Story of Psychology - Morton Hunt [113]
Freud arrived at this view after he first analyzed a dream of his own. In July 1895, he dreamed about “Irma,” a young woman he was then treating. The dream is complicated and Freud’s analysis of it very long (over eleven pages). In brief, he meets Irma in a large hall where guests are arriving and learns from her that she has been having choking pains in her throat, stomach, and abdomen; fears that he has incompetently overlooked some organic trouble; and after many other details, discovers that his friend Otto, a physician, had given Irma an injection with an unclean syringe and that this was the source of her trouble.
Pursuing the real meanings of the many components of the dream through free association, Freud recalled that the previous day he had met his friend Oscar Rie, a pediatrician who knew Irma, and who had said to him, “She’s better, but not quite well.” Freud had felt annoyed; he had taken this to be veiled criticism, meaning that he had been treating Irma with only partial success. In the dream, he disguised the truth by turning Oscar Rie into Otto, changing Irma’s remaining neurotic symptoms into physical ones, and making Otto responsible for her condition—unlike himself, who was always scrupulous about the cleanliness of needles he used. Freud’s conclusions:
Otto had in fact annoyed me by his remarks about Irma’s incomplete cure, and the dream gave me my revenge by throwing the reproach back on to him. The dream acquitted me of responsibility for Irma’s condition by showing that it was due to other factors… The dream represented a particular state of affairs as I should have wished it to be. Thus its content was the fulfillment of a wish and its motive was a wish. 24
Through ruthless self-examination of his own less than creditable motives in the dream, Freud had discovered a technique of incomparable value. Within the next five years he analyzed over a thousand dreams of his patients and reported in Interpretation that the method was one of the most useful tools of psychoanalytic treatment and of research on the workings of the unconscious mind.
The use of psychoanalytic procedures for research purposes has been much criticized as methodologically unsound. Free association leads the patient and analyst to an interpretation of a dream, but how can one prove that the interpretation is correct? In a few cases there may be historical evidence that a trauma, reconstructed from a dream symbol, did in fact occur, but in most cases, as in Freud’s Irma dream, there is no way to prove objectively that the interpretation has revealed the real dream content.
Yet as anyone knows who has ever interpreted his or her dreams in therapy, there comes a moment in the effort when one feels a shock of recognition, an epiphany, a sense of having stumbled on emotional truth. In the end, dream analysis is authenticated by the analysand’s own response—“Yes! This must be the true meaning of it because it feels true”—and because that response enables him or her to begin grappling with the problem that generated the dream.
In Freud’s case, free association and dream analysis led him to just such experiences of illumination and rescued him from a serious scientific error. Very early in his practice of psychotherapy, he suspected that sexual difficulties were at the basis of many or most neurotic disorders. He might have got that idea from the Zeitgeist. Although Viennese society was still thoroughly prudish and hypocritical about sexuality,