Freud’s The Interpretation of Dreams both painstakingly builds the case for a revolutionary theory of dreams and lays the foundation for Freud’s general theory of the mind, the latter an undertaking he believed necessary to account for dreams. He identified as the real breakthrough of the treatise his discovery that dreams fulfill wishes, a wish-fulfillment embodying a condition of relief, whether expressly desired or otherwise welcome.

The argument contains a gap absent from Freud’s account of other phenomena. The central problem—that even a successful dream analysis does not thereby translate, in reverse, into an account of how the dream formed – though observed before, warrants scrutiny in the context of Freud’s full argument and in comparison with his arguments elsewhere.

Accordingly, the book reconstructs Freud’s treatise, in preparation for an evaluation of his argument, after which it compares the account of dreams with his explanation of other experiences and with his avowedly speculative work.

Neither Freud’s extrapolation from the endpoint of the analysis of dreams to their origin nor his attempt to derive the account from general theory appears to support the conclusions he reaches about dreaming. The gap in his argument appears not to have an equal in his other lines of writing. Consequently:

1. 1. The Interpretation of Dreams cannot form the bedrock of his other treatises.

2. 2. His larger project, consequently, is little affected by the weakness of the tract.

3. 3. We need not, on those accounts, abandon the practice of interpreting dreams.

4. 4. We may still be driven by a pleasure principle, even if dreams do not carry out wish-fulfillment.

Freud might have been blindsided, in formulating his dreams theory, by his insistence that all mental processes are purposive. Purposiveness may be incompatible with sleeping, and by extension dreaming. The apparatus Freud maps out in The Interpretation of Dreams and elsewhere may pertain only, though still illuminatingly, to waking life.