ABSTRACT
Freud, at times, pricked his hysteric patients with a needle to help him isolate and pinpoint the hysterogenic areas in their body, to better diagnose their illness and malaise. Freud's idea of "transference" was an elaboration of this early notion. The "abnormal response" to a given stimulus, Freud thought, was ultimately coded by an unconscious memory which reached back into the patient's childhood, tapping into a traumatic experience the ego was unable to process and treated therefore as "non arrivé". The guilt dimension of Freud's dream surfaced indirectly through the many reproaches voiced throughout the dream. Freud came to associate the "dirty needle" which featured in his Irma dream to the injection of morphine that he gave his elderly patient twice a day. In Freud's dream, traveling up the stairs three at a time gave a feeling of elation, underpinning a "mood of powerful and even exaggerated self-assertiveness".
