The Interpretation of Dreams Characters

The Interpretation of Dreams has one protagonist, and his name is—you guess it—Sigmund Freud. Analyst, husband, father, and friend by day; billionaire, playboy, philanthropist by night (okay, w...

In his preface to the second German-language edition of The Interpretation of Dreams, Freud wrote: "For this book has a further subjective significance for me personally—a significance which I on...

Freud spends less time dwelling on his relationship with his mother, Amalia Freud, than he does on his relationship with his father, Jakob Freud. All the same, Amalia does appear in some of Freud's...

Freud's wife, Martha, doesn't get a lot of attention in The Interpretation of Dreams, and when she does, Freud's comments can sometimes be sulky. For instance, as he interprets his Dream of Irma's...

Sigmund and Martha Freud had six children together: Mathilde, Martin, Oliver, Ernst, Sophie, and Anna. All of them appear in The Interpretation of Dreams, but Freud doesn't always distinguish or id...

Freud had a number of brothers and half-brothers, some of whom lived long and fruitful lives and one of whom—his brother Julius—died in infancy (source). Throughout The Interpretation of Dreams...

As with those of other family members, friends, and colleagues, appearances by Wilhelm Fliess in The Interpretation of Dreams tend to say more about Freud's personality and perceptio...

Ernst Fleischl von Marxow was a senior colleague of Freud's at Ernst Wilhelm von Brücke's Institute of Physiology. Freud "greatly admired" Fleischl (source). In fact, as one scholar puts it, Freud...

Josef Breuer was another of Freud's senior colleagues, and he established a long legacy in his own right. In fact, because Breuer inspired many of Freud's most influential theories and methods, he...

Oskar Rie was the family pediatrician and one of Freud's oldest friends (source). One scholar thinks that Rie is the "Otto" who appears in Freud's Dream of Irma's Injection (source). In the dream,...

Ernst Wilhelm von Brücke was a German physiologist whose theories and practice influenced Freud's earliest work in psychology. Brücke was Freud's superior at the Institute of Physiology, where Fr...

Josef Paneth was a junior colleague of Freud's who worked for some time with Freud, Ernst Fleischl von Marxow, and Ernst Wilhelm von Brücke at Brücke's Institute of Physiology. He appears as "P."...

Otto Rank was another of Freud's real-life colleagues. Younger than Freud, Rank was influenced by the more experienced psychoanalyst's work—but later editions of The Interpretation of Dreams were...

Theodor Meynert was a Professor of Psychiatry at the University of Vienna while Freud studied there (source). He doesn't make much of a splash in The Interpretation of Dreams, but he does appear br...

Freud's Uncle Josef was one of five uncles who Freud knew throughout his life, but as he interprets his Dream of Uncle Josef (4.1.10-11), he mistakenly writes that he had "never had more than one u...

Late in The Interpretation of Dreams, as Freud teases out all of the associations that emerged from his Non Vixit Dream, he tells his readers about his nephew "John"—a childhood friend who made a...

During his long interpretation of a dream in which he appeared in public "very incompletely dressed" (5.4.34), Freud suggests that part of the latent content of the dream came from childhood memori...

Freud doesn't reveal the true identity of the "Irma" who appears in his Dream of Irma's Injection. Instead, he says that she was "a young lady who was on very friendly terms with me and my fam...

Mathilde was the name of Freud's eldest daughter, but it was also the name of a patient who appears—in disguised form—in the Dream of Irma's Injection. As Freud explains in his interpretation o...

Leopold is another of the acquaintances from Freud's waking life who appears in the Dream of Irma's Injection. Freud used the name "Leopold" as a pseudonym for Dr. Ludwig Rosenberg, the real-life b...

Another of Freud's real-life colleagues, Karl Koller is credited with discovering "the anaesthetic properties of cocaine" (5.2.10). As Freud reminds us, Koller's discovery owed something to Freud's...

Dr. Königstein is another of the colleagues whom Freud finds himself thinking about as he interprets his Dream of the Botanical Monograph (5.2.7). As Freud explains, Dr. Königstein was the "ophth...

As Freud interprets his Dream of the Botanical Monograph (5.2.7), he recalls a recent conversation with a colleague and his wife, Herr and Frau Gärtner (5.2.11). Freud doesn't tell us much about t...

Frau L. was a woman of Freud's acquaintance—and someone he had previously treated medically (5.2.9). Although Freud doesn't tell us much about her, we do know that she helped to inspire Freud's i...

Flora is one of the many female patients Freud mentions throughout The Interpretation of Dreams, and she has special significance because she figures in one of Freud's own dreams. In the Dream of...

In Freud's Dream of Uncle Josef (4.1.10-11), "R." is one of the three men who are blended into one figure in the dream. Freud doesn't identify the real-life name of this friend, but he says that "R...

As Freud interprets his Dream of Uncle Josef (4.1.10-11), he realizes that not only have his Uncle Josef and his friend "R." been brought together in the dream, but also that the dream is referring...

Whereas we here at Shmoop have been known to dream dreams of Counts Chocula, Dracula, and von Count, Freud's dreaming mind brought him images of a real-life politician of his day: the aristocratic...

In the Dream of Count Thun that appears in the book's fifth chapter (5.3.35), Freud isn't 100% sure that the Count he sees is really Count Thun. As he says, it may also have been Count Taaffe—ano...

The "Professor N." Freud mentions in his "Autodidasker" Dream (6.2.53) is probably not the same "N." he mentions in his Dream of Uncle Josef (4.1.10-11). "Professor N." was probably a father-figure...

In the sixth chapter of The Interpretation of Dreams, Freud tells about a personal dream in which a young acquaintance of his is attacked in writing by the very famous (and very dead) writer Johann...

Freud doesn't tell us much about this woman. So, what do we actually know about her?Freud tells us that Louise N. was a lady of his acquaintance—someone who was a close enough friend of his famil...

In the sixth chapter of The Interpretation of Dreams, Freud tells about a personal dream in which a man called "Herr P." appears as the Governor of a "castle by the sea" (6.9.11). In the dream, Her...