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The dream of Irma's injection, that first prototypical psychoanalytic dream that Freud had in the night of 23 to 24 July 1895 and that he accorded a central place, with a paradigmatic interpretation, in his Interpretations of Dreams, is probably the most debated dream in the entire history of psychoanalysis. It seems that this dream has such a distinctive and ultimately indefinable quota of condensation that the interpretive possibilities are almost endless. The publication of Reicheneder's book presented here represents a special moment in the course of these interpretations: never yet, in my opinion, has Freud's dream been so thoroughly and carefully examined and interpreted in terms of both the history of science and psychoanalysis. Reicheneder is therefore fulfilling for the time being a desideratum of research dating right back to the early 1950s, formulated by Erik H. Erikson, which is that the dream's numerous striking references to specific diseases, somatic configurations and medical methods remain to be understood. Yet Reicheneder's medical-historical reconstruction is not pursuing a merely antiquarian interest; it is embedded in the precise analysis of Freud's specific relational constellations and psychic situation at the time of the dream—and on the way Reicheneder sheds a surprising light on the preconditions for the creative founding of a science in general. His method draws closely on the procedure of dream interpretation developed by Freud: he interprets and contextualises the individual elements of the manifest dream and its associations, which refer to medical research—these are the concepts of injection, infection and dysentery, as well as tuberculosis, diphtheria and pyaemia—not in a general way but in detail.
Reicheneder begins by explaining the kind of progress that is connected with the interpretation of the dream of Irma's injection. Freud was then able to show that with the method of free association in principle every dream can be systemati