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In my Freud Lecture given before the New York Psychoanalytic Society in 1964, I presented a condensed over-view of Freud's evolving attitude towards death, from his persistent preoccupation with the idea that he might die at certain ages to the supreme serenity and heroism with which he faced sixteen years of suffering from cancer, and ultimately, his own death. I indicated then that the clue to our understanding of this evolution could be found in Freud's self-analysis, and therefore in that phase of his life generally known as the “Fliess period.” My paper on “Some Additional ‘Day Residues ‘of’ The Specimen Dream of Psychoanalysis,’” published in the Heinz Hartmann Festschrift, dealt with one episode of this period. Because this presentation is intrinsically a continuation of that paper, I will begin with a brief summary of it.
On July 24, 1895, Freud carried out the first systematic interpretation of one of his own dreams, known as “the dream of Irma's injection.” The months preceding this dream had given rise to the first crisis in his relationship to Fliess. By that time, Fliess had developed his hypothesis of the “nasal reflex neurosis,” which claimed that a host of physical symptoms were caused by pathology of the nose and the sinuses and could be cured either by surgery or application of cocaine to the nasal mucosa.
Freud was in the habit of sending to Fliess, for examination and treatment, many of his analytic patients who suffered from such symptoms. In February of 1895, Fliess came to Vienna to operate on a patient of Freud's named Irma. Subsequently she developed pain, nosebleeds, fever, and a putrid secretion. Freud finally called in a consultant, who discovered to everyone's horror that Fliess had left a large packing of iodoform