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IRMA DREAM:
In a large hall, Freud received many guests, one of whom was Irma. He takes Irma to one side where they have a conversation in which Irma complains of being in a great deal of pain, her stomach and abdomen feeling as if they were being tied in knots. Freud wanted to reproach her for not accepting his ‘solution’ regarding the pain, but instead he becomes alarmed at her appearance and, taking her to a window, Freud examines her throat. She allows this reluctantly. Freud sees that Irma’s throat is infected. Various of his colleagues present also examine Irma and offer their own diagnoses. They are aware of the origin of the infection. Its origin was an injection of a particular preparation of chemicals administered by Freud’s friend Otto. Freud quite clearly sees the chemical formula for the injection written down in heavy or bold type. He thinks that such injections should not be given as thoughtlessly and that the needle had also been dirty.
INTERPRETATION:
There are some important things we need to know in order to interpret the dream. First, Irma was a real patient of Freud’s that he was treating ‘psychoanalytically’. She was also a friend of Freud and his circle. For example, Irma was friendly enough with the family to be invited to the birthday celebrations of Freud’s wife at Bellevue where Freud was living at the time. Freud’s dream occurred at Bellevue which was a house designed, according to Freud, as a place of entertainment. Finally, Freud mentions in the dream that Irma was resisting his treatment. In his own notes on the dream, Freud remarks that when treating her in real life, she was not prepared to do as he said either. (That people were not prepared to do as he suggested is a theme that comes up time and again in Freud’s writing and in the writing of others who knew him. Even though Jung was to be Freud’s successor, Freud’s insistence on obedience was the reason behind Jung’s professional disagreement with him and why they eventually parted company.)
So, to the actual interpretation.
The house in which Freud welcomed his guests was built for entertainment. Crucially that one fact immediately reveals Freud’s attitude regarding his work on dreams: that is, it was entertainment for him. In some versions of the dream Freud is recorded as welcoming guests to a ball. The interpretation of this is that he was ‘having a ball’ or, to put it another way, ‘having a whale of a time’.
We talk of ‘entertaining’ an idea. One way Freud was having a whale of a time was entertaining the different ideas – represented by the different people at the function – and deciding which to favour, or use, in his professional work.
As an aside, there is also something puzzling about Freud’s approach to analysing his patients. If we take Freud at his word and accept that in order to get the patient to open up to him they had to lie on a couch while he sat behind them and out of sight, then I find myself wondering why Freud’s experience – this difficulty encouraging patients to speak openly – is so very contrary to my own. It is my experience that people love talking about themselves. My mother once gave me advice about how to ‘make conversation’ at social events, which was: ask people questions about themselves. It worked. My experience with life coaching clients and school pupils is similar. So if Freud had difficulty getting patients to speak about themselves, it suggests the difficulty lay not with the patient, but with Freud himself. (Adler and Jung had face to face sessions with their patients.)
Freud frequently found himself treating hysterical young women. We’ve all heard about mass hysteria. As a teacher I know very well that an excitable teacher gets their pupils excitable whereas a calm teacher has calm pupils. This suggests that Freud’s patients were not hysterical before being treated by Freud, implying that Freud himself was hysterical. That he was highly competitive and confrontational and, most significantly, was prone to fainting fits during confrontations, all point to this trait in his character. In short, Freud behaved like an hysterical old woman and this hysteria transmitted itself to his patients. (Contrast this with Jung’s rather more robust interactions with patients. One woman he treated, a lady of the aristocracy, was in the habit of slapping her employees - and this included her doctors. After a number of unsuccessful treatments with various doctors, she finally ended up as Jung’s patient. He describes her physical appearance as being stately and imposing for she was very tall and could, therefore, pack a bit of a punch. There came a point in the treatment when Jung had to say something ‘unpleasant’ to her and the woman responded with a threat to slap Jung on the face. Jung stood his ground. Standing up, he informed her that if she slapped him, he would slap her back. The woman had the wind taken out of her sails completely for no one had ever stood up to her like that before. Jung records that from that moment on her treatment began to succeed.
To summarise the points above, speaking from experience it can only be said that people open up if speaking to someone who is calm and open, whereas they only shut up if faced with a confrontational, challenging and secretive person. Freud was competitive and challenging and confrontational and this is why patients wouldn’t open up to him. In fact, a calm, open, up-front type of person, the very opposite of Freud, has a totally different problem: that is, they have to expend a lot of energy curtailing conversations and interviews.
Regarding the rest of the dream, because she is one of Freud’s circle as well as a patient, Irma represents dreams. She is sick but demonstrates different symptoms to those Freud identifies in real life. One ‘dream’ symptom is that her stomach feels as if it is being tied in knots. To tie someone in knots is to confuse them completely, which would make them nervous or anxious, and this is what Freud is doing with dreams: he is causing confusion. In the dream Irma also has a throat infection. She reluctantly allows an examination. Freud was irked by people who did not do as he said. Insisting someone does as they are told silences them. This is represented in the dream by Irma’s throat infection.
At that time there were numerous theories in circulation about how to interpret dreams and cure patients and Freud was familiar with a good number of them. These ideas are represented in the dream by Freud’s friends and colleagues who examine Irma and make their own diagnoses. The dream also explained to Freud – had he been able to interpret it - that he was assessing these ideas, that is, weighing up these ideas and their potential consequences should he use any of them. This was the part that he particularly enjoyed for it is these ‘friends and colleagues’ who are present at the function. There’s no original thinking here, for Freud is using other people’s ideas, not his own. Furthermore, all these ideas about dream interpretation are artificial. That is, dreams are being injected with meaning, which is represented by Irma having been given injections with chemicals. In the dream, Freud even sees the formula being used. So, consciously or otherwise, he is aware that these methods are formulaic and artificial. The dream identifies whose particular idea was used by Freud, for Irma’s injection was given by Otto. The only contribution Freud himself is likely to have made was the dirt on the needle. The source of this contamination would have been Freud’s insistence on associating dreams with sex that, as with much of today’s advertising, is used to sell products. Freud was also in a position where he had a reputation to make for himself and that was done by selling his version of dream interpretation. The first casualty of advertising is truth and, as is evident from the ‘Irma’ dream, so it was with Freud’s methods.
It is relevant now to look at Carl Jung in more detail and, as with Freud, this will be done by examining a sample of his dreams.
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