ught to assuage his inadequacy by placing blame on other characters in his dreams. In the dream of Irma’s injection, “Irma, a young widow, is characterized in her dream by her complaint (her pains), and her resistance, her unwillingness to accept Freud’s solution” (Felman, 77). Freud is fixated on a disobedient patient. The dream is a condensation of several different defenses that absolve Freud’s responsibility for her pains. In one section of the dream analysis, Freud actually blames his patient for her pains: “I reproached Irma for not having accepted my solution; I said: ‘If you still get pains it’s your own fault.’” (Freud,107). However, since the dream allows Freud to escape all responsibility, it demonstrates his anxiety of being at fault.In his Introductory Lectures, Freud explains how his innocence in the dream reflects the opposite, his belief that he is responsible, when he discusses an aspect of dream condensation: “Opposites are especially close to one another in associations and that in the unconscious they coalesce” (272). By means of condensation, an aspect of a dream can symbolize several different and even opposing meanings. In the dream, the dirty syringe that infects Irma reflects this idea . It represents both opposing sides of Freud’s conflict over his inability to cure because it refers to two opposing episodes in his professional life. On the one hand, it refers to a patient that Freud gave several injections to with no ill effect. Conversely, it also refers to a patient, Mathilde, that he inadvertently killed when he gave her an injection that was seen as harmless at the time. Whereas an injection into a woman can represent sexual prowess, because of the dream work’s condensation processes, the needle symbolizes Freud’s medical impotence. The “thoughtless injection” symbolizes his diagnosis of Irma; ...
