The "Irma Injection" Dream:
Perceptanalytic and Freudian
Interpretations

Freud's dream of Irma's Injection is the first which he 'submitted to a detailed interpretation'; and so stands as a major event in the history of psychoanalysis. It is the 'Specimen Dream' which forms the centrepiece of The Interpretation of Dreams. Naturally, a great deal can be added to the account which Freud made public. The honesty of his analysis is unimpeachable: its limits and intentions frankly indicated: yet, through historical scholarship and historic distance, we are enabled to pursue the dream-thoughts as they run 'into the intricate network of our world of thought' (Freud 1900, 672) - to re-map the 'tangle' of that 'meshwork', bringing into relief a bluntly ad hominem reading (plain as the nose on Freud's face) - the figure/ground relationships of which, however, suddenly reverse on us, so that Freud fades back and is subsumed into the physiognomy of psychoanalysis itself.