The Interpretation of Dreams was first published in an edition of only 600 copies, and these took eight years to sell. The work subsequently gained popularity, and seven more editions were printed in Freud's lifetime, the last in 1929.[2]
The classicist Norman O. Brown described The Interpretation of Dreams as one of the great applications and extensions of the Socratic maxim "know thyself" in Life Against Death (1959).[21] The philosopher Paul Ricœur described The Interpretation of Dreams as Freud's "first great book" in Freud and Philosophy (1965). He argued that like Freud's other works it posits a "semantics of desire".[22] The mythologist Joseph Campbell described the book as an "epochal work", noting in The Masks of God: Creative Mythology (1968) that it was "based on insights derived from years devoted to the fantasies of neurotics".[23] Max Schur, Freud's physician and friend, provided evidence in Freud: Living and Dying (1972) that the first dream that Freud analyzed, his so-called "Irma dream", was not very disguised, but actually closely portrayed a medical disaster of Emma Eckstein, one of Freud's patients.[24] The psychologist Hans Eysenck argued in Decline and Fall of the Freudian Empire (1985) that the dreams Freud cites actually disprove Freud's dream theory.[25]
The philosopher John Forrester described The Interpretation of Dreams as Freud's "masterpiece" in Dispatches from the Freud Wars (1997). He suggested that the book could be considered a form of autobiographical writing and compared it to the naturalist Charles Darwin's On the Origin of Species (1859).[26] The philosopher Dermot Moran compared the influence that The Interpretation of Dreams exerted on psychoanalysis to that which the philosopher Edmund Husserl's Logical Investigations (1900–1901) exerted on 20th-century European philosophy in his introduction to the latter work.[27]
The philosopher Mikkel Borch-Jacobsen and the psychologist Sonu Shamdasani noted in The Freud Files (2012) that the Swiss psychiatrist Eugen Bleuler wrote to Freud in October 1905 that he was convinced of the correctness of The Interpretation of Dreams as soon as he read it. They argued, however, that Freud's analysis of the dream of Irma's injection was partly based on Belgian psychologist Joseph Delboeuf's analysis of a dream in Sleep and Dreams. In their view, The Interpretation of Dreams should be placed in the context of the "introspective hypnotism" practiced by figures such as Auguste Forel, Eugen Bleuler, and Oskar Vogt. They charged Freud with selectively citing some authors on dreams (including Marie-Jean-Léon, Marquis d'Hervey de Saint Denys and Louis Ferdinand Alfred Maury), ignoring others (including Jean-Martin Charcot, Pierre Janet, and Richard von Krafft-Ebing), and systematically avoiding "citing the passages in the works of his predecessors which came closest to his own theories."[28]
E. James Lieberman and Robert Kramer wrote in an introduction to a collection of letters between Freud and the psychoanalyst Otto Rank that Rank was impressed by The Interpretation of Dreams when he read it in 1905, and was moved to write a critical reanalysis of one of Freud's own dreams. They suggested that it may have been partly this reanalysis that brought Rank to Freud's attention. They noted that it was with Rank's help that Freud published the second edition of The Interpretation of Dreams in 1909.[29] The neuropsychoanalyst Mark Blechner argued in Contemporary Psychoanalysis that even if one does not agree with Freud's theories, The Interpretation of Dreams remains a valuable record of dream texts and an analysis of the mental operations that dreams demonstrate.[30] Art historian and filmmaker Joseph Koerner drew the title of his 2019 film The Burning Child from a dream of that title, which opens Chapter 7 of Interpretation of Dreams.[31] The album packaging for the 2002 David Bowie album 'Heathen' contains an image of the book.[32]
