Freud on the Couch by Beverley Clack

Author:Beverley Clack
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: -
Publisher: Oneworld Publications
Published: 2011-09-10T00:00:00+00:00

It had never occurred to me before but it struck me now almost like an act of retribution on the part of destiny. It was as though the replacement of one person by another was to be continued in another sense: this Mathilde for that Mathilde, an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth (Freud, 1900: 112).

Not for the last time, Freud makes a near-religious connection between two different people or events (a theme to which we will return in the next chapter). But note that Freud claims he had not considered this connection between the two Mathildes before having the dream. Something new is being played out through the dream’s content.

This stage in the analysis opens up what seems to be its main concern. Remembering an experience of past incompetence raises a particular anxiety. Is he really a good doctor? To understand this anxiety takes us to the heart of The Interpretation of Dreams: Freud claims that all dreams are wish-fulfilments, hence their importance, physiologically and psychologically. They offer the pleasure of seeing our wishes fulfilled, to ensure the sound sleep required physiologically for good health. They are psychologically significant, because they offer access to the unconscious wishes of the individual. This leaves a question mark over nightmares and dreams that repeat traumatic experiences. Not straightforwardly wish-fulfilments, they lead Freud, as we have seen, to that which lies ‘beyond the pleasure-principle’: the death-drive found in repetition and the desire to return all things to an inanimate state.

The Irma dream, however, is a straightforward example of a wish fulfilled. Freud wishes to be seen as a good doctor. In a nutshell, the dream has this message: ‘Yes, I am a good doctor; the problem is with the patient.’ But in designating the dream as the fulfilment of a wish, Freud also reveals something of the unconscious, which knows more than our conscious selves about our attitudes, desires, fears, and anxieties. This is brought into sharp relief when the aspects of the dream that he neglects in his analysis are considered.

The issue of medical malpractice unfolds against the backdrop of Freud’s difficult and intense friendship with Wilhelm Fliess. Fliess was the first of the intimate male friends with whom Freud shared the development of his ideas. An ear, nose, and throat specialist, Fliess forged a powerful bond with Freud that, later, Freud was to view as redolent of unacknowledged homosexual feelings. At the time of the dream of Irma’s injection, Fliess was the person with whom Freud shared most about the psychoanalytic enterprise on which he was embarked. In the dream itself, Fliess is an anonymous presence, identified only through the mention made of the chemical formula of the injection, which includes trimethylamin. This substance Freud associates with Fliess, for Fliess argued that trimethylamin was connected with the chemistry of sexual processes (Freud, 1900: 116).

There is a further, more troubling connection between Fliess and the content of the dream, which Freud omits to reveal. One of Freud’s patients was a woman called Emma Eckstein.

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