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THE EMBODIED IMAGINATION INSTITUTE LIBRARY
EIO Bibliography
Paper - The Dirty Needle by Robert Bosnak
EIO Bibliography
The books starred are suggested reading. In addition, throughout our work together we will be exploring passages to texts that present as a conundrum.
1. Abram, David. The Spell of the Sensuous. Vintage Books, 1997.
2. Adams, Michael Vannoy. The Multicultural Imagination. Routledge, 1996.
3. A Magic Still Dwells. Edited by Kimberly Patton and Benjamin C. Ray, University of California Press, 2000.
4. *Avens, Robert. Imagination is Reality. Spring Publications, 1980. [Out of Print and being reprinted. It will be available at Barnes and Noble in April, 2003. It can also be purchased at www.half.com - ebay's book sales.]
5. *Barfield, Owen. Saving the Appearances. Wesleyan University Press, 1995.
6. Bachelard, Gaston. The Poetics of Reverie. Beacon Press, 1960.
7. Bachelard, Gaston. The Poetics of Space. Beacon Press, 1958.
8. Bachelard, Gaston. The Psychanalysis of Fire. Beacon Press, 1964
9. Barrett, Deirdre (edited by). Trauma and Dreams. Harvard University Press, 1996.
10. Bomberg, Philip M. Standing in the Spaces. The Analytic Press, 1998.
11. *Bomberg, Philip M. "On Being One's Dream: Some Reflections On Robert Bosnak's 'Embodied Imagination'". Contemporary Psychoanalysis, Vol. 39, No. 4(2003); pp.697-710.
12. Bosnak, Robert. Christopher's Dreams: Dreaming and Living with Aids. Delta Publishers, 1989. [Out of print but available at www.barnesandnoble.com under out of
print books and at www.alwynbookscouts.com
13. Bosnak, Robert. The Little Course on Dreams. Shambala, 1986.
14. *Bosnak, Robert. "Embodied Imagination". Contemporary Psychoanalysis, Vol. 39, No. 4(2003); pp.683-695.
15. Bosnak, Robert. Tracks in the Wilderness of Dreaming. Bantum Doubleday/Dell Publishing Group, 1996. [Out of Print but available at www.amazon.com
under out of print books and www.alibris.com and www.abebooks.com
16. Bryant, Dorothy. The Kin Ata Are Waiting for You. Moon Books/Random House, 1971. [This is a novel]
17. Buber, Martin, (Ronald G. Smith -- translator). I and Thou. T. and T. Clark, 2000.
18. Cassirer, Ernst. ( Susanne K. Langer –translator). Language and Myth. Dover Publiactions, 1953.
19. Chettick, William C. Imaginal Worlds. State University of New York press, 1994.
20. Corbin, Henry. Creative Imagination in the Sufism of Ibn 'Anabi. Bollingen Series XCI. Princeton University Press, 1969. [Out of print but available at www.barnesandnoble.com Out of Print books]
21. Corbin, Henry. "Mundus Imaginalis or The Imaginary and the Magical". Condensed paper delivered at Colloquium on Symbolism in Paris in June, 1964. Cahiers Internationaux de Symbolism 6, Brussels, 1964. pp. 2-26.
22. Cowan, James. Messengers of the Gods. Vintage Books, Random House, 1993. [Out of print but available at www.amazon.com out of print books]
23. Damasio, Antonio. The Feeling of What Happens. Harcourt Brace & Co., 1999.
24. Damasio, Antonio. Descartes Error . N.Y., Morrow/Avon, 1995. [This book is out of print but can be found at www.barnesandnoble.com Out Of Print books
25. Deleuze, Gilles and Guattari, Felix. Anti-Oedipus - Capitalism and Schizophrenia. University of Minnesota Press. 1985.
26. Dillon, M.C. Merleau-Ponty's Ontology. Northwestern University Press, 1997.
27. *Doi, Takeo. The Anatomy of Dependence. Kodansha International, 1971.
28. *Eliade, Mircea. The Forge and the Crucible. University Chicago Press, 1978.
