s. The implications of this novel understanding spilled over into the budding field of humanistic psychology, as well as into many new theoretical writings spanning areas from social sciences to fine arts.Freuds work made interesting contributions to general psychology because, in offering the idea that dreams have meaning that could be comprehended and interpreted, he was taking the side of the ignorant and the superstitious against the positivist philosophy of early science psychology. Thus, the text can be read not only in the context of social and intellectual traditions impinging on fin-de-siecle culture, but more generally in relation to a broader framework of changing western conceptions of the nature and importance of dreams. Freuds writings on dreams provide an ideal psychology of modern life, and this is especially clear if his work is viewed in the context of the major transformations in the understanding of dreams that have characterized different periods of development within psychology.For Freud, the possibility of dream interpretation is contingent on the premise that their puzzling and seemingly nonsensical elements actually contain a series of clues from which their originating ideas can be deduced. Dreams are, in some sense, designated to conceal events/emotions that would be too painful for a person to recall, but nonetheless do so in such a way as to still communicate those very events or emotions in a disguised and indirect form. Freud distinguishes between latent (hidden) and manifest (surface) contents of dreams. There is a complex process of partial concealment, both the function and method of which require elaboration.Freud began to analyze his own dreams, and was quite excited by the analytic insight which he believed his first dream interpretation produced. This dream specifically became known as the dream of Irmas Injection, and serves as the specimen dream that Freud uses for the starting point of The Inte...
