Irma's Injection, Dream of

Freud's dream of "Irma's injection" introduced the process of dream interpretation and, in a way, psychoanalytic technique as well. It is described in the second chapter of The Interpretation of Dreams, "The Method of Interpreting Dreams," and was reinterpreted many times by Freud's successors and biographers.

Early in the morning of July 24, 1895, Freud, then on vacation at the Hôtel Bellevue, near Vienna, had a dream about one of his patients, whom he called Irma. The manifest content of the dream can be summarized as..