psychosis and dream; the transferential reconstruction of her early pleasures...fantastic scenes from her inner life." In particular, Freud's theory of deferred action owed much to "Emma Eckstein's twinned scenes in shops...'Now this case is typical of repression in hysteria. We invariably find that a memory has been repressed which has only become a trauma through deferred action'''." Surgery Freud was at the time under the influence of his friend and collaborator Wilhelm Fliess, an ear, nose, and throat specialist. Fliess, whom Freud had called "the Kepler of biology", had developed theories today considered pseudoscientific, including the belief that sexual problems were linked to the nose by a supposed nasogenital connection. Fliess had been treating "nasal reflex neurosis" by cauterizing the inside of the nose under local anesthesia. Fliess conjectured that if temporary cauterization was useful, surgery would yield more permanent results. He began operating on the noses of patients he diagnosed with the disorder, including Eckstein and Freud. His surgery proved disastrous, resulting in profuse, recurrent nasal bleeding; Fliess had left a half-metre of gauze in Eckstein's nasal cavity, the subsequent removal of which left her permanently disfigured. Though aware of Fliess's culpability, Freud fled from the remedial surgery in horror, he could only bring himself to delicately intimate in his correspondence to Fliess the nature of his disastrous role and in subsequent letters maintained a tactful silence on the matter or else returned to the face-saving topic of Eckstein's hysteria. Freud ultimately reasserted his full confidence in Fliess's competence, making Eckstein responsible for the catastrophe by concluding that her post-operative haemorrhages were "wish-bleedings", caused by her hysterical longing for the affection of others.Masson, Jeffrey M. The Assault on Truth: Freud's Suppression of the Seduction Theory. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1984, pp. 55–106. Guilt over the episode has been identified as contributing to the dream of Irma's injection in The Interpretation of Dreams: "Max Schur grasped right away the significance of the episode to the 'Irma' dream...in his paper on the specimen dream." Seduction theory Eckstein is also associated with Freud's seduction theory. In 1897, Freud cites her analytic findings to Fliess as support for his "so-called seduction theory, the claim that all neuroses are the consequences of an adult's, usually a father's, sexual abuse of a child". Freud wrote that "Eckstein deliberately treated her patient in such a manner as not to give her the slightest hint