29. Elkin, A. P. Aboriginal Men Of High Degree. Inner Traditions,1997.
30. Fabricius, Johannes. Alchemy. Diamond Books, 1976.[Out of print but can be found at www.bookfinder.com
31. Giegerich, Wolfgang. The Soul's Logical Life. Peter Lang, 1998.
32. Guggenbuhl - Craig, Adolf. Power in the Helping Professions. Spring Publications, 1971. [Out of Print but can be found at www.amazon.com in out of print books]
33. Harpur, Patrick. Daimonic Reality. Pine Winds Press, 2003.
34. Hartmann, Ernest. Dreams and Nightmares.Plenum Trade, 1998.
35. Hillman, James. Dream Animals. Chronicle Books, 1997.
36. *Hillman, James. Re-Visioning Psychology. Perennial Library/Harper and Row, Publishers, 1975.
37. *Hillman, James. The Dream and the Underworld. Harper and Row, New York, 1979.
38. *His Hawaiian Majesty Kalakaua. The Legends and Myths of Hawaii. Charles E. Tuttle Company, 1972.
39. Jung, C.G. Mysterium Conunctionis. Vol. 14 of the Collected Works of C.G. Jung. 2nd edition. Bollingen Series XX. Princeton University Press, 1970.
40. *Jung, C.G. The Psychology of the Transference. The Practice of Psychotherapy. Vol. 16 of the Collected Works of C.G.Jung. 2nd edition. Bollingen Series XX. Princeton University Press, 1966.
42. *Junkin, Elizabeth Darby, editor. South African Passage. Fulcrum, Inc. Golden Colorado, 1987.
43. Hobson, J. Allan. Dreaming. Oxford, 2002.
44. *Jung, C. G. Dream Analysis. Bollingen Series XCIX, Princeton University Press, 1984.
45. Kalsched, Donald. The Inner World of Trauma.Routledge, 1996.
46. *Kaplan-Solms, Karen and Mark Solms. Case Studies in Neuro-Psychoanalysis. Karnac Publishers, 2002.
47. Langer, Susanne K. Philosophy in a New Key. Harvard University Press, 1948.
48. Lakoff, George and Mark Johnson. Philosophy in the Flesh. Basic Books. 1999.
49. *Le Doux, Joseph. The Emotional Brain. Touchstone Book, 1996.
50. *Le Doux, Joseph. The Synaptic Self: How Our Brain Becomes Who We Are. Pan Macmillan Book, 2002.
51. *Liliuokalani. Hawaii's Story by Hawaii's Queen.Charles E. Tuttle Company, 1964.
52. *Luomala, Katherine. Voices on the Wind. Bishop Museum Press, 1955.
53. Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. The Primacy of Perception. Northwestern University Press, 1964.
54. *Otto, Walter F. Dionysus: Myth and Culture. Spring Publications, 1995.
55. Pace-Schott, Edward F. (editor), Mark Blagrove (editor), Stevan Harnad (editor), Mark Solms (editor). Sleep and Dreamimg. Cambridge University Press, 2002. .
56. *Player, Ian. Zulu Wilderness - Shadow and Soul. Fulcrum Publishing, Golden Colorado, 1998.
57. Roob, Alexander. The Hermetic Museum: Alchemy and Mysticism. Taschen, 1997. [Difficult to find. Can be found at www.bookfinder.com
58. Scholem, Gershom. Major Trends in Jewish Mysticism. Knopf Publishing Group, 1995.
59. Schwartz - Salant, Nathan. The Mystery of Human Relationship. Routledge,1998.
60. Searles, Harold F. Collected Papers on Schizophrenia and Related Subjects. Karnac Books; Reprint Edition, 1993.
61. Searles, Harold F. Countertransference and Related Subjects: Selected Papers. International Universities Press, Inc., 1996.
62. Shafton, Anthony. Dream Reader. State University Of New York Press, 1995.
63. Shaw, Gregory. Theurgy and Soul. The Pennsylvania State University Press, 1995.
64.Solms, Mark. Neuropsychology of Dreams. Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, Publishers, 1997.
65. Sonenberg, Janet. Dreamwork for Actors. Routledge, 2003.
66. Stein, Robert. Incest and Human Love. Spring Publications,1973.
67. *Stephen, Michele. A'aisa's Gifts: A Study of Magic and Self. University of California Press, 1995.
