A reappraisal of the Emma episode and the specimen dream

Schur's (1966, 1972) speculations that the "specimen dream" exculpates Fliess rather than Freud and that Freud was unaware of this are challenged. Schur's assertion that Freud was not aware of "current conflict" when writing The Interpretation of Dreams is countered with the previously unpublished "Completion of the Analysis" of the dream of "Running up the Stairs," which illustrates Freud's withholding of "current conflict" from his published associations. The view is advanced that Freud's and Fliess's treatment of Emma Eckstein might have been an important element in Freud's self-analysis because it was a repetition of his childhood conflicts. The identities of Emma Eckstein (operated on by Fliess) and Anna Hammerschlag Lichtheim, together with the previously unnoticed, published exchange between Abraham and Freud, are used to add further insight into Freud's interpretation of the dream. In addition, new material concerning Freud's father's terminal illness, beginning in July, 1985, casts further light on the specimen dream as well as others. It is argued that concerns about Martha Freud's sixth pregnancy and wishes for improved contraception were important determinants of the dream and part of the undisclosed associations. It is also argued that rivalrous elements of the associations are elaborated in the later non vixit dream.     

Freud's struggle with misogyny: homosexuality and guilt in the dream of Irma's injection.

The highly condensed dream element trimethylamin is central to the dream of Irma's injection. After a brief review of the medical literature on timethylamine (TMA), it is suggested that two important meanings of this chemical and its properties lie in its disguised reference to disparaging views of women, as well as to Freud's homosexual connection to Wilhelm Fliess. Freud's misogynistic and homosexual impulses were stimulated by Fliess's recent surgical error committed while operating on Freud's patient Emma Eckstein. Evidence is presented that the collaboration between Freud and Fliess in performing an aggressive act toward a woman was for Freud an enactment of a childhood situation in which he and his nephew John had ganged up on John's sister Pauline. The later relationship between Freud, Jung, and Sabina Spielrein is seen as an additional reenactment of this childhood triangle. An examination of Freud's associations to and analysis of the Irma dream, as well as some of his later relationships with women, indicates that guilt and the wish to make reparation were also prominent themes in Freud's inner life.     

Freud's Irma dream and the origins of psychoanalysis

This paper investigates Freud's Irma dream as a response, in part, to the publication of Studies on Hysteria (Breuer & Freud, 1893-1895). As such, Freud's dream and associations reveal a great deal regarding the origins of psychoanalysis. The preamble to the dream reflects Freud's concern with the ground rules and boundaries of the psychotherapeutic technique that he was in the process of developing. This paper cites evidence for Freud's concerns regarding the consequences of alterations in these basic tenets. The Irma dream and Freud's associations also convey a deep and apparently unconscious concern within Freud in respect to the concept of transference, which he may have realized on some level had been used to defensively deny disturbing inputs by the therapist into the treatment situation and patient. The dream may be understood also as reflecting a deep sense of concern regarding unrecognized harmful effects of psychoanalytic psychotherapy and Freud's concern that the treatment process might be more destructive than helpful. The curative aspects of psychotherapy are viewed in terms of action-discharge rather than insight. In all, this reanalysis of the Irma dream focuses on Freud's unconscious conflicts, fantasies, and anxieties at a time when he, along with Breuer, presented a burgeoning psychoanalytic treatment modality to the professional world.     

An event in medical life,or the advent of a belief?

Freud's ambivalent relations with medicine are well known. Based on his relatively unknown text, A religious experience, published in 1928, the authors present an analysis of the internal reasons for this conflict. Responding to a letter from an American doctor, who tells him about his reactions to an autopsy and the influence it had on his religious faith, Freud suggests an analysis that leads him to make a surprising slip. This slip reveals the conflicts inherent in the practice of autopsy, considered as a peculiar event in medical training that puts a strain on the future medical practitioner's subjectivity. Based on the analysis of unconscious impulses and fantasmatic activity, the authors demonstrate that Freud's theory is still surprisingly relevant today in the light of testimonies from contemporary doctors confronted with autopsy during their training or daily practice.     

