CARL PLETSCH
317
cent years and found somewhat inaccurate. It is simply not the case,
for example, that
The Interpretation of Dreams
went unreviewed and
unacknowledged. But it
is
remarkable that the seed of this myth of
the unrecognized Freud should already appear in the text of
The In–
terpretation
of
Dreams.
It is a curious thing that this text that estab–
lished the portrayal of Freud as the unrecognized genius should have
appeared in the very text for which he was to be recognized as a
genIUs .
Perhaps Freud portrayed himself (to himself at least) as the
unappreciated genius of psychotherapy as early as 1895, in the
dream of Irma's injection . Certainly he portrays himself as such in
the interpretation of the dream-text published in
The Interpretation of
Dreams
in 1899. Erik Erikson may be right in his speculation that
Freud dreamed this dream in order to analyze it and give credence
to his theory, but Freud
must
have written it down and analyzed it
for the rhetorical purpose of representing himself as the unrecog–
nized genius.
To make his journey, the dreamer/physician has had to put the
norms of his profession in abeyance. He had to suspend his
allegiance to the Hippocratic oath in favor of his quest for the solu–
tion to the riddle. This is the most dangerous terrain in the dream–
text as well as the interpretation, the point at which Freud seems to
take the greatest risk. It is the point at which he is most vulnerable,
the point where even the logic of interpretation falters and takes on
the characteristics of a dream. But dream-text and interpretation
demonstrate this to have been a risk worth taking. The mystery of
the patient's persisting symptoms is solved along with the riddle of
hysteria in the end. And doctor and patient may live, in the logic of
narrative structure, happily ever after.
Finally, merely to indicate that Freud was aware of the
mythical import of the dream of Irma's injection, I cite the famous
passage of Freud's letter to Wilhelm Fliess, dated June 12, 1900.
Nearly five years after he had dreamed it, and six months after the
publication of
The Interpretation of Dreams,
Freud and his family were
spending their vacation in the house in which he had originally
dreamed the dream of Irma's injection. From there he wrote to
Fliess,
Do you suppose that someday a marble tablet will be placed
on the house, inscribed with these words?
In this house, on July 24th, 1895