68. *Sternberg, Esther M. The Balance Within. W. H. Freeman & Co., New York, 2000. [Out of print but available at www.amazon.com out of print books
69. *Tacey, David. Edge of the Sacred - Transformation in Australia. Harper, Collins, Blackburn; Australia, 1997. [This book is out of print but can be found at www.bookfinder.com and www.alibris.com
70. *Taussig, Michael. Mimesis and Alterity: A Particular History of the Senses. Routledge, 1992.
71. *Taylor, Mark. C. The Moment of Complexity. University of Chicago Press, 2003.
72. The Diamond Sutra and the Sutra of Hui-Neng. Translated by A.F. Price and Wong Moa-lam. Shambala, 1990.
73. Tick, Edward. The Practice of Dream Healing. Quest Books, 2001.
74. Trismosin, Solomon. Splendor Solis. Yogi Publication Society,1582. [This is available in many different translations]
75. van der Kolk, Bessel. Psychological Trauma. American Psychiatric Press, 1987.
76. Varela, Francisco J., Evan Thompson and Eleanor Rosch. The Embodied Mind. MIT Press, Cambridge, Mass., 1993.
77. White, David Gorden. The Alchemical Body. University of Chicago, 1996.
78. *Yates, Frances Amelia. The Art of Memory. University of Chicago Press, 1974.
79. *Waldrop, M. Mitchell. Complexity. A Touchstone Book, New York, 1992.
Go to www.cyberdreamwork.com/books.htmlto find the Amazon.com and AddAll Search Engines.
Books can also be purchased from Kevin Connerton if you e-mail him
at alwynbook@earthlink.com
Go to the following websites for wonderful information:
www.neuro-psychoanalysis.org
www.psychematters.com
www.pbs.org/wnet/brain/history/index.html
THE DIRTY NEEDLE
Images of the Inferior Analyst
ROBERT BOSNAK
(Cambridge, Mass.)
The Dream of Psychoanalysis
"Here was revealed on July 24, 1895 to Dr. Sigm. Freud the mystery of the dream.1 Thus Freud imagined a marble plaque on the house where the dream came to him: the dream of psychoanalysis, a meeting with Irma. This is the core dream in Freud's Interpretation of Dreams. Freud says of it: "This is the first dream that I subjected to a thorough [eingehend] interpretation."2 This dream, frequently referred to as "the Dream of Irma's Injection," is usually assumed to mark the beginning of modern dream analysis because Freud used it as a "specimen" to demonstrate his method. The dream itself is treated as incidental, as if Freud could have chosen any dream to initially demonstrate method. For Freud and psychoanalysts after him, the breakthrough lies in the interpretation, not the dream itself.
To me, however, the dream is central and the interpretations incidental. I take the Irma dream as the creation myth of psychoanalysis: a revelation in the sense of epiphany to the scribe Sigmund Freud; a genetic code of psychoanalysis clad in the day residues of the First Analyst.
Concerning initial dreams, Jung writes: "It frequently happens at the very beginning of the treatment that a dream will reveal to the doctor, in broad perspective, the whole programme of the unconscious."4 If the dream of Irma's injection is taken as the archetypal revelation of psychoanalysis, revealing the whole program of its unconscious, and not only as an expression of the person Sigmund Freud, then the images portray a preview in nuce of the psychoanalytic domain: the initial dream of psychoanalysis. In the metaphor of current genetics, a genetic code is a blueprint to be repeated in each ensuing cell; thus psychoanalysis would be an endless variation on the Irma dream.
