title: The Interpretation of Dreams: The Complete and Definitive Text
author:  Sigmund Freud 
description: "The groundbreaking work that launched psychoanalysis."<b><i><b><i>Time</i></b></i></b><br /><br />"A century after the book's publication, Freud's ideas have seeped so deeply into the culture that most people invoke them daily without being aware of it."<b><i><i><b>New York Times</b></i></i></b><br /><br />"It is impossible to read <i>The Interpretation of Dreams</i> without coming away wiser."<b><i><i><b>Globe &amp; Mail</b></i></i></b><br /><br />"Freud's classic. Freud has been a dominant force in Western thinking and here's the book that started it all."<b><i><i><b>Psychology Today</b></i></i></b><br /><br />"[An] epoch-making book."<b><i><i><b> Economist</b></i></i></b>
zlib_text: CHAPTER ONE
  
  
  # The Interpretive Process As a Whole:  
  Its foundations and fallibilities
  
  
  
  
  
  During the first half-century of psychoanalysis, Freud and his followers
  assumed that their methods of inferring latent meanings and determinants were
  scientifically sound. Freud (1905a) claimed confidently and repeatedly that
  “it is easy to learn how to interpret dreams, to extract from the patient’s
  associations his unconscious thoughts and memories, and to practise similar
  explanatory arts: for these the patient will always provide the text” (p.
  116). He assured clinicians that free association provides a “plentiful store
  of ideas” that “put the therapist on the right track” of what is repressed;
  and that clinical data contain “such plain and numerous hints” that the doctor
  is able to understand the patient’s unconscious meanings (1924, pp. 195—196;
  for similar such statements see Freud 1914, 1915, 1925, 1937b). (See also
  Leavy 1980, Rangell 1987, Rubinstein 1997, Shope 1987). Even at the e