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I find it useful to comment on the correspondence between Henry Cohen and Frank R. Hartman on the Specimen Dream (This Journal, 35:525-8) since an article of mine on the same subject appeared simultaneously with Dr. Hartman's in the Kohut memorial volume, The Future of Psychoanalysis(1983). Neither Hartman nor I were aware of the other's article before publication.
My stand is almost completely in accord with Cohen's, but I believe it would be more fundamental to state briefly my own thesis. The day residue would be the desire to consult a doctor about a patient whom we can now say was Anna Hammerschlag, a point on which I would agree with Hartman. In the course of the dream the patient changes from Anna, the rosy widow, to a pale and puffy woman, with Freud making the comment, "I began to suspect that someone else was being substituted for her" (S.E. 4, p. 109). This "someone," as I suggest from the evidence (largely to be found in Schur (1966) also) was Emma Eckstein. Surely, Irma could be could be a condensation of two conflicting lines of thought!
The real problem that disturbed Freud was neither woman, but the almost broken relationship between him and his intimate friend, Fliess, which centered on the malpractice of Fliess with Freud's patient, Emma, still in treatment with Freud. It can be stated with certainty that she was all but forgotten by them! The dream problem was Freud's alleged malpractice (with Anna Hammerschlag) which he solves by shifting the blame to the hapless Oscar Rie. Schur finds the wish-fulfillment here was to exculpate Fliess' malpractice with Emma, with which I agree.
The first act of Freud after he made his epochal interpretation of the dream, and understood it, was to break the silence between himself and Fliess and notify him cheerfully that he would be coming to Berlin for a sinus operation by Fliess, as the latter demanded. There was no more obvious way of declaring his confidence in the offended friend. In the dream, as the