In the following introductory essay, Bloom examines critical responses to Freud's dream interpretation, including reading Freud's work as literature.

Charles Rycroft explains his use of the word ' 'innocence' ' in the title of his The Innocence of Dreams as a reference to ' 'the idea that dreams back know-ingness, display an indifference to received categories, and have a core which cannot but be sincere and is uncontaminated by the self-conscious will." Such an explanation is itself innocent and hardly accounts for the polemical force of the title, since the book is largely written against Freud where Freud is strongest, in the interpretation of dreams. The actual rhetorical force of Rycroft's title is that it contains an implicit interpretation of Freudian theory, in effect making the title of what Freud called the "Dream Book" into The Guilt of Dreams. So many years after the publication of Die...