Another Example of How Control Mastery Theory Helped

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The analysis is not published.

Freud's heart condition at the time of the Irma dream provides another example of how Control Mastery Theory contributes to the dream's interpretation. Freud alluded to the condition in passing while associating to the dream. In his letters to Fliess, Freud repeatedly indicated the belief that he had something physically wrong with some aspect of his cardiovascular system. Fliess agreed and so did Dr. Josef Breuer, another close personal friend, although neither was able to find evidence of a problem. Freud's personal physician much later in Freud's life, Max Schur, has written that he believed there was something wrong with Freud's heart at the time of the dream, although he too found nothing during his own examinations. Taking an opposing view, Freud's official biographer, Ernest Jones, has written: "Looking back one would come to the conclusion that all these troubles were in the main special aspects of his psychoneurosis, possibly slightly localized by the effect of nicotine. There was assuredly no myocarditis. Even in those years he was proving it, for a man of forty-three who can climb the Rax mountain in three and a half hours could not have had much wrong with his heart."

So the record is inconclusive. The reason Jones mentioned nicotine was that Freud was a heavy cigar smoker. According to Fliess's nasal-reflex theory, nicotine should affect heart action, so he decreed that Freud must give up smoking, which Freud did, on and off.

To make sense of the Irma dream in the same terms that seemed to work for other aspects of the dream, I needed to say that the heart problems were psychological and that they were another instance of Freud unconsciously testing Fliess's credibility as an authority figure. To make that case, I needed to indicate, first, that Freud recognized that heart problems could be psychological and, secondly, that the heart problems seemed to come on a willed schedule.

As to the first point, Freud wrote a paper on "The Anxiety-Neurosis" at about the time the heart problems first appeared. Alluded to several times in this paper was the case of a man whose severe heart troubles were the result of anxiety-neurosis, in Freud's view. Furthermore, several of the reasons Freud gave for the man's neurosis could apply to Freud himself.

As for the second point, an examination of Freud's letters to Fliess shows that most of the heart incidents came when Fliess's nasal-reflex theory said they should not. Freud was also free of symptoms when he shouldn't be, according to Fliess's theory. The attacks do seem to have been willed. All of this, of course, makes perfect sense from the point of view of the Control Mastery Theory, as does the assumption that Freud is unconsciously fighting to establish his own sense of self-reliance by freeing himself of his childhood-related subservience to authority figures.

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