Fulfillment, bad forebodings, a promise of the future:
Since ancient times people have been dreaming what is not accessible to them when they are awake in their everyday life. People believed that it was the gods who spoke to them. Until Sigmund Freud realized that in the dream our own unconscious actually speaks to us.
“A large hall, many guests that we receive. Among them Irma, whom I take aside immediately. I tell her: If you are still in pain, it is really only your fault. She replies: If you knew what pain I have now in my throat, stomach and body. It ties me up. "
A medical examination follows, still in a dream. Irma resists like someone wearing artificial teeth. Freud knows that she is not wearing one. It looks pale. Otherwise it is rosy. Finally she opens her mouth; he discovers spots and scabs in her throat, calls for Dr. M., who looks very different than usual, without a beard; Otto and another colleague also join. There are four of them examining Irma. The situation - like the diagnosis - is becoming increasingly confused.
"M. says: No doubt it's an infection, but it doesn't matter: there will be dysentery and the poison will be eliminated. We also immediately know where the infection comes from. Her friend Otto recently gave her an injection with a propyl preparation, trimethylamine (the formula I can see in bold type) when she felt uncomfortable. Such injections are not made lightly. The syringe was probably not clean either. "
Dreams as gateways to the unknown and inexplicable
For millennia, dreams have been the gateway for the unknown and inexplicable. The pharaoh in Egypt had dreamed of fat and lean cows for the fat and lean years that were to come to the country. Alexander the Great saw a world empire in a dream, Emperor Constantine the sign of the cross. The Bible and the myths of history are full of inspirations received in sleep.
However, the fact that the external impulses of an event could be recorded in such detail and their representation in the dream so freshly recorded and so systematically sorted and evaluated - that had never happened before. Freud knew immediately that he had succeeded in discovering his life with the dream of "Irma's injection": the proof of a very active unconscious that followed rules like a language of its own. And that was also to be translated.
He analyzed the dream sentence by sentence, picture by picture, encountered hidden memories and resistances, sexual impulses - Irma was a young widow - and the secret motive to burden the colleagues. A painful job, as he sarcastically notes.
“You can't hide the fact that hard self-determination is part of interpreting and communicating your dreams. You have to reveal yourself as the only villain among all the nobles with whom you share life. "
Freud analyzed around 200 dreams
Freud remained true to technology. The dream, he had recognized, was a "vital psychic act", a paradigm for the work of unconscious, often suppressed drives and affects - and therefore precisely the ideal way to explore it. He analyzed around 200 dreams in the following years, around 50 of which were his own. And much that should later characterize his theories comes to light in consciousness for the first time: the Oedipus complex, castration anxiety, the structural theory that distinguishes between the instances of the ego, id and superego.
"Do you think," he later asked a friend and colleague, "that there will one day be written on a marble tablet in this house? Here, on July 24, 1895, Dr. Sigmund Freud the secret of dreams'? ”His book“ The Interpretation of Dreams ”was published half a year earlier, in November 1899. But the publisher had predated it to 1900 - because he too knew and wanted to contribute to it with the little trick should be a work of the century.
