One must agree with Peter Gay that "the genre of Freud's book is, in short, undefinable" (1988, p. 104).

I now regard The Interpretation of Dreams as the first (post)modern (auto)biography. I'm bemused at orthodox psychoanalytic obeisance to the dream book as a "scientific" treatise, though to be sure Freud stands beside it beckoning one to that interpretation. Other tempting readings of the tome are:

• as ur-case history: the documentation of the first psychoanalysis, with Sigmund Freud as patient and Wilhelm Fliess (in Freudian drag) as analyst
• as a triptych to a fin de siècle Freudian world
• as a spoof of analytic writing generally, and psychoanalytic theorizing specifically
• as a jump-station to one's own self-construction

There is in the entire opus not a single fully interpreted dream. All the interesting interpretations break off when they're starting to get good, only to emerge a hundred pages later to be cross-referenced with another dream of Freud or a patient, then spun off into literary and clinical allusions or forced into a Procrustean botanizing argument of the kind the dreams themselves often mock. Certainly for me this text has never fallen into place as a systematic treatise in dream-meanings. Rather I think the book is the recounting df the process by which Freud achieves his uniqueness as Freud, a process that has something to do with his own neurosis -- of which there's ample evidence in the Fliess years. The dream work allows him to recapture powerful memories of his own past and to do something with them that, aside from rendering them less troubling, makes literature of them, allows him to speak in a powerful way of the things that really concern him: family romance, mythic history, erotic fantasy.

During the year following his father's death in October, 1896, Freud experienced a sea change in his view of neurotic etiology, found himself preoccupied with self-analysis, and produced some of the most profound and revealing of the dreams that would be presented two years later in The Interpretation of Dreams. The most-discussed of his letters, written eleven months after Jacob's demise, announces his disbelief in what has been called the "special theory of psychoanalysis (Laplanche, l989), summarizes logical and empirical problems with the seduction theory, hints broadly at the personal implications of the new point of view, and evokes "the dream [book]" as the focus of his creative interest.

• It is a "dream" work in several senses:
• He had to dream it to write it.
• Dream-like, it haunted, mocked, eluded him at every turn.
• It is profoundly subjective, self-(de)constructing, post-modern, hypertextual.