The Dream of Irma's Injection, July 23-24, 1895
A great hall-a number of guests, whom we are receiving-among them Irma, whom I immediately take aside, as though to answer her letter, and to reproach her for not yet accepting the "solution." I say to her: "If you still have pains, it is really only your own fault."-She answers: "If you only knew what pains I have now in the throat, stomach and abdomen-I am choked by them. " I am startled and look at her. She looks pale and puffy. I think that after all I must be overlooking some organic affection. I take her to the window and look into her throat. She offers some resistance to this, like a woman who has a set of false teeth. I think, surely, she doesn't need them [that].-The mouth then opens wide, and I find a large white spot on the right, and elsewhere I see extensive grayish-white scabs adhering to curiously curled formations, which are evidently shaped like the turbinal bones of the nose.-I quickly call Dr. M, who repeats the examination and confirms it.... Dr. M. looks quite unlike his usual self; he is very pale, he limps, and his chin is clean-shaven [beardless].... Now my friend Otto, too, is standing beside her, and my friend Leopold percusses her covered chest [on top of the bodice], and says: "She has a dullness below, on the left," and also calls attention to an infiltrated portion of the skin on the left shoulder (which I can feel, in spite of the dress).... M says: "There's no doubt that it's an infection, but it doesn't matter; dysentery will follow [supervene] and the poison will be eliminated." . . . We know, too, precisely how the infection originated. My friend Otto, not long ago, gave her, when she was feeling unwell, an injection of a preparation of pro- pyl ... propyls ... propionic acid ... trimethylamin (the formula of which I see before me, printed in heavy type) .... One doesn't give such injections so rashly.... Probably, too, the syringe [Spritze] was not clean.5
Birthday Reception: In his associations to the dream, Freud says that this reception6 is for the birthday of his spouse. The creation myth starts out in a great hall where many figures are received to celebrate a day of birth. The day of birth of the spouse of Analyst, his feminine partner for life. Psychoanalysis, Freud's spouse for life, in statu nascendi. As we witness the creation of psychoanalysis, the day of birth of the spouse, we meet the dramatis personae, the characters in this myth: Freud, First Analyst, Archanalyst; Irma, Psyche-in-Analysis; and later, three other Doctor figures. Among them the drama of psychoanalysis is conceived.
The Relatives: In the background of Irma, visible only in the preamble to the dream, are her relatives who are described as the ones who don't like the treatment. The natural solution in which Psyche-in-Analysis exists, her close kin, resists analysis, indicating the fear that the natural, familiar soul has of analysis and her desire to resist it.
Therefore, the first movement Archanalyst makes with Psyche-in-Analysis is one of separation ("Irma, whom I immediately take aside"). The exterior light Archanalyst has shed on Psyche-in-Analysis ("I take her to the window") is resisted, not only by Psyche herself ("she offers some re- sistance to this"), but by her natural intimi as well. This illustrates Jung's image of the opus contra naturam.
Medical Quaternio: Our creation myth shows four medical figures; imagine them, these masculine medical attitudes, grouped around Psyche. Of course, there is Archanalyst, who says in his associations to the dream: "It is as if I looked for each occasion to reproach myself for a lack of medical conscientiousness." Below, when we discuss the images of inferiority, we'll see why.
Then there is Dr. M. In the preamble he is described as an authority. This figure is Joseph Breuer, the authoritative voice in matters of pathology and prognosis ("There's no doubt that it's an infection ... dysentery will follow and the poison will be eliminated"). In the case of psychoanalysis, however, this diagnostic and prognostic authority is limp and his chin shaven of the beard of virility. The authoritative judgment in analysis is limp, uneven, and not penetrating, lacking phallic dignity.
Leopold is the conscientious, observant perspective, the one who looks carefully at the phenomena. He is the one attitude who, through careful observation of Psyche-in-Analysis, discovers the nature of the pain.
Finally there is Otto, our healer who causes the iatrogenic disease. If we take the Irma dream as the initiation dream that is our creation myth, then we must see how each of these four attitudes is active in our therapy with psyche. The one who feels he's done something wrong, the one who limply states what's the matter and where it's going, the one who carefully observes, and most of all our therapist who makes psyche sick. Each of them seems to be a necessary component in our drama.
Psyche Covered: "Leopold percusses her covered chest" (literally: over her bodice"). Of course we are in victorian Vienna. But since we fantasize about each image in the dream as if it mattered to our psychoanalytic initiation, we can here disregard history and look at mythical image. Two implications arise from Irrna's bodice: first, Psyche-in-Analysis is always under cover. We never see her unveiled; Psyche, a dance of endless veils. This ends the hope that we will see what is really going on. We must sense it underneath the cover-up. Then our language must cover what it tries to reveal, and all clear descriptions as to the true nature of psychic reality are dubious. A bodice of myth is woven around Psyche. Second, there is material between Psyche and Analyst. The work of analysis goes through the material. The material is formed by the sexual taboo between Psyche and Analyst. This taboo is necessary since, as we will see below, the nature of their relationship is one of dirty sexuality. The taboo leads this porno-cros over from the literal naked enactment to the vivid sexual imagination of the transference, most clearly described by Jung in his Psychology of the Transference. This taboo on naked touch, on direct sexual contact in our creation myth, indicts against naked sexuality as therapy.
