defined as the unconscious defense against awareness of repressed experiences in order to avoid the resulting anxiety. Both the mechanisms of resistance and repression are in abeyance or at least substantially weakened during sleep, and experiences and feelings come to the fore in dreams that during wakening hours are kept in check (Hogensuw, 1994, p. 98).
Freud traced the operation of unconscious processes, using the free associations of the patient to guide him in the interpretation of dreams and slips of speech, and from this point on in both his practice and his theoretical writings dreams would play an important part in FreudÆs conception of the ways in which the human psyche works (Hogensuw, 1994, p. 103).
Dream analysis led Freud to his discoveries of infantile sexuality and of the so-called Oedipus complex, which constitutes the erotic attachment of the child for the parent of the opposite sex, together with hostile feelings toward the other parent. In these years he also developed the theory of transference, the process by which emotional attitudes, established originally toward parental figures in childhood, are transferred in later life to others. Sometimes the pathways of these transferences can be traced through a personÆs dreams.
The end of this five-year period of work was marked by the appearance of Freud's most important work, The Interpretation of Dreams (1900). In this essential treatise Freud analyzed many of his own dreams recorded in the 3-year period of his self-analysis, begun in 1897. This work expounds all the fundamental concepts underlying psychoanalytic technique and doctrine and its influence on all of his later work (as well as in much of the criticism leveled at him) is clear in the book. The time of the publication of this book may also be as something of a personal and professional calm-before-the-storm for Freud, whose works would become increasingly controversial, losing him a number of su...