Sigmund Freud's Discovery of Psychoanalysis by Schimmel Paul;

Sigmund Freud's Discovery of Psychoanalysis by Schimmel Paul;

Author:Schimmel, Paul;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Taylor and Francis


Summary of Freud’s associations and inferences to the different elements of the dream

The hall – numerous guests, whom we were receiving.

The dream is set at Bellevue and took place, says Freud, a few days before his wife’s birthday. He recalls that the day before the dream his wife had told him that one of the friends she was expecting to attend her birthday was Irma. ‘My dream was thus anticipating this occasion: it was my wife’s birthday’ (Freud 1900: 108).

I reproached Irma for not having accepted my solution; I said: ‘If you still get pains, it’s your own fault.’

Freud thinks he might in reality have said something like this to her. ‘It was my view at that time (though I have since recognized it as a wrong one) that my task was fulfilled when I had informed a patient of the hidden meaning of his symptoms: I considered that I was not responsible for whether he accepted the solution or not’. So Freud, writing some years after the therapy in question, reflects that he now believes what we might call his therapeutic attitude at this earlier time was an incorrect one.

Freud also notes that his words to Irma in the dream seemed to reflect his anxiety to show that he was not responsible for the persistence of her pains; that the pains were her own fault and therefore not his. ‘Could it be that the purpose of the dream lay in this direction?’ (Freud 1900: 108).

Irma’s complaint: pains in her throat and abdomen and stomach; it was choking her.

Freud notes that Irma’s symptoms included pains in the stomach but these were not prominent, and ‘pains in her throat and abdomen’ and ‘choking’ were hardly present. In fact, Irma complained more of ‘nausea and disgust’, so what, Freud wonders, were his reasons for this choice of symptoms in the dream? (Freud 1900: 109).

She looked pale and puffy.

As Irma had a ‘rosy complexion’, Freud began to suspect that these features suggested the presence of another figure, behind that of Irma in the dream (Freud 1900: 109).

I was alarmed at the idea that I had missed an organic illness.

‘This, as may well be believed, is a perpetual source of anxiety to a specialist whose practice is almost limited to neurotic patients and who is in the habit of attributing to hysteria a great number of symptoms which other physicians treat as organic.’ Freud conjectures that the logic of his dream may be to suggest that because his treatment can only be effective in curing hysterical pains, if the origin of Irma’s pains is seen to be organic then he cannot be held responsible for their persistence. He suggests that he ‘was actually wishing that there had been a wrong diagnosis; for, if so, the blame for my lack of success would also have been got rid of’ (Freud 1900: 109).

I took her to the window to look down her throat. She showed some recalcitrance, like women with false teeth. I thought to myself that really there was no need for her to do that.



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