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The “specimen dream” of psychoanalysis, the centerpiece of Freud's classic The Interpretation of Dreams, is the dream that stimulated his wish “that some day a marble tablet will be placed on the house” (where Freud dreamt this dream) inscribed with the words, “In This House, on July 24th, 1895 the Secret of Dreams was Revealed to Dr. Sigm. Freud” (Freud, 1900/1953, editor's footnote, p. 121). Immediately before narrating this dream, Freud makes some remarks about taking the risk of revealing intimate details of his personal life. He then beseeches his readers, “[a]nd now I must ask the reader to make my interests his own for quite a while, and to plunge, along with me, into the minutest
details of my life; for a transference of this kind is peremptorily demanded by our interest in the hidden meaning of dreams” (pp. 105–106).
Anyone taking up John Fletcher's Freud and the Scene of Trauma must be prepared to submit to what Freud requires of his readers. And so before turning to Fletcher's book, let's examine Freud's text and expectations. This is not simply an exercise in literary or textual criticism, but rather, we believe that Freud is here spelling out the essential task and the fundamental requirement of the analyst as clinician. In demanding that his reader “make my interest his own for quite a while,” Freud is asking no more and no less than what every patient asks of every analyst, and this may in fact be the most difficult aspect of being an analytic clinician, to listen to every minute detail of the patient's narrative with the same interest and intensity as if one were listening to the details of one's own life.
We suggest that it is not accidental that in the next words Freud uses the term “transference,” albeit not yet in its technically developed meaning. Freud has not yet formulated his ideas about transference; nevertheless, we suggest that here Freud is hinting at his dawning recognition of transference love. What is the secret o