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.     

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.     

Some sources for a slip in a translation by Freud

Among Freud's papers, we find instances in which Freud describes the "psychopathology of everyday life" as he found it in himself and in others. "A Religious Experience" (Freud, 1928) contains examples of both kinds. In addition, this paper contains a slip of which Freud appears to have been unaware. Freud's paper interprets a religious conversion described in a letter written to him in English. In the translation of this letter into German, Freud inserted material that was not present in the original. He mentions another slip he made in speaking about the letter. These slips and some associated details in the paper indicate persisting unconscious conflict. The content of these slips and details points to an association with Freud's childhood anxiety dream reported in The Interpretation of Dreams (Freud, 1900). Freud's associations and discussion of that dream lead to the Philippson Bible of his childhood, which provides additional connections to the paper of 1928.     

Little Hans and Freud's self-analysis: a biographical view of clinical theory in the making

For nearly a century, Freud's "Analysis of a Phobia in a Five-year-old Boy" has been read mainly--if often critically--with Freud's conscious aim in mind: providing evidence for the central importance of oedipal conflict. Material recently released by the Freud Archives casts new light on Freud's treatment of Hans's mother, Olga Graf (nee H?nig)--which began at the height of his self-analysis in 1897--and of Hans himself. Read in the enriched context of new information from Eissler's interviews with Max Graf and Herbert Graf, two texts--Freud's 1897 letters to Fliess and the 1909 case history--illuminate possible personal motives for Freud's insistence on the primacy of oedipal conflict.     

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.     

Freud, Fliess, and the parenthood of psychoanalysis

This paper focuses upon the roles of procreation, fatherhood, and identification with the fertile mother in Freud's creation of psychoanalysis. Fatherhood and motherhood, pregnancy and birth, children and siblings, figure prominently in Freud's self-analysis and in his relationship with his prototransference object, Wilhelm Fliess. Although Freud attributed his self-analytic interest and revived oedipal conflict to the death of his father, becoming a parent himself was also a significant determinant. Birth as well as death reactivated his childhood and stimulated his creative ferment.     

“sexuality and death” in freud's discovery of sexual aetiology

Abstract

The present study focuses on Freud's discovery of sexual aetiology in the period from his studies in Paris and Berlin (1885–86) to self-analysis (1897). The study gives a reassessment of both the link and the break between Freud's early works and the contemporary medical views and splits concerning sexual aetiology, which is relevant for the understanding of Freud's later developments. Freud's initial aversion toward sexual aetiology is investigated, and a significant connection between sexuality and death is found in the medical practice of female circumcision and castration in the treatment of hysteria. Finally, the relevance of the tabooed surgical operations is discussed in relation to a series of important moments for the birth of psychoanalysis (the collaboration with Fliess and the operation on Emma Eckstein, the Irma dream, the seduction theory and its abandonment, and the emergence in Freud of the memory of the death of little Julius as the “germ of guilt”).     

“So It Really Does Exist—The Sea-Serpent We’ve Never Believed in!” Ferenczi’s Influence on Freud Revisited

In the last phase of his work, Ferenczi created a new language for trauma, based on the fragmentation of mental life. In the paper on “The principles of relaxation and neocatharsis,” Ferenczi reformulated the goal of analysis by proposing that “no analysis can be regarded … as complete unless we have succeed in penetrating the traumatic material”, where the “traumatic material” was not to be sought in the neurotic reactions and adaptive solutions of the ego but in more primitive reactions, such as the psychotic turning away from reality, splitting, and fragmentation. This was exactly the material that Freud assimilated in the essay “A disturbance of memory on the Acropolis”, after the death of Ferenczi. Freud visited Athens in 1904, and the walk up to the Parthenon represented the successful coronation of his self-analysis. Actually, the hallucination turned out to be so uncanny that he never again visited Athens. In a letter to Fliess, written shortly before the meeting in Nuremberg, on January 24, 1897, Freud reported on a case history turning on a “scene about the circumcision of a girl,” who later was convincingly identified by Schur as Emma Eckstein. Did Freud have the germinal idea that Emma Eckstein’s hallucination of the penis contained the wish to overcome her trauma and the hope to have a restored genital? Is this the holy visitation, which haunted him on the Acropolis? Why did he give up the profound insight that the dreams of gigantic snakes had a traumatic origin?     

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.     

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.     

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.     