Leonardo's phantasy and the importance of Freud's slip: The role of the analyst's phantasies in applied psychoanalysis and in the analytic relation

In his paper on Leonardo, Freud made a slip. Referring to the bird which, according to one of Leonardo's memories, tossed its tail into the painter's mouth many times when he was a child, Freud replaced 'kite' with 'vulture'. It is widely accepted that this slip doesn't signifi cantly damage the whole of Freud's constructions on the paper, nevertheless, the part of his considerations relating to the meaning of 'vulture' should be discounted. In the author's view, this part of the Leonardo paper is necessary. Thanks to the slip Freud was able to reach a comprehension which otherwise would have been unattainable. Interpretation based on the vulture made possible the confi guration of a mother as 'daughter of the wind', as was the case not only with Leonardo's mother but also with Freud's. Interpretation of Leonardo's phantasy was achieved through Freud's unconscious identifi cation with Leonardo and the slip adequately interpreted becomes the evidence of this. Through identifi cation, Freud succeeded in making sense of Leonardo's memory but also in realising an indirect virile possession of his own 'winged' mother. Freud's position as interpreting subject in his paper on Leonardo also has more general value: the analyst's knowledge about the 'other' has a very important basis in the indirect expression of his unconscious wishes within the fi eld of sense. The author uses clinical material in order to show how the analyst's phantasies play an important role in analytical interpretive work.     

ON THE DATING OF FREUD'S ALIQUIS SLIP

In a recent article in this journal, Philip Kuhn (1999) criticised Peter Swales's 1982 thesis that Minna Bernays, Freud's sister-in-law, aborted the child that she had conceived by Freud during their summer travels together in 1900, and proposed instead that the aliquis slip of around this time reveals a momentary fear of Freud's that his wife was once again pregnant. This author contests Kuhn's argument by demonstrating that key speculations underpinning his paper cannot be sustained, that the aliquis slip did not occur at the time he presumed, that the woman referred to in the aliquis slip could hardly have been Freud's wife and that there is no reason to suppose that Freud fabricated part of his analysis in the way that Kuhn suggests. On the basis of new empirical evidence the timing of the aliquis slip is established and the likelihood of it concerning Freud's anxiety about the possible pregnancy of his sister-in-law is reasserted.     

Day residue and screen memory in Freud's dream of the botanical monograph

Freud's theory of dream construction allowed the censorship to intervene only when a repressed infantile wish emerged from the unconscious. In his (1899) paper on screen memories, however, he proposed a mechanism for the defensive displacement of current events as they are sorted for introduction into permanent memory. I suggest that Freud was actually describing the conflictual process through which the day residue of the dream is formed. Day residue and screen memory are closely related as elements of the dreamer's present and past experience displaced from his more central instinctual concerns. Freud's dream of the botanical monograph clearly illustrates this relation. Substituted day residues were matched in the dream with relatively innocuous memories of past events of similar cognitive and affective significance. By retracing the substitutions, one can see how a current conflict over Fliess's role in the writing of the dream book recapitulated a series of Freud's earlier conflicts concerning his father and the power of books.     

Dream dialogue and retrogression: neurolinguistic origins of Freud's "replay hypothesis."

At the phenomenological level, Sigmund Freud in the Traumdeutung presents dream speeches that are ubiquitous, and syntactically and pragmatically usually well-formed (despite occasional lexical anomalies), while at the generative level Freud maintains that these are playbacks, devoid of linguistic creativity, and as such do not violate the theoretically "primary-process," nondiscursive nature of the dreamwork. Neither anecdotal data nor recent systematic experimental evidence lend the "replay hypothesis" convincing support, however. This hypothesis may (like many other aspects of his dream theory) have its particular antecedents in the theoretical constraints of Freud's protopsychoanalytic "Project for a Scientific Psychology." In fact, the hypothesis can be reconciled with the neurological mechanisms of the "Project," though it cannot be specifically derived from them. Freud utilized the concept of functional retrogression from his still earlier, prepsychoanalytic work On Aphasia, thus effecting the best compromise he could between the constraints of his overall dream theory derived from the "Project" and his own observations on the phenomenology of dream speech.     

