The Irma Dream, Self-Analysis, and Self-Supervision

Abstract

The Irma dream has special historical significance. Erikson and others have placed it in historical, social, and cultural context. The manifest dream was elaborated in terms of analytic surface with analysis of form and content, patterns and movement in time and space, etc. There are, however, limits to textual reinterpretations. Further psychobiographic consideration of the Irma dream highlights issues of transference, countertransference and their sources in unconscious conflict and trauma. The Irma dream was initially a secret dream which represented the initiation of a self-analytic and supervisory process. Freud's revealing the dream and imagining the commemoration of the discovery of “the secret of the dream” marked the termination of formal self-analysis within analysis interminable.