SubStance

Jacques Lacan, who made a career of placing the Freudian oeuvre in unexpected philosophical contexts, admitted in 1955 that "I'm not the only one to have had the idea of taking up the dream of Irma's injection again" (Seminar II 147). That dream of Freud's, the analysis of which constitutes one of the most famous passages of The Interpretation of Dreams, has occupied a central place in the psychoanalytic canon for several reasons: it is the first dream that Freud subjects to a rigorous analysis, and it is his own dream; moreover, its analysis, unusually thorough, leads Freud to two essential formulations (the dream as a fulfillment of a wish, and the logic of the broken kettle). Freud returns to this dream several times throughout The Interpretation, just as post-Freudian psychoanalytic thinkers have consistently returned to Irma to theorize aspects of the dream-work and the unconscious. The body of scholarly work on Irma is so voluminous that, some forty years after Lacan, Joan Copjec could call Irma's injection "that overinterpreted anxiety dream" (119); two years after that, undaunted by "the enormous analytic literature that, throughout the world, has submitted it to investment and investigation from every angle," Jacques Derrida would publish his own close reading of the dream in a 1996 essay entitled "Resistances" ("Resistances" 5). The dream has, to borrow a phrase from another context and J. Hillis Miller, "an inexhaustible power to generate commentary" (Miller 177).

Derrida, like many others, turns to Irma's injection as a way to access the thoughts of a discipline's founding father at the very scene of that discipline's invention. Rightly skeptical of creation myths, however, Derrida concludes that "Freud was neither able nor willing to inaugurate a new concept of analysis" in this case ("Resistances" 20). "Resistances" is persuasive in its refusal to acknowledge the audacity or inventiveness of Freud's self-analysis; it is daring in its call for non-psychoanalytic perspectives on Irma. It is arguably the most serious challenge to psychoanalytic orthodoxy anywhere in Derrida's work, The Post Card included. In this it recalls the bravado of Lacan, who, with characteristic glee in frustrating his auditors' expectations, spent two meetings of his second seminar [End Page 17] discussing that "dream of dreams, the inaugurally deciphered dream" so as not to perform any psychobiographical analysis of Freud himself nor to identify any particular meaning of the analysis beyond the fact that Freud, qua subject, could not be found anywhere within it (147).

In the wake of Derrida's reflections on and in "Resistances," Lacan's commentary from 1955 becomes all the more urgent, opening, as it does, questions about the Irma dream that suddenly resonate with renewed ambiguity and purchase: "Of course there must be a psychology of the creator," Lacan acknowledges, "But . . . is it the lesson we must draw from what takes place in the dream of Irma's injection?" (Seminar II 148). It is a good question. By "the creator" Lacan at first means Freud: the Irma dream, as Lacan notes, is often taken as a constitutive moment not only in psychoanalytic terms but also as a foundational episode in the mythology of Freud himself. But in plumbing "the lesson" of a "creator" Lacan introduces curious Biblical overtones to the Irma dream, overtones that Lacan, who after all supplied them, is quick to disavow or proclaim unnecessary: he is unwilling to transform the dream to an access point into an otherwise unknowable "creator" named Freud, insisting instead that "the creator . . . is [Freud's] unconscious" (Seminar II 171).

This essay represents my own attempt to prolong Lacan's question, leaving all of its Biblical import intact, and extend it in the direction of Derrida, or rather a certain Derrida, namely the Derrida of The Gift of Death, who has proven a formidable theorist of responsibility, refusal, inaccessibility, secrecy, and monotheism. Such an analysis will require that we go further than Lacan: it is not enough, in my view, to identify Freud's unconscious as "the creator" here. Although the Irma dream has...