Withstanding Trauma: the Significance of Emma Eckstein’s Circumcision to Freud’s Irma Dream

Abstract

The author considers the medical rationale for Wilhelm Fliess's operation on Emma Eckstein's nose in February 1895 and interprets the possible role that this played in Freud's dream of Irma's injection five months later. The author's main argument is that Emma likely endured female castration as a child and that she therefore experienced the surgery to her nose in 1895 as a retraumatization of her childhood trauma. The author further argues that Freud's unconscious identification with Emma, which broke through in his dream of Irma's injection with resistances and apotropaic defenses, served to accentuate his own "masculine protest". The understanding brought to light by the present interpretation of Freud's Irma dream, when coupled with our previous knowledge of Freud, allows us to better grasp the unconscious logic and origins of psychoanalysis itself.(1.)

The Freud–Ferenczi controversy in light of Emma Eckstein's circumcisio

“…The scene was likely presented by Emma to Freud in analysis while in a state of deep regression. 2 The scene had obviously been fashioned on the model of the Jewish ceremony of circumcision (brit milah; Bonomi, 1994cBonomi, , 2013. I won't discuss the symbolic structure of Emma's fantasy in any detail in this context but wish merely to focus on the actual cut that she had suffered and endured, as Freud's own words and description on the asymmetry of Emma's labia lips clearly hint and suggest -at least for me.…”

“So It Really Does Exist—The Sea-Serpent We’ve Never Believed in!” Ferenczi’s Influence on Freud Revisited

“…This letter is the only place in all of Freud's work where he refers to the phallus as "the great Lord Penis." It is as if Freud was associating the dreams that his female patient had dreamt of the holy snake to her genital mutilation (Bonomi, 2013).…”