130 Years of the Dream of Irma’s Injection
Today marks the 130th anniversary of the dream of Irma’s Injection, dreamed by Freud on the night of July 23/24 1895. This dream is the very inception of Freud’s own self-analysis, if we take Didier Anzieu’s word for it in his (rather overstuffed) book on the topic—Freud’s Self Analysis (1981). Irma’s Injection appeared first in literary form in The Interpretation of Dreams (1900), in which Freud will dissect the dream at great length throughout the book. I am less convinced by the interpretations of the dream than by the dream itself, which reads like a Kafka story—I think because Kafka read the dream book and turned the style of Freud’s dreams into his own style: see for example, A Country Doctor, 1919, a story that is strikingly similar in vibes and imagery to that of Irma’s Injection.
While I usually find dreams to be highly annoying and redundant when they appear in movies or fiction, (not to mention when they are told to me by an acquaintance) I am somehow never annoyed by Freud’s dreams. At one point Freud in the Introductory Lectures on Psycho-analysis admits as much, that the gift of the artist is precisely to transmute what would normally be a boring or even repulsive dream into an artwork. Irma’s Injection is no exception: it is a lurid dark comedy in which a parade of bumbling doctors prod and examine an unhealthy young woman. With its drug formulas written in the air and its images of dirty syringes, it revels in the unseemly but highly cinematic hothouse of the asymmetrical medical examination, anticipating a whole genre of body horror, but one wrapped up in the bodice of victorian propriety. Of course, in the last analysis what is finally under examination by the dream is Freud’s own desire.
Freud, in real life, had been treating Irma for hysterical anxiety but had broken off the treatment for summer vacation. He had just written out her case history the day before the dream.
I am coming up on my own summer vacation and the break in the treatment of my patients and I can tell you that, if the dream expresses an anxiety due to a certain kind of neglect (because vacation), the anxiety is real.
Here is the dream in the Strachey translation.
Dream of July 23rd—24th, 1895
A large hall—numerous guests, whom we were receiving.—Among them was Irma. I at once took her on one side, as though to answer her letter and to reproach her for not having accepted my ‘solution’ yet. I said to her: ‘If you still get pains, it's really only your fault.’ She replied: ‘If you only knew what pains I've got now in my throat and stomach and abdomen—it's choking me’ —I was alarmed and looked at her. She looked pale and puffy. I thought to myself that after all I must be missing some organic trouble. I took her to the window and looked down her throat, and she showed signs of recalcitrance, like women with artificial dentures. I thought to myself that there was really no need for her to do that.—She then opened her mouth properly and on the right I found a big white patch; at another place I saw extensive whitish grey scabs upon some remarkable curly structures which were evidently modelled on the turbinal bones of the nose.—I at once called in Dr. M., and he repeated the examination and confirmed it. … Dr. M. looked quite different from usual; he was very pale, he walked with a limp and his chin was clean-shaven.… My friend Otto was now standing beside her as well, and my friend Leopold was percussing her through her bodice and saying: ‘She has a dull area low down on the left.’ He also indicated that a portion of the skin on the left shoulder was infiltrated. (I noticed this, just as he did, in spite of her dress.) … M. said: ‘There's no doubt it's an infection, but no matter; dysentery will supervene and the toxin will be eliminated.’ … We were directly aware, too, of the origin of the infection. Not long before, when she was feeling unwell, my friend Otto had given her an injection of a preparation of propyl, propyls … propionic acid … trimethylamin (and I saw before me the formula for this printed in heavy type) … Injections of that sort ought not to be made so thoughtlessly. … And probably the syringe had not been clean.
