About the lecture

In this lecture, we think about Freud’s theory of dreams, focusing in particular on: (i) Freud’s The Interpretation of Dreams, published in 1899, as a seminal text in psychoanalysis; (ii) Freud’s bisection of every dream into manifest dream content, which is how the dream is remembered, and latent dream thought, which is the underlying message of the dream; (iii) the dream-work, which acts as a form of censorship for thoughts when dreaming; (iv) symbolism in dreams, whereby objects in a dream can represent different objects in reality, depending on the person; (v) Freud’s idea that all dreams and drives are sexual, but that this definition extends to pleasure more broadly; (vi) the one-sided nature of Freud’s theory of dreams, with nightmares as an example; (vii) Freud’s attempt to explain nightmares as being caused by drives from which we recoil when they enter the dream world; (viii) Freud’s research with patients suffering from ‘shellshock’, now known as post-traumatic stress disorder, which demonstrated the one-sided nature of his theory of dreams; (ix) Freud’s positivistic academic background as one explanation for him sticking to his theories even in the face of evidence to the contrary; (x) a rhetorical reason for Freud sticking to his dream theories being his desire to put these theories ‘on the map’, which sometimes generated a certain inflexibility on Freud's part; (xi) Freud’s The Interpretation of Dreams as a key text containing the five main elements of psychoanalysis; (xii) the fact that The Interpretation of Dreams , unlike Studies on Hysteria , applies to everyone, thus demonstrating the universal nature of the workings of the unconscious; (xiii) the origin of parapraxes or ‘Freudian slips’, as discussed in Freud’s 1901 book The Psychopathology of Everyday Life ; (xiv) Freud's understanding of parapraxes as compromise formations between the unconscious and conscious mind.

About the lecturer

Henk de Berg is Professor of German in the School of Languages and Cultures at the University of Sheffield. His expertise is in German and French cultural theory and in social and political thought. Professor de Berg is the author of four books, including Freud’s Theory and Its Use in Literary and Cultural Studies (2003; described by Peter Gay as “as good an introductory text as one can possibly hope for”), which received a Choice Outstanding Academic Title Award and has been translated into three European languages as well as Chinese. Among his eight co-edited volumes is Modern German Thought from Kant to Habermas: An Annotated German-Language Reader (2012); the editors’ general introduction has been described by Joachim Whaley as “probably the best short account of the development of modern German philosophy”. Henk de Berg’s most recent book, written for a larger audience, is Trump and Hitler: A Comparative Study in Lying (2024).