disobedient patient by exchanging her for a more sensible, more docile one. Nor do I leave the contradiction of Dr. M. unnoticed, but express my opinion of him in an obvious allusion, to the effect that his relation to the question is that of an ignoramus ("dysentery will develop," &c.).
It seems to me, indeed, as though I were appealing from him to some one better informed (my friend, who has told me about trimethylamin); just as I have turned from Irma to her friend, I turn from Otto to Leopold. Rid me of these three persons, replace them by three others of my own choice, and I shall be released from the reproaches which I do not wish to have deserved! The unreasonableness itself of these reproaches is proved to me in the dream in the most elaborate way. Irma's pains are not charged to me, because she herself is to blame for them, in that she refuses to accept my solution. Irma's pains are none of my business, for they are of an organic nature, quite impossible to be healed by a psychic cure. Irma's sufferings are satisfactorily explained by her widowhood (trimethylamin!); a fact which, of course, I cannot alter. Irma's illness has been caused by an incautious injection on the part of Otto, with an ill-suited substance—in a way I should never have made an injection. Irma's suffering is the result of an injection made with an unclean syringe, just like the inflammation of the veins in my old lady, while I never do any such mischief with my injections. I am aware, indeed, that these explanations of Irma's illness, which unite in acquitting me, do not agree with one another; they even exclude one another. The whole pleading—this dream is nothing else—recalls vividly the defensive argument of a man who was accused by his neighbour of having returned a kettle to him in a damaged condition. In the first place, he said, he had returned the kettle undamaged; in the second, it already had holes in it when he borrowed it; and thirdly, he had never borrowed the kettle from his neighbour at all. But so much the better; if even one of these three methods of defence is recognised as valid, the man must be acquitted.
Still other subjects mingle in the dream, whose relation to my release from responsibility for Irma's illness is not so transparent: the illness of my daughter and that of a patient of the same name, the harmfulness of cocaine, the illness of
