Freud's major work, The Interpretation of Dreams (Die Traumdeutung, 1900a), was published in November of 1899, and he was disappointed that the book initially met with little success. His friend Wilhelm Fliess suggested that he publish a more easily-accessible, abridged version, but Freud resisted the idea, as he was already working on The Psychopathology of Everyday Life (1901b). However, he soon got to work on the project, which he considered to be strictly utilitarian drudgery. The essay appeared in 1901.

By its very nature, the book is a summary that adds nothing to The Interpretation of Dreams, but in thirteen short, untitled chapters, Freud did lay out the essentials of his theory of dreams:

• The analysis of dreams, the "royal road" to the elucidation of unconscious processes, aims at extracting the latent meaning from the manifest text of the dream (the dream narrative).
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