The Early Relationship between Sigmund Freud and Isidor Sadger: A Dream (1897) and A Letter (1902)1

The first reference of this essay is to a dream of Freud that consists of only one sentence. Freud writes:

On one occasion a medical colleague had sent me a paper he had written, in which the importance of a recent physiological discovery was, in my opinion, overestimated, and in which, above all, the subject was treated in too emotional a manner. The next night I dreamt a sentence which clearly referred to this paper: ‘It's written in a positively norekdal style. The analysis of the word caused me some difficulty at first. There could be no doubt that it was a parody of the [German] superlatives ‘kolossal and ‘pyramidal; but its origin was not so easy to guess. At last I saw that the monstrosity was composed of the two names ‘Nora’ and ‘Ekdal’ — characters in two well-known plays of Ibsen's. [A Doll's House and The Wild Duck]. Some time before, I had read a newspaper article on Ibsen by the same author whose latest work I was criticizing in the dream. (Freud 1900, p. 296)

This dream has been discussed extensively by Anthi (1990), Anzieu (1986) and Grinstein (1980). They in particular investigated the significance of the figures of Nora and Ekdal, as well as Freud's relationship to Ibsen. I will try to clarify another aspect of Freud's associations; those that refer to the ‘medical colleague’. Anthi, Anzieu and Grinstein have all commented on the identity of this colleague and agreed that it was Wilhelm Fliess who was referred to. In Fritz Wittels’ (1924) biography of Freud, however, I have found a passage that suggests another interpretation.

In the nineties, one of Freud's earliest collaborators, I. Sadger, sent Freud an essay extolling Flechsig's works. Freud considered the essay bombastic and, since Sadger had previously written upon Ibsen, Freud dreamed of a ‘norekdal’ style, the adjective being a condensation of ‘kolossal’ (preposterous), ‘Nora’, and ‘Ekdal’. (Wittels 1924, p. 76)