CARL PLETSCH
309
which he concludes the long paragraph justifying the use of his own
dreams as examples: "It is safe to assume that my readers too will
very soon find their initial interest in the indiscretions which I am
bound to make replaced by an absorbing immersion in the
psychological problems upon which they throw light. " By the time
he wrote this Freud certainly knew that precisely the opposite would
be the case. His use of his own dreams as examples, and particularly
the indiscretions entailed in analyzing them , would only stimulate
the reader's curiosity about the author-just as in psychoanalysis
every revelation made by the analyst stimulates the patient's fan–
tasy. The statement must therefore be interpreted-as Freud inter–
preted many dream statements-as the contradiction of what it
seems at first to indicate.
A remarkable sentence precedes the preamble and the dream–
text. Freud announces abruptly, "Now I must ask the reader to
make my interests his own for quite a while , and to plunge, along
with me, into the minutest details of my life; for a transference of this
kind is peremptorily demanded by our interest in the hidden mean–
ing of dreams." At the time of writing
The Interpretation of Dreams,
of
course, Freud had not yet fully developed his notion of the
transference; he uses the word in several different senses. But while
neither the term
Uebertragung
nor the concept of transference figures
very largely in the book, Freud uses it here in a provocative way that
approaches its later meaning . The signaled transference suggests
that the reader must enter into Freud's emotional life, even identify
with him. Given Freud's interpretation of the dream ofIrma's injec–
tion, this is an invitation to identify with the heroic explorer of the
personality, the creator of psychoanalysis.
The "preamble" presents the background of the dream:
Freud's partially successful treatment of a young woman well known
to his family (Irma), and the mild reproach of a junior colleague
(Otto), who apparently disapproved of Freud treating this patient
psychoanalytically . According to the preamble:
The patient was relieved of her hysterical anxiety but did not lose
all her somatic symptoms. At that time [1895] I was not yet quite
clear in my mind as to the criteria indicating that a hysterical
case history was finally closed, and I proposed a solution to the
patient which she seemed unwilling to accept.
Summer vacation interrupted the treatment at this point. Otto then
paid Freud a visit after spending part of his vacation with Irma and
