Interpretation of Dreams

From Daniel T. O'Hara and Gina Masucci MacKenzie's Introduction toThe Interpretation of Dreams During the night of July 2324, 1895, Sigmund Freud (aged thirty-nine) dreamed the dream that came to be known as the "specimen dream" of psychoanalysis, that of Irma's injection. Freud began the analysis of this much-commented-on dream before either his self-analysis or his book about dreams was fully underway. It occupies the entire second chapter ofThe Interpretation of Dreams(1900). It is significant, as we will later see, that although the dream occurred fifteen months prior to the death (in October 1896) of his eighty-two-year-old father, Jacob, from heart and bladder failure, its secret core deals with their ambivalent relationship. Although Freud said that the greatest loss a man could suffer in life was the death of his father, this dream helps to explain why that loss may also be a bit of a blessing. The dream of Irma's injection presents a scene in a large hall decorated for the birthday party of Freud's wife, Martha. As the couple greet guests at the entrance, Freud meets his patient "Irma" (actually a composite of two female patients, Anna Lichtheim and Emma Eckstein, with similar "hysterical" complaints) and some of his medical colleagues, all given pseudonyms: Dr. M., the master diagnostician; Otto, Freud's needling friend; and another associate, Leopold. As the dream makes clear, hysterical complaintssuch as dizziness and breathlessness without exertion, partial paralysis of a limb, abdominal pains not tied to evident gastric obstructions or dietary excesses, loss of voice, and so onwere at the time taken to be the symptoms of what was termed a hysterical neurosis, particularly in women. Before he went to bed and had this famous dream, Freud had completed a report for one of these colleagues that justified his treatment for his patient Irma; the report was for the older physician and mentor whom he held in the deepest respect and who appears in the dream as Dr. M. The reason for this sudden bout of conscientious reporting was that earlier that night Otto, a mutual friend and Freud's contemporary who came to dinner that evening with a cheap gift, a rancid bottle of liqueur, mentioned during casual conversation over cigars that he had just treated Irma for an organic symptom, not a neurotic one. In effect, Otto called into serious question Freud's psychological diagnosis and therapeutic treatmentthe cathartic talking cure for hysterical symptoms (not quite psychoanalysis yet) that he and Josef Breuer had outlined in their controversialStudies on Hysteria(1895). At this point in his career, Freud still held to the seduction theory of the origin of neurosis and to the technique of cathartic discharge as its cure. He came to believe that it is the memory of unconscious fantasies rather than the memory of real events that inaugurates and sustains neurosis, and that reliving traumatic emotion alone, without analytic insight, is not of any permanent help. FreudRFreud, Sigmund is the author of 'Interpretation of Dreams ', published 2005 under ISBN 9781593082987 and ISBN 1593082983.