Reflections on Freud's Dream of “Irma's Injection”

Ella Freeman Sharpe (1978) was one of the first analysts to investigate the unconscious motivations for choosing psychoanalysis as a profession. Writing in 1930, and making use of Melanie Klein's theories about infantile aggression, Sharpe said that the desire to heal the mind is a subtle form of annulling the anxieties that accompany the primitive wish to hurt and to kill. The decision to become a psychoanalyst is an attempt to confront, to tolerate, and to harness these terrifying early drives. Klein emphasized the importance of analyzing these drives in all patients. Sharpe reminded analysts of their essential identity with their patients by underlining the particularly prominent role of infantile aggression in the unconscious make-up of the psychoanalyst.

Superficially, the first psychoanalysis—Freud's self-analysis—appears to contradict Sharpe's theory. Freud's various remarks about his self-analysis were focused primarily on infantile sexual drives and their accompanying conflicts. His letters to Fliess, the nearest thing that we have to a transcript of his analysis, describe his growing awareness of his childhood attraction to his mother and his hostility toward his father—his Oedipus complex. Freud did recognize jealousy and competitive aggression, but the primitive