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In this house on July 24th, 1895, the Secret of Dreams was revealed to Dr. Sigmund Freud
In a letter to Fliess on June 12, 1900, Freud (1887-1902) wrote, “Do you suppose that some day a marble tablet will be placed on the house, inscribed with these words:” (p. 322). He was referring to the above inscription and the summer place, Bellevue, where he had interpreted the now-famous dream of Irma's injection. Freud had dealt to some extent with his own and his patients' dreams before; however, this was the first dream he subjected to a complete and exhaustive interpretation. He saw Belevue as the place where “… the Secret of Dreams was Revealed.” As Schur (1972) put it, “… that day, July 24, 1895, represented a milestone in a development of the new science” (p. 85). Certainly, the interpretation of the Irma dream was one of Freud's important creative acts. The noteworthiness of the analysis of this dream has also been discussed by Erikson (1954), Leavitt (1956), Grinstein (1980), Keiper and Stone (1982), and others.
The Irma dream is reported in detail in “The Interpretation of Dreams” (1900), and although Freud, admittedly, prudently stopped short along some of his lines of association, he still provided a rich account that enables us to appreciate the circumstances in which the dream occurred and the impact events had on him at the time. We, therefore, are given an opportunity to gain some understanding of the psychological conditions that favored this scientific, creative act. While this information is not likely to answer questions relating to the psychological bases of creativity, it may