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The things which I have seen I now can see no more…Whither is it fled the visionary gleam? Where is it now, the glory and the dream?
—William Wordsworth
After 90 years, Sigmund Freud's dream of July 23rd-24th, 1895 continues in its distinction as having “received the greatest study in the psychoanalytic literature” (Grinstein, 1968, p. 22), perhaps throughout all history, and certainly one that marks the birth of a continuing epoch by its founder:
Do you suppose that some day a marble tablet will be placed on the house, inscribed with these words?—‘In This House, on July 24th, 1895 the Secret of Dreams was Revealed to Dr. Sigm. Freud’ (Freud, 1887-1904, p. 417).
In the first 60 years since the dream, its interpretation enchanted readers on its own merit without any attempts to approach those areas which Freud left uninterpreted. In the last 30 years, however, several have questioned many of the theoretical issues of Freud's dream theory via the Irma dream, almost as if the “specimen dream” itself were the fulcrum on which Freudian dream theory rests, rather than a demonstration of a method.
Freud's treatment of the Irma dream, however, was intended to demonstrate the major thesis that dreams are the fulfillment of a wish, while other inter-connecting facets of the theory were illustrated elsewhere in The Interpretation of Dreams. Those who review the dream continue to “spend much more time over it, derive further information from it (Schur, 1966; Hartman, 1983; Erikson, 1954; Elms, 1980;