ABSTRACT
Ironically, however, Sigmund Freud’s interpretation of his own Irma dream owes little or nothing to his own disguise-censorship dream theory. The insertion of Freudianism into the humanities has accentuated the antiscientism of many humanists and has thus fostered an unfortunate division of the intellectual world that precisely mirrors the neurology-psychiatry split. As a crypto-Freudian who still believes in dream decoding, he is an unwelcome fellow traveler. Freud, to his credit, had an anxious dream about Irma in which he felt chagrined, on examining her throat, to have missed the diagnosis of diphtheria, in those days only slightly better understood than the unconscious mind or sleep and dreams. The most serious aspect of the current misunderstanding concerns the mistaken belief that activation-synthesis asserts that dreams are meaningless and that the physiology of REM is the whole story.
