So he sat down to think. One hundred years this week after the publication of The Interpretation of Dreams, Freud is considered both genius and crackpot. The book launched the modern study of human behavior, and was hailed as the first attempt to bring the light of science to the study of the mind. Dense with Freud's own dreams and the dreams of his patients, the book argued that all dreams are about the dreamer's secret wishes. The more abstruse the dream, the more proof that obfuscation masks the mind's deepest desires.
All signs are symbols, all words are metaphors.
Freud himself, sublimely self-confident, held aloft the lamp of analysis to make the unclear transparent. It is actualized through a pictorial scene. The person may dream he is out hunting lions. You have a gun, you shoot the lion, you feel great. A century after its publication, Freud's book still guides psychoanalysis, and the metaphor of the therapist and his couch has become ubiquitous.