CARL PLETSCH
313
So Freud's narrative is selective, as every narrative must be.
But what were the principles of selection? Of course one was didac–
tic-to select what would best convey his thesis about dreams being
the expressions of wishes. But treating his anxiety about Irma's per–
sisting symptoms as the motive of the dream permitted Freud to
make his own journey in discovering psychotherapy to be the nar–
rative theme of his interpretation . On the first page of the interpreta–
tion, Freud comments upon how the dream blames Irma for her
symptoms , and notes that:
It was my view at that time (though I have since recognized it as
a wrong one) that my task was fulfilled when I had informed a
patient of the hidden meaning of his symptoms: I considered that
I was not responsible for whether he accepted the solution or
not-though this was what success depended on. I owe it to this
mistake, which I have now fortunately corrected, that my life
was made easier at a time when , in spite of all my inevitable ig–
norance, I was expected to produce therapeutic successes.
This provides a plot to Freud's career as an investigator-creating a
story of the hero correcting early mistakes made in ignorance. It sug–
gests, furthermore, that his ignorance and therapeutic failures had
the constructive function of permitting him to persist in pursuit of
the solution to the riddle of hysteria.
The dream-text announces that the dreamer was "alarmed at
the idea that [he
1
had missed an organic illness . " This, he notes, "is
a perpetual source of anxiety to a specialist whose practice is almost
limited to neurotic patients and who is in the habit of attributing to
hysteria a great number of symptoms which other physicians treat as
organic . " At that time, of course, and in 1895 when he dreamed the
dream, Freud was practicing a wholly unorthodox and unrecognized
therapy. It is safe to say that he was the
only
specialist in
psychoanalysis. Therefore the anxiety he mentions is not the simple
concern of a physician who might mistakenly interpret a symptom in
the context of his specialty when it ought
to
be treated by another
specialist. It was the anxiety of a maverick who could expect his col–
leagues to reproach him for engaging in psychotherapy at all. This
would have been the self-evident meaning of this passage to the
medical and scientific readers Freud had in mind when he wrote
The Interpretation oj Dreams .
Thus there is a curious lapse of logic
when the paragraph continues,
