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‘The dream of Irma's injection,’ also called the ‘Irma dream,’ occupies a special place in psychoanalysis. When Freud started to develop his theory in the second chapter The Interpretation of Dreams, it was the Irma dream that he related and analyzed. Freud set great store by it; it was his ‘specimen dream’ (Traummuster). “Do you suppose,” Freud (1954: 322) wrote to his friend Fliess after a visit to the Bellevue, a hotel where he had had this dream a few years earlier, “that some day a marble tablet will be placed on this house, inscribed with these words:
In this House, on July 24th, 1895 the Secret of Dreams was Revealed to Dr. Sigm. Freud.”
‘The dream of Irma's injection’ has been the subject of many reinterpretations.1 This may be due to Freud singling it out as the cornerstone for his dream theory. Freud also offered a profusion of associations while ignoring other elements, and repeatedly warned his readers that his account was not the whole story.
The piecemeal opening up of Freud's legacy of letters and documents also contributed to the feeling that The Interpretation of Dreams was a more complex book than Freud had revealed. Our understanding of Freud's intellectual development during the writing of the ‘dream book’ was greatly enhanced in 1950, when Ans den An-fdngen der Psychoanalyse [The Origins of Psychoanalysis], a