ABSTRACT
The Irma Dream is probably the most famous of Sigmund Freud’s dreams, brilliantly deconstructed by Freud himself, and the subject of much further exegesis by a host of subsequent investigators. Mourning and dreaming must have been constantly “feeding” his self-analysis with turbulent affect and memory. Mourning seems to insist on a brutal confrontation with reality; dreaming seems to need to disguise truth in an elaborate finery of self-deception. There is one other “incident” prior to Freud’s discovery of the Oedipus complex that is analogous to winking and closing the eyes or keeping them insightfully open. From a developmental point of view the original resolution of the Oedipus complex in children at approximately six years of age relies mainly on repression and identification to steer the Oedipal child out of seemingly unresolvable conflict into the relative quiescence of latency. Freud was dispatching “letters” to Fliess that contain not only a personal note but also “drafts” of Freud’s most original discoveries.
