it was not thoughtful enough or else she would be cured. Felman summarizes the dream analysis exceptionally well when she states, “the Irma dream is not simply a description of Freud’s attempt at mastery; it is a description of the necessary failure of such an attempt” (90). The dream of the headstrong Irma, a woman who refuses his solutions, reflects Freud’s internal conflict. Despite Freud’s intelligent and “correct” analyses, he is impotent; when it comes to actually curing his patients, Freud’s injections “shoot blanks”.Freud’s preoccupation with his female patients’ resistance is reflected in the dream of Irma’s injection. However, beyond frustration with their recalcitrance, he is extremely concerned with their complaints. Upon this point, Shoshana Felman states:It would not be inappropriate to see the entire Irma dream as a dream, specifically, about female resistance, and about female complaint. Freud is indeed obsessed not just with Irma’s nonacceptance of his solution but, even more importantly, with her pain (99). The dream, as Freud sees it, is a way of displacing the blame of her pain onto someone else. The dream thus fulfils the wish that absolves his guilt over being at fault for her complaints. If the dream however, is about the female complaint and female pains, and Freud’s anxiety surrounds not only his impotence at curing these pains but also actively causing them, the dream reflects Fred’s anxiety that he is at fault, as a man, for the psychical problems women acquire. Freud’s dream therefore reflects his guilt surrounding the belief that man forces women into unjust gender roles.By means of condensation, the character of Irma also represents Freud’s pregnant wife. Both are resistant and disagreeable. As Freud states in a footnote, his wife, “was not one of my (Freud’s) patients, nor sho...
