#the interpretation of dreams

by Sigmund Freud

What’s it about?

A Viennese cocaine addict blames everything on repressed childhood sexual trauma.

This is non-fiction?

Yes. This is the book that invented psychoanalysis, thereby rescuing countless women (and a few men) from being locked away in insane asylums whose priority was not treatment, but containment. There is no doubt, however that Freud’s initial conceptionion is deeply flawed. 

I have heard about his theories on, er, inter-familial sexual tension.

He genuinely, however incorrectly, believed that the root of everyone’s neuroses was the unresolved Oedipus complex.  Although, if you’ve read Game of Thrones and you can’t process the idea of family members being sexually attracted to each other, you should present yourself to the relevant authorities at first light.

So he got it wrong?

As with many pioneering geniuses, the reason this book is so important isn’t because he came up with all the correct answers, but because he asked the right questions, questions that no one had thought of before, and which would change our understanding of what it means to be stressed, what it means to suffer from mental illness or a behavioural disorder, and even what it means to have a consciousness at all.

What should I say to make people think I’ve read it?

“Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar.”

What should I avoid saying when trying to convince people I’ve read it?

“Psychotherapy is for the weak-minded.”

Should I actually read it?

Maybe not. Although revolutionary at the time, most of its inquiries have become such an integral part of our fundamental assumptions about the human mind that this book can seem almost quaint.