"Solution": "reproach her for not yet accepting the "solution." When Oedipus, Freud's central hero, is asked a riddle by the Sphinx, he knows the solution. And knowing the solution to the riddle is the doorway to the incest. Riddle and solution belong to mother and incest. Psyche-in-Analysis does not accept the solution Archanalyst has found for the riddle of her illness. His Sherlock Holmes fails to unlock her doors. It is Archanalyst who does not understand the meaning of the word "solution" in the mysteries of psyche. Mother poses riddles; psyche is mysterious. For Psyche-in-Analysis "solution" means turning into water, the stinking waters of dysenteric diarrhea that will discharge what poisons her.
In the Psychology of the Transference in the chapter called "Diving into the Bath" [CW 16, §454 (my translation)], Jung says: "this diving into the 'sea' means solutio. Dissolution in the physical sense and ... at the same time the solution to a problem. It is to be placed back into the dark initial state.... This stinking water contains all in itself, of which it has need." With the problem of solutio we have reentered the original Greek meaning of the word "analysis": the process of dissolution. Dissolution into stinking water; dysentery.
And, as Jung stresses in the same paragraph, it is the waters from below that cause the process of dissolution. The waters from below rise and dissolve the fixed positions, the fixed boundaries, the clear distinctions. This intimates that we are dealing, not with a distant and clean process of clear vision and detached treatment, but with a dirty one where the distinctions between psyche and analyst dissolve. Both are drenched in the stench of stinking water, the experience of the low. Being dissolved in the feelings of lowly stench is the experience of the inferior: feeling lower than low. This feeling of inferiority is the experiential counterpart to the initiation from below.
Images of the Inferior Analyst
In this section are collected those moments in our story of genesis in which Archanalyst, or one of his colleagues, is shown as inferior. One of these images we already referred to: limping, beardless Dr. M. As the authoritative analyst is not of strong posture and manly beard, but limps, devoid of virile regalia (as a beard in 1895 would allude to), so the analytical authority is not firm and of masculine superiority, but drags its feet and is of inferior dignity. This image is repeated in the preamble: "In the Summer of 1895 1 had treated psychoanalytically a young lady who was an intimate friend of mine and my family. It will be understood that such a (lit: mixture of relationships] can become the source of manifold excitations for the doctor, especially the psychotherapist. The personal interest of the doctor is greater, his authority less."
Archanalyst and Psyche-in-Analysis are intimate already before the onset of analysis. They are familiar to each other, calling each other du, before becoming the constituents of psychoanalysis. They are involved in a mixture of relationships, as in alchemy: a massa confusa. There is no clear single relationship but an unnerving mix-up. Any attempt to remain disengaged and exclusively professional seems doomed from the outset. Personal involvement is intrinsic to analysis as there is no objective persona to hide behind. Between analyst and analysand there is not the relationship of the disinfected syringe administered detachedly by a white-coated doctor, but a dirty needle, laden with personal infection. Also, this mixture of relationships refers to the fact that there is an internal psychic relationship between psyche and analyst before any analysis. Psychoanalysis is an intimate, familiar process that goes on constantly in the depth of soul as one of the archetypal processes. It is only socially formalized and structured by the literal psychoanalysis. It is this primordial psychoanalysis that forms the basis for literal psychoanalysis. It may therefore be important to establish in the beginning of literal, artificial analysis how the primordial analysis has been conducted in order to have a notion of which elements get mixed when primordial analysis and artificial analysis interpenetrate.
''the reproach ... that I had promised the patient too much. . . ." In the preamble, Archanalyst thinks he hears the reproach of having promised too much. Psychoanalysis is related to the Promise, the archetypal intimation of a Better World to Come. Since it is the nature of the Promise never to be fulfilled, Psychoanalysis is always a "partial success" (preamble: "the treatment ended in a partial success. . . .").