Another look at dreaming: disentangling Freud's primary and secondary process theories

The Interpretation of Dreams contains Freud's first and most complete articulation of the primary and secondary mental processes that serve as a framework for the workings of mind, conscious and unconscious. While it is generally believed that Freud proposed a single theory of dreaming, based on the primary process, a number of ambiguities, inconsistencies, and contradictions reflect an incomplete differentiation of the parts played by the two mental processes in dreaming. It is proposed that two radically different hypotheses about dreaming are embedded in Freud's work. The one implicit in classical dream interpretation is based on the assumption that dreams, like waking language, are representational, and are made up of symbols connected to latent unconscious thoughts. Whereas the symbols that constitute waking language are largely verbal and only partly unconscious, those that constitute dreams are presumably more thoroughly disguised and represented as arcane hallucinated hieroglyphs. From this perspective, both the language of the dream and that of waking life are secondary process manifestations. Interpretation of the dream using the secondary process model involves the assumption of a linear two-way "road" connecting manifest and latent aspects, which in one direction involves the work of dream construction and in the other permits the associative process of decoding and interpretation. Freud's more revolutionary hypothesis, whose implications he did not fully elaborate, is that dreams are the expression of a primary mental process that differs qualitatively from waking thought and hence are incomprehensible through a secondary process model. This seems more adequately to account for what is now known about dreaming, and is more consistent with the way dream interpretation is ordinarily conducted in clinical practice. Recognition that dreams are qualitatively distinctive expressions of mind may help to restore dreaming to its privileged position as a unique source of mental status information.     

Discussion of Sigmund Freud.

Between the years 1928 and 1932, Sigmund Freud occasionally assembled a small group of members of the Vienna Psychoanalytic Society for scientific discussions. These informal meetings took place on Wednesday evenings at Freud's home. The author reports what he was able to preserve of Freud's remarks on some of these occasions.     

The finite and infinite development. II. Recent psychoanalytic theory and therapeutic considerations]

Freud's characterization of the manifest dream is typified by an implicit appreciation and an explicit devaluation of dream images. According to the author, the theoretical-historical motive behind this divergent evaluation is already evident in Freud's prepsychoanalytic writings, where he assigns primacy to the written word. The author holds that the biographic motive derives from an ambivalent internalization of the Mosaic sanction against graven images, conveyed to Freud by his father through the spirit of the Phillipson Bible.     

From the dreams of a generation to the theory of dreams: Freud's Roman dreams

In The Interpretation of Dreams, Freud's interpretation of oedipal desires does not occur at the expense of historical and personal desires, which are always there as a backdrop. In the relentless examination of his own dreams that Freud makes in order to show the mechanisms inherent in all oneiric deformation, we are also led to another, specifically historical, aspect of the issue of Jewish emancipation, which he experiences at first hand. By analysing his own dreams, Freud not only shows us the mechanisms governing dream formation, but also develops a pointed critique of his contemporary society and its prejudices.     

Inventing Freud

Written to commemorate the 150th anniversary of Freud's birth, this paper construes Nina Coltart's statement that "if Freud did not exist it would be necessary to invent him," with its implicit comparison of Freud to God, to refer to (a) the things that Freud taught that are incontrovertibly true; (b) the unavoidable subjectivity in all judgments of Freud; and (c) the resemblances between psychoanalysis and religion. This last comparison is likewise seen to have both positive and negative aspects. Freud's ideas have inspired many people, yet he unscientifically arrogated sovereign authority over psychoanalysis. Freud's admirers are reminded of his extreme difficulty in admitting he was wrong and changing his mind when he should have known better, while his detractors are encouraged to consider the evidence supporting many of Freud's core tenets and to recognize that his discovery of psychoanalysis is indeed one of the supreme achievements in human history.     

Emil Kraepelin's dream speech: A psychoanalytic interpretation

Freud's contemporary fellow psychiatrist Emil Kraepelin collected over the course of several decades some 700 specimens of speech in dreams, mostly his own, along with various concomitant data. These generally exhibit far more obvious primary-process influence than do the dream speech specimens found in Freud's corpus; but Kraepelin eschewed any depth-psychology interpretation. In this paper the authors first explore the respective orientations of Freud and Kraepelin to mind and brain, and normal and pathological phenomena, particularly as these relate to speech and dreaming. They then proceed, with the help of biographical sources, to analyze a selection of Kraepelin's deviant dream speech in the manner that was pioneered by Freud, most notably in his 'Autodidasker' dream. They find that Kraepelin's particular concern with the preservation of his rather uncommon family name-and with the preservation of his medical nomenclature, which lent prestige to that name-appears to provide a key link in a chain of associations for elucidating his dream speech specimens. They further suggest, more generally, that one's proper name, as a minimal characteristic of the ego during sleep, may prove to be a key in interpreting the dream speech of others as well.     

