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.
Psychoanalysis is the parent of all forms of insight-oriented psychotherapy.
For over half a century, however, Freud's theories about the origins of dreams have been under siege. Experiments supported the idea that dreaming wasn't limited to humans. All at once, dreams took on a physiological aspect. The second cataclysm came when scientists found ways to photograph the brain at work. Scientists took pictures of people's brains while they slept and found that the REM phase occurred when the stem of the brain fired off signals every 90 minutes.