WITHSTANDING TRAUMA: THE SIGNIFICANCE OF EMMA ECKSTEIN'S CIRCUMCISION TO FREUD'S IRMA DREAM

The author considers the medical rationale for Wilhelm Fliess's operation on Emma Eckstein's nose in February 1895 and interprets the possible role that this played in Freud's dream of Irma's injection five months later. The author's main argument is that Emma likely endured female castration as a child and that she therefore experienced the surgery to her nose in 1895 as a retraumatization of her childhood trauma. The author further argues that Freud's unconscious identification with Emma, which broke through in his dream of Irma's injection with resistances and apotropaic defenses, served to accentuate his own “masculine protest”. The understanding brought to light by the present interpretation of Freud's Irma dream, when coupled with our previous knowledge of Freud, allows us to better grasp the unconscious logic and origins of psychoanalysis itself. 1     

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.     

G. C. Lichtenberg: dreams, jokes, and the unconscious in eighteenth-century Germany.

The German physicist and writer Lichtenberg (1742-1799) was well known during the nineteenth century as a humorist, thinker, and psychologist. He was also a favorite author of Freud, who read him beginning in his teens, quoted him frequently, and called him a "remarkable psychologist." Despite this, he has been ignored by psychoanalysts and historians of psychiatry alike, and most of his writing is still unavailable in English. An introduction to Lichtenberg as a psychologist is provided, stressing material dealing with dream analysis, association theory, and drives. Relevant excerpts are translated into English. Lichtenberg is shown to have insisted upon the need for a systematic and rationalistic study of dreams, to have analyzed individual dreams (describing them as dramatized representations of thoughts, associations, and even conflicts from his own waking life), and to have emphasized the functional link between dreams and daydreams. His remarks on drives and commentary on eighteenth-century association theory represent a significant practical application, and thus refinement, of Enlightenment rationalistic psychology. These achievements are assessed in light of Freud's early fascination with him; it is argued that Lichtenberg is an example of the relevance of the historical and cultural background of psychoanalysis to clinical practice.     

Freud, Oedipus and the Hebrew Bible

The current paper examines the question of why Freud employed Greek rather than Hebrew foundation legends, specifically the story of Oedipus, as a basis for psychoanalysis, Freud's choice of Oedipus emanates from his deterministic view of the universe, paralleling the Greek rather that the Biblical story of creation. In the Biblical account God precedes and creates nature with no sign of an Oedipal conflict. In the Greek account, nature precedes the gods and the Oedipal conflict is inherent. Freud's choice has implications for his view of human psychology.     

Freud's writing: his (w)rite of passage and its reverberations

The study of Freud's personal conception of writing and his use of it illuminates a significant aspect of his relationship with others, and also his sense of his own heroic greatness. In two related periods of his life, acts of writing--which were notably overdetermined in Freud and which informed as well as facilitated a distinctive kind of self-expression--gave rise to veritable (w)rites of passage. In those periods, the transferential dynamics in Freud's relationships with Fliess, his daughter Anna, and certain important analysands were expressed in ways connected with the content and process of various types of writing, including editing and translating. In sum, there is something still to be discovered in Freud's attitudes to his writing and to related intergenerational transactions between analysts and analysands who engage together in compositional activities.     

FREUD'S PRIVATE MINI-MONOGRAPH ON HIS OWN DREAMS: A CONTRIBUTION TO THE CELEBRATION OF THE CENTENARY OF THE INTERPRETATION OF DREAMS

A virtually unknown brief commentary by Freud on the characteristics of his own dreams is described and discussed. Freud's mini-monograph, discovered after some 80 years, has autobiographical, theoretical and organisational significance in the enigmatic context of the early development of psychoanalysis. Found among papers of Alfred Adler, this extraordinary document adds to our knowledge of psychoanalytic history, including the significance of dreams in the evolution of psychoanalytic thought. Freud's commentary permitted the identification of a particular dream as his own. This dream had been presented in anonymity to the fledgling Vienna Psychoanalytic Society for interpretation. The dream was later inserted, again anonymously, into The Interpretation of Dreams with Freud's own remarkable pre-oedipal interpretation. Freud's conflicted relationships with Adler and Jung are considered in historical context.     

The Freudian Antecedents of Cognitive–Behavioral Therapy

The writings of Sigmund Freud are reviewed, showing the similarities of many of his concepts with those of cognitive–behavioral therapy (CBT). Automatic thoughts, core beliefs, and the desire to please the therapist are shown to have parallels in Freud's ideas about involuntary thoughts, the preconsdous, the unconscious, and transference. Similarities in technique are noted, especially in light of Freud's original ideas about suggestion and influence as well as latter-day discoveries regarding Freud's actual practices. In certain ways, CBT is closer to Freud than is classical psychoanalysis. A brief history of the attempts to integrate behaviorism with Freud is given, showing how Freud's objectifying of dream reports presaged the viewing of verbal reports as behavior. Other developments in cognitive psychology are also discussed with regards to Freud's ideas about information processing and the production of memories.