Since the necessary relationship to the Promise is the failure to live up to it, there will be a constant, gnawing sense in the analyst of not living up to what was promised. This is the basis for the sense of charlatanism plaguing Archanalyst: the con-man who promises more than he delivers.
Violation
Irma has been shown to coincide with or correspond to the victim of one of the worst-botched cases in the written history of psychotherapy, a dreadful incident. The following information is based on an article by Max Schur, Freud's personal physician. Schur gives "supplementary background material for the Irma dream which will constitute, so to speak, a preamble to Freud's preamble."
From a series of these [unpublished] letters [to Wilhelm Fliess] the following facts emerged: Freud had treated a female patient, Emma, for hysteria. In the correspondence, this patient is first mentioned in the ... letter of March 4, 1895. Like Irma, Emma had been examined by Fliess, at Freud's request, to determine if there was a partly "nasal origin" of her somatic symptoms. Fliess had come to Vienna, recommended surgery (apparently of the turbinate bone and one of the sinuses-compare the Irma dream), and had operated on her there, returning to Berlin a few days later.8
The progress of the treatment is documented in the following excerpts of Freud's letters to Fliess:
(March4)
We really can't be satisfied with Emma's condition; persistent swelling, going up and down "like an avalanche", pain to the point where morphine is indispensable, poor nights. The purulent secretion has somewhat decreased since yesterday. The day before yesterday (Saturday) she a massive hemorrhage, probably because a bone chip the size of a penny had come loose; there were about two bowlfuls ....
(March 8)
I arranged for Gersuny [surgeon] to be called in, and he inserted a drain.... He behaved in a rather rejecting way. Two days later ... there was moderate bleeding from the nose and mouth; the foetid odor was very bad. R. [Dr. Otto in Irma dream] ... suddenly pulled at something like a thread. He kept right on pulling, and before either of us had time to think, at least half a meter of gauze had been removed from the cavity. The next moment came a flood of blood. The patient turned white, her eye's bulged, and her pulse was no longer palpable. However, immediately after this he packed the cavity with fresh iodoform gauze and the hemorrhage stopped.... The following day ... the operation was repeated.... So we had done her an injustice. She had not been abnormal at all, but a piece of iodoform gauze had gotten torn off when you removed the rest, and stayed in for fourteen days, interfering with the healing process, after which it had torn away and provoked the bleeding. The fact that this mishap should have happened to you .... Of course no one blames you in any way, nor do I know why they should ....
(April 11)
Gloomy times, unbelievably gloomy. Mainly this business with Emma which is rapidly deteriorating .... Eight days ago she began to bleed.... Two days ago a new hemorrhage .... New packing, renewed helplessness. Yesterday ... [the blood] didn't spurt, but it surged, something like a [fluid] level rising exceedingly fast and then overflowing everything.... Add to this the pain, the morphine, the demoralization resulting from the obvious medical helplessness, and the whole air of danger, and you can picture the state the poor girl is in.... I'm really quite shaken that such a misfortune can have arisen from this operation, which was depicted as harmless. I am not sure that I should attribute exclusively to this depressing business the fact that my cardiac condition is so much below par for this year of my illness.9
Freud bases his theory of the wish-fulfillment nature of dreams on this Irma dream. He says, the dream disculpates me from all wrongdoing by blaming Otto, who (as stated in the preamble) reproached Freud for promising the patient too much. Otto gave the injection with the dirty needle, causing all of Irma's pain. From the letters we can see another reason why it should be Otto, Dr. Oskar Rie, upon whom the blame Freud felt should be displaced. Dr. Rie, Otto, is the one who discovers Wilhelm Fliess's malpractice. Schur remarks that this episode also marks the beginning of the end of the powerful transference Freud had to Fliess. At this time, as can be seen in the letters, Freud was by no means consciously ready to blame Fliess for any wrongdoing ("of course no one blames you"). So the displacement of the guilt onto Otto has a double purpose: to disculpate both himself and Fliess. Freud stresses how helpless he felt during all this to the extent of a deterioration of his heart condition. The inferiority is here heart-felt.
