Of sleep and dream: A psychoanalytic essay

Freud considered that his major contribution to the understanding of the human psyche was his ground-breaking work: The Interpretation of Dreams. (1) Although his collected works cover twenty-three volumes and deal with many other questions concerning psychic structure-in health, in pathology, in the individual, in society-the theory of dreams occupies an important place if only for the fact that in Freud’s research, it led to a global conception of mental life. ‘At the same time Freud warned readers and colleagues that, in a certain sense, a dream wasjust a thought like any other, but specific in that, in the dream-state, defenses were largely abolished thus allowing unconscious wishes some form of expression.