Editorial

The historian is continually endangered by the fetishism of the fact. Without facts, our work is dust. Historians have to work hard to turn source materials into ‘facts’ and those ‘facts’ inhabit a historical world where tremors can suddenly render them unstable or make them mysteriously disappear into sinkholes. So when is a fact a fact? Facts in the history of psychoanalysis are the same as in any other historical domain, but with an additional twist: a dream-image, a hallucinatory experience or a rumour of a secret affair have a greater than usual significance because of the specific subject-matter of psychoanalysis. But what is the fact of the matter about a dream-image?

Take a classic example: the figure of the patient in Freud's dream of ‘Irma's injection’. Freud left enough clues as to her identity: she was a ‘recalcitrant’ patient; she was a widow; her family name (Familienname) more or less rhymed with ‘Ananas’. Surely that's enough for a smart detective! And then there's Freud's letter to Abraham, who had suspected that syphilis was behind the dream:

Sexual megalomania is hidden behind it, the three women, Mathilde, Sophie and Anna, are the three godmothers of my daughters, and I have them all! There would be one simple therapy for widowhood, of course. All sorts of intimate things, naturally. (Freud 1908, p. 21)

Now it's simple: ‘Irma’ is Anna Freud's godmother, Anna Hammerschlag-Lichtheim. What could be more factual than that? There are the crossword puzzle-clues in the dream and then there's independent corroboration from the dreamer, some thirteen years later, as to her identity. Let us call this the well-corroborated biographical fact of the matter about Irma's identity (Appignanesi & Forrester, 1992, 117-45).