself no longer took this theory very seriously. But it seems that I was mistaken in this conclusion: I shall
record in another place some observations made with reference to Swoboda's thesis, which did not, however, yield convincing results. It gave me
far greater pleasure to find by chance, in an unexpected quarter, a conception of the dream which is in complete agreement with the essence of my
own. The relevant dates preclude the possibility that this conception was influenced by reading my book: I must therefore hail this as the only
demonstrable concurrence with the essentials of my theory of dreams to be found in the literature of the subject. The book which contains the
passage that I have in mind was published (in its second edition) in 1910, by Lynkeus, under the title Phantasien eines Realisten.
ADDENDUM 1914
The above apologia was written in 1909. Since then, the state of affairs has certainly undergone a change; my contribution to the "interpretation
of dreams" is no longer ignored in the literature of the subject. But the new situation makes it even more impossible to continue the foregoing
summary. The Interpretation of Dreams has evoked a whole series of new contentions and problems, which have been expounded by the authors
in the most varied fashions. But I cannot discuss these works until I have developed the theories to which their authors have referred. Whatever
has appeared to me as valuable in this recent literature I have accordingly reviewed in the course of the following exposition.
Footnotes
[1]The following remarks are based on Buchsenschutz's careful essay, Traum und Traumdeutung im Altertum (Berlin 1868).
[2]The relationship between dreams and disease is discussed by Hippocrates in a chapter of his famous work.
[3]Griechische Mythologie und Religionsgeschichte, p. 390.
[4]For the later history of dream-interpretation in the Middle Ages consult Diepgen, and the special investigations of M. Forster, Gotthard, and
others. The interpretation of dreams among the Jews has been studied by Amoli, Amram, and Lowinger, and recently, with reference to the
psycho-analytic standpoint, by Lauer. Details of the Arabic methods of dream-interpretation are furnished by Drexl, F. Schwarz, and the
missionary Tfinkdji. The interpretation of dreams among the Japanese has been investigated by Miura and Iwaya, among the Chinese by Secker,
and among the Indians by Negelein.
[5]We dream of what we have seen, said, desired, or done.
[6]Communicated by Winterstein to the Zentralblatt fur Psychoanalyse.