The dream book that sold six hundred copies 

The book that made Freud's name was almost ignored. Die Traumdeutung, The Interpretation of Dreams, went on sale in Vienna in November 1899, with 1900 printed on the title page because the publisher wanted the new century. The first edition ran to six hundred copies and took roughly eight years to sell out. Reviews were few and several were dismissive. Freud, then in his forties, had expected the scientific world to turn round. It did not, for a long time.

The argument inside it was simple to state and enormous in its consequences. Dreams, Freud claimed, are not noise. They have a surface, the story you remember on waking, which he called the manifest content, and a meaning underneath, the latent content. Between the two sits what he named the dream work: condensation, where several ideas collapse into one image, displacement, where feeling attached to something forbidden is transferred onto something harmless, and symbolisation. Dreams, in his formula, are the disguised fulfilment of a wish, and their function is to let a mind sleep while still wanting something it cannot admit to wanting.

The method was association, not a symbol dictionary. Freud asked the dreamer to talk around each fragment until a chain of connections appeared, and he insisted that the dreamer's own associations, not the analyst's guesses, supplied the meaning. That is a more careful position than the popular version, and it did not stop the popular version from taking over completely.

Much of the raw material was his own. The book is built on Freud's dreams, including the famous dream of Irma's injection, and on his memories of his father, who had died in 1896. It is part scientific treatise, part autobiography, part detective story, and its literary quality is a large share of why it survived. Freud wrote unusually well for a physician, and he knew it.

It is also where the deepest problem shows. Interpretation of this kind cannot fail. If a dream looks like a straightforward wish, the theory is confirmed. If it looks like the opposite, the disguise is confirmed. If the patient rejects the reading, the rejection can be treated as resistance, which is confirmation again. That structure is exactly what philosophers of science would later object to, and it is worth naming here rather than at the end, because everything Freud built afterwards inherits it.

What the book did achieve was permission. It made the idea of an unconscious mind, with its own logic and its own agenda, a subject an educated person could discuss at dinner. Sleep research since has found that dreaming has real relationships with memory and emotional processing, though not the wish-fulfilment mechanism Freud proposed.

Slowly the book began to draw people. By 1902 a handful of Viennese doctors were meeting in Freud's waiting room on Wednesday evenings.