An early, on the borderline between dream and transference, unconscious fantasy of Freud on the psychoanalytic situation (1898). A contribution to psychoanalytic creativity

Taking 24 hours in the life of Freud, the author shows how significant the interplay of dream, day-dream, unconscious phantasy and transference can be in solving scientific problems. This is documented by using the correspondence between Freud and Fliess on March 9/10, 1898, by taking Freud's dream of a botanical monograph, his day-dream of a glaucoma operation, his remarks on the "real" course of the day, and segments of self-analysis.     

The cryptomnesic origins of Jung's dream of the multi-storeyed house

Abstract :  Jung first recounted his dream of the multi-storeyed house in the 1925 seminars to illustrate the concept of the collective unconscious and explain the influence of phylogeny on his split with Freud. However, his telling the story of the dream belies a cryptomnesic influence of the early writings of psychoanalysis because Josef Breuer used a similar image to illustrate the structure of the psyche which Édouard Claparède associated with a phylogenetic inheritance. When telling the story of the dream, Jung misrepresented Freud's position, creating the impression of there being a bigger difference between their theories than was actually the case, and giving the dream a fictional significance for the breakdown of their relationship. In fact, Jung followed Freud into the fields of mythology and phylogenetics, and their split was due primarily to their different attitudes towards sexuality rather than phylogeny. The dream image has therefore led to a misunderstanding of Freudian theory when viewed from within a Jungian perspective. Freud believed there was a phylogenetic layer in the psyche, though he held a different view to Jung on its nature and importance.     

Fact and fantasy in the seduction theory: a historical review

This article surveys Freud's various versions of the seduction theory, from 1896 to 1933. It is concluded that the seduction theory had never been based on the patients' direct statements and conscious recall of seduction by the father in early childhood--unlike what Freud was to state much later (1933). This early seduction was mostly reconstructed by Freud from the patient's verbal material and behavior in treatment (including memories of sexual experiences from later childhood) which he interpreted as disguised and incomplete "reproductions" and reenactments of the original seduction trauma. Further, the external trauma was never meant to account by itself for the later neurotic symptoms. The "delayed action" of its unconscious memory, producing the repression of an event from the time of puberty, was a necessary part of the process. Thus internal psychic transformations and conflicts, anticipating Freud's later emphasis on fantasy and psychic reality, were already an intrinsic part of the seduction etiology of 1896. It is also noted that the father played no central role in the original theory as presented in 1896; it is only in the letters to Fliess that the father emerged as the prime seducer. The implications of this clarification of the seduction theory for the understanding of the changes and continuity in the development of Freud's theories are highlighted; their relevance to ongoing issues in psychoanalysis about the role of external trauma, fantasy, and reconstruction are briefly examined.     

A structural and intertextual reading of Freud's "On Dreams"

By using the framework of a "quest" narrative based on literary allusions to Virgil's Aeneid and Goethe's Wilhelm Meister's Apprenticeship, Freud transformed the 500 pages of The Interpretation of Dreams into some fifty pages entitled "On Dreams." This paper elucidates the narrative means by which Freud achieved the feat of turning a highly complex, lengthy theoretical work into an engaging narrative. Its main plot, provided by a specimen dream, reveals Freud's working through of the personal and professional conflicts of his life up to 1901, and serves as a practical demonstration of and paradigm for the process of working through in psychoanalysis.     

Freud and feminism: a critical appraisal

This paper traces the contributions made by women to Freud's ideas about women. Freud paid back the gifts he received from women with encouragement and support for their careers and with a theory that was instrumental in freeing women from both domestic bondage and fantasies of inferiority, but which was used by later "Freudians" as justification for returning women to an exclusively domestic life. Paying particular attention to Sabina Spielrein, Lou Andreas-Salomé, and H.D., the paper illustrates some of the contributions of women to early psychoanalysis, and speculates on ways in which Freud's thinking was guided by his belief that women are, and should be considered, equal to men.