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In “The interpretation of dreams” (1900), Freud refers to Ibsen as an example of how a playwright is certain to have a particular impact on the audience when he makes the primeval conflict between father and son the object of his drama. In the same book, he describes a dream he has had in norekda style, in which the concept formation “norekdal” represents a word condensation and a fusion of the names Nora and Ekdal, two figures in Ibsen's A Doll's House (1879) and The Wild Duck (1884), respectively.
Freud was fascinated by the wealth of deep psychological knowledge Ibsen displayed through his writings. He has been considered as one of Freud's most significant sources of inspiration, influencing and illustrating aspects of his psychoanalytical concepts (Anthi, 1982). Freud's (1915) study of Ibsen's Rosmersholm is an example of this. In this study, the tragedy of the principal character, Rebecca, is related to the realization of her forbidden oedipal and incestuous wishes.
When it dawns upon her that her previous lover, Dr. West, is really her father, she is overwhelmed by guilt and shame and throws herself into the waterfall, thus doing away with herself. Futher, in the case history of the Rat Man (1909), Freud writes that in spite of the patient's abundant associations, no light was shed upon the meaning of his great obsessive fear, until one day, the Rat-Wife in Ibsen's Little Eyolf came up in the treatment. Then it appeared that his obsessive fear of rats was attached to his repressed phantasies of being a biting beast like a rat.
In what follows, I will make an attempt to analyse his dream in norekdal style. It illustrates that Freud under certain circumstances was identified