Via Regia

Via regia — the royal road — is Freud‘s famous phrase for the dream as the privileged avenue of access to the unconscious: “the interpretation of dreams is the via regia to a knowledge of the unconscious activities of the mind,” from the closing pages of The Interpretation of Dreams (1900). The formulation is the foundational thesis of the dream-work in the depth-psychological tradition.

The phrase has survived Freud’s particular theory of disguised wish-fulfillment and passed into the general vocabulary of Jung and the post-Jungians, for whom the dream remains the royal road — though now not to the repressed material of infantile sexuality but to the whole activity of the unconscious psyche, including its compensatory and prospective functions. The difference in how the road is traveled marks the difference between the Freudian and Jungian schools; the agreement that the road exists, and that dreams are the principal path along it, is common ground. See dream and freud-interpretation-of-dreams.

Relationships

• dream
• unconscious
• freud-interpretation-of-dreams