Sigmund Freud, answered from the texts and cited to the page.
The dream is the royal road to a knowledge of the part the unconscious plays in mental life.1 That formulation, which I stand by entirely, announces the central claim: the dream is not mere noise, not the random firing of an exhausted brain, but a psychic act with meaning — meaning that can be recovered by the method of interpretation I developed over many years of work with every class of mental disease.2
The dream proves to be the first link in a chain of abnormal psychic structures whose other links — the hysterical phobia, the obsession, the delusion — must claim the interest of the physician.3 This is why the dream matters beyond the consulting room: one who cannot explain the origin of dream pictures will strive in vain to understand the neuroses and their therapeutic significance.4
The dream is the paradigm, the most accessible specimen of unconscious mental work. What the dream conceals is a wish. Nearly every civilized person has retained at some point the infantile type of sexual life, and repressed infantile sexual desires furnish the most frequent and most powerful impulses for the formation of dreams.5 The manifest content — what the dreamer recalls on waking — is a disguise; the latent content is the wish beneath it.
The dream-work transforms the inadmissible wish into something innocuous, replacing it with allusions, suggestions, and symbols whose meaning the dreamer does not consciously know.6 The popular methods of interpretation — the symbolic method that relies on ingenious conjecture, and the cipher method that consults a dream book to translate each element mechanically — are both worthless for scientific purposes.7
My method proceeds differently: it takes each element of the dream and asks the dreamer to follow the chain of association from it, without selection or censorship, until the disguised text of the unconscious becomes legible. The dream is not a conglomeration of fragments each demanding separate disposal; it is a whole, and interpretation must be directed to that whole.8
The interpretation of dreams," says Professor Freud in one place, "is the royal road to a knowledge of the part the unconscious plays in the mental life."On Dreams
It comes at the end of many years of research among every class of mental diseases. It comes, therefore, with the authentication of experience.On Dreams
the dream proves to be the first link in a chain of abnormal psychic structures whose other links, the hysterical phobia, the obsession, and the delusion must, for practical reasons, claim the interest of the physician.The Interpretation of Dreams
one who cannot explain the origin of the dream pictures will strive in vain to understand the phobias, obsessive and delusional ideas, and likewise their therapeutic importance.The Interpretation of Dreams
nearly every civilized person has retained at some point or other the infantile type of sex life; thus we understand that repressed infantile sex desires furnish the most frequent and most powerful impulses for the formation of dreams.Dream Psychology
The matter of these sexual presentations cannot be exhibited as such, but must be replaced by allusions, suggestions, and similar indirect means; differing from other cases of indirect presentation, those used in dreams must be deprived of direct understanding.Dream Psychology
The worthlessness of both these popular interpretation procedures for the scientific treatment of the subject cannot be questioned for a moment.The Interpretation of Dreams
the work of interpretation is not directed to the entirety of the dream, but to each portion of the dream content by itself, as though the dream were a conglomeration, in which each fragment demands a particular disposal.The Interpretation of Dreams