1900) in his first major text, The Interpretation of Dreams, was completely consistent with that intellectual development. Although Dreams was not particularly successful as a book at the time it first appeared, its long-term influence has been widely acknowledged. Tuchman describes it as the one of the 20th century's "most potent factors of future social change," the other being the automobile (1981, p. 314).
Dreams does not deal solely with the dream state, although of course that material is covered. Rather, the intent of that text is to set forth Freud's theory of personality, which is meant to have explanatory power with regard to human behavior individually and as a member of the wider community. It presents the structural hypothesis of human psychology as comprising the ego, id, and superego; indeed, Dreams introduces a host of technical (scientific) terms that have the effect of structuring the theory. The terminology embeds definition in the words of the terms themselves. Thus day residue (actual events that have been experienced by the dreamer but that may appear in distorted form in events or images of a dream), dream censorship or endopsychic censorship (the tendency of the dreamer's conscious mind to "defeat interpretations" within the course of the dream during the sleep state), and wish-fulfillment (the name, as we have seen, that is given to the repressed infantile gratified in some form in the dream) originate with Freud (1978, pp. 44, 383; et passim).
Two basic ideas govern Freud's interpretation of fundamental human impulses and actions, from Dreams, which focuses on the individual as subject, to Civilization, which deals with the interplay of individual and the world at large. The first is the power of the unconscious (including dream states) to affect conscious experience. The second is the fundamental position of sexuality in the unconscious to affect conscious human behavior.
The status of consciousness i...