Some More Additional ‘Day Residues’: The First Review of Studien Uber Hysterie, Ilona Weiss and the Dream of Irma's Injection

Vacationing with his family ‘amid the scent of lilac and laburnum… acacia and jasmine’ at Bellevue, a villa just outside Vienna, Sigmund Freud kept himself abreast with the latest medical literature (Freud , pp. 417-119). When he picked up a copy of the Sunday 14 July 1895 number of the Wiener medizinischer Presse, the leading Viennese medical journal for the practising physician (Urban & Schwarzenberg 1966), he would have been struck by that issue's feuilleton. Appearing in that journal, which two years earlier had published his and Josef Breuer's preliminary communication, ‘Uber den psychischen Mechanismus hysterischer Phanomene’,1 was an essay, entitled ‘Studien Uber Hysterie’ and signed W. It provided what appears to be the first substantive response to the identically titled volume that Freud and Breuer had recently published. This rather favorable review of Studien uber Hysterie appeared months before those reported by Jones (1953b, pp. 252-53), Ellenberger (1970, p. 772, citing Umpfenbach, Bleuler, Strumpell, and Clarke all from 1896), Sulloway (1979, pp. 80-82, adding Alfred von Berger to the list of 1896 reviews),2 Kiell (1988, pp. 727-28),3 or Grubrich-Simitis (1997, p. 20).4