From Freud's personal perspective and from the wish-fulfillment aspects of the dream, which move the inferiority away from ego, his interpretation is clear. But what does this Emma story add to our mythical reading of the dream as creation myth of psychoanalysis? From our perspective the movement of the guilt from Archanalyst to Colleague is not a displacement but a further specification of the imagery surrounding Archanalyst. Otto is Archanalyst in his dark and dirty aspect.
The added material also introduces a new figure: Wilhelm Fliess. Who is Wilhelm Fliess? The word Fliess means "flow," and Freud says that he "was overflowing with ideas and projects as long as [Fliess was] within reach."10 Fliess was Freud's ardently admired lover with whom he corresponded for years and then broke off completely. The intercourse of this love affair was nasal; they constantly treated and worried over the state of each other's noses which they both acknowledged as intimate sexual organs. Fliess is the healer who will cure the suffering by removing the fundamental cause of the disease, the nasal dysfunction.
Thus the figure of Fliess embodies the elevated, magical healer at the source of the flow of ideation who promises the simple cure through the removal of the sexual dysfunction, thereby leading Psyche-in-Analysis to a moment where "within half a minute she would have bled to death."11.12 It is this cherished healer aspect of Archanalyst who leads Psyche-in-Analysis to her dreadful confrontation with death. The magical healer, the wellspring of ideas, makes psyche suffer the proximity of death gruesomely while intending a simple erotic cure. He is an unconscious, dark eros who loves to play with ideas and fantasize about causes and whose unconscious aim leads toward a betrayal of Psyche-in-Analysis that drains her toward death.
According to the preamble, Irma was suffering from "hysterical dread." Through the Emma material we see how this hysterical dread is transformed into realistic dread in a process that looks like a sacrifice of Psyche-in-Analysis by the healer shadow of Archanalyst. If we take the Irma dream as an embodiment of psychoanalysis, as a description of what psychoanalysis is, then the foundation of our profession is tragic and the dark mission of our healer shadow is a necessary and repulsive element of the psychoanalytic drama. The ugly way down is led by an inferior figure. The unraveling of Psyche-in-Analysis is a violation all the way, like the murderous tale of Hades and Kore.
The Dirty Needle
One of the great dreams of modern medicine is that of sterility. The sterile, disinfected whiteness is able, through clean injections, to cure disease. Now look at the dream of psychoanalysis. Our needle is dirty with inferior motives, personal involvement, our filth. We infect. Our cure is dysenteric diarrhea. We turn to water with our patients through inferior feelings. Our treatment seems a debacle. Inept surgeons, butchers of soul, our ineptitude sticking in psyche's throat. Our love of healing magic all but kills psyche. Our love of ideas leads us not to the missing piece of a puzzle but to dissolute excretion. Our exalted purpose leads to the misery from below. And our dirty needle is filled with trimethylamin. Freud's association to this is that it is a sexual hormone, a sexual stimulant. That is shown in the dream to be the italicized cause of the iatrogenic disease from which Psyche-in-Analysis suffers. She was penetrated by the unclean Spritze, which could also be translated as " squirter. " The Latin word for unclean in the sense of unchaste is incastius from which we derive the word "incest. " In order to stimulate her sexually, the dirty squirt enters Psyche-in- Analysis incestuously. This violation, contamination, brings about both the iatrogenic disease and the cure, the dysenteric dissolution. Another aspect of the dirty needle that produces infection points to venereal disease. What is this incestuous, sexually stimulating, sickening process that leads to venereal infection and cure in psychoanalysis? We call it transference: the sick bond between Archanalyst and Psyche-in-Analysis sealed by the penetration of the dirty needle. Not a clean patient-doctor relationship, but a sickening, unchaste, highly personally involved, and confused erotic bind: transference. Let us remember that the first talking-cure, the case of Anna O., ended in a hysterical pregnancy. Here again it is the inferior venereal ministrations that pervade psychoanalysis throughout. Ours is a sick story of love, a lovestory of sickness, the story of sickening love: excreting lovesickness in the stench of an outpouring of toxins.
Conclusions
Inferior feelings are very hard to bear. By their nature they feel horrible. Since the beginning of my training, I have always felt horribly inferior whenever psychic material was presented to me. I felt I couldn't understand any of it; that I should never have become an analyst; that I was stupid and in every way inferior to the material. In the beginning I felt that more training would alleviate this. Then I found that my seniors felt similar things after decades of work. As in our creation myth, our seniors limp in unmanly fashion. Then I felt strongly pulled toward a scramble for academic credibility. More degrees, more respectability. Maybe as Professor Doctor Doctor, I would feel less inferior. But now it has become clear to me that inferior feelings in the process of psychoanalysis are structural. They belong; they form the emotional experience of depth in the myth of psychoanalysis. This could explain why for the past century psychoanalysts have reproached their colleagues for practicing an inferior blend of psychoanalysis and giving inferior training to their trainees.
How can we train ourselves in painfully gaining ever more precision in the differentiation among the different kinds of inferior feelings? Such training would change our self-image to a lowly one, befitting the shadow of our endeavor. The main enemy to such a training is the so-called inferiority complex. This complex puts a blanket of diffuse inferiority feelings over all our emotions, making the differentiation of the many subtle kinds of inferior feelings virtually impossible. And the inferiority complex takes all inferior feelings to be personal-which may be the biggest problem of all. Therefore it is of the utmost importance to study our myth of genesis so as to recognize that Archanalyst feels terrible in many different ways. Then we can bear with him in order not to get lost in the trap that it is only we who feel this way. The trap of inferior feelings of course is that they feel so damned personal, which cuts us off from the myths that create them.
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1. Erik H. Erikson, "Tbe Dream Specimen of Psychoanalysis," Journal of the American Psychoanalytical Association 2 (1954): 7 (citing the Freud-Fliess letters: S. Freud, A us den A n- fangen der Psychoanalyse [London: Imago Publishing Co., 1950)).
2. S. Freud, Die Traumdeutang, Studienausgabe (Frankfurt am Main: S. Fischer, 1972), vol. 2, p. 126, n. 1 (my translation).
3. Erikson, "Dream Specimen."
4. C. G. Jung, CW 16, §343.
5. I have taken the translation of Brill-though imprecise in places-since he tells the dream in the present tense, as it is presented in the original, whereas Strachey translates the dream into the past tense, losing the immediacy of the drama. The words between brackets are some literal renderings of the original. Since the word Spritze in German has several connotations, I have given the original word.
6. The word translated as "receive" is the German word Empfangen.This word also has the medical meaning "to conceive a child."
7. Max Schur, "Some Additional 'Day Residues' of 'The Specimen Dream of Psychoanalysis,"' in Psychoanalysis-A General Psychology.- Fssays in Honor of Heinz Hartmann, ed. Loewenstein et al. (New York: International Universities Press, Inc., 1966), P. 54.
8. Ibid., pp. 54-55
.9. Ibid., quotations from March 4 letter, P. 55; March 8, pp. 56-58; April 11, pp. 63-64.
10. Ibid, p. 61. Schur also reports (n., P. 67) that "In another (unpublished) letter, Freud even begins with the salutation "Lieber Zamberer" ("Dear Magician").
II. Ibid, p. 66.
12. This article has developed from a series of lectures at the C. G. Jung-Institute in Boston in the Fall of 1981. It was previously presented at the IAAP conference in Jerusalem in 1983. During 1983 a controversy arose, which presently has culminated in two articles in the New Yorker (December 5 and 12, 1983) and an article in the Atlantic (February, 1984) concerning assessments made by Dr. Jeffrey Masson, former director of the Freud Archives. Based on the Emma case, also described in this paper, Masson purports to prove that Freud, for inferior motives, reversed himself from the seduction theory (the cause of hysteria is a sexual violation in the early biography of the patient) to the Oedipus-complex theory (hysteria stems from the incestuous imagination of the patient). Because of Freud's inferior motives, Masson concludes that the evolution of theory formation in psychoanalysis is flawed. From my paper it would be hard to assume that theory formation in psychoanalysis could take place without inferior motives. Inferior motives, being fundamental to the dream of psychoanalysis, do not prove or disprove the value of the theory itself; they reaffirm the nature of psychoanalysis. As to the content of the discussion, I believe that both seduction theory and Oedipal theory ring true, since the causation of hysteria and neurosis only by seduction in early childhood provides no insight for those of us, hysterics and neurotics, who were not seduced in early childhood. And there were many of us.
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