Freud - Complete Works (197 page)

   ‘At a social gathering
someone quoted "
Tout comprendre c’est tout
pardonner
". I made the comment that the first part of the
sentence was enough; "pardoning" was a piece of
arrogance: it should be left to God and the priests. One of those
present thought this observation very good, and this emboldened me
to say - probably with the intention of securing the good opinion
of the benevolent critic - that I had recently thought of something
better. But when I tried to repeat it I found it had escaped me. I
immediately withdrew from the company and wrote down the
screen-associations. There first occurred to me the names of the
friend and of the street in Budapest that witnessed the birth of
the idea I was looking for; next came the name of another friend,
Max, whom we usually call Maxi. This led me to the word
"maxim" and to the recollection that what we were after
was, like my original remark, a variation on a well-known maxim.
Strangely enough my next thought was not a maxim but the following
sentence: "God created man in His own image" and the same
idea in reverse: "Man created God in his." Thereupon the
memory of what I was looking for immediately appeared. On that
occasion my friend had said to me in Andrássy Street:
"Nothing human is foreign to me", whereupon I had
answered, in allusion to the discoveries of psycho-analysis:
"You ought to have gone further and have admitted that nothing
animal is foreign to you."

   ‘But after I had at last
remembered what I wanted, I was less than ever able to repeat it in
the company I happened to be in. The young wife of the friend whom
I had reminded of the animal nature of the unconscious was among
those present, and I had to recognize that she was by no means
prepared to receive such disagreeable truth. My forgetting spared
me a number of unpleasant questions from her and a pointless
discussion. This and nothing else must have been the motive for my
"temporary amnesia".

   ‘It is interesting that a
screen-association was provided by a sentence in which the Deity is
debased to the status of a human invention, while in the missing
sentence there is an allusion to the animal in man.
Capitis
diminutio
is therefore the element common to both. The whole
subject is clearly only the continuation of the train of thought
about understanding and forgiving which the conversation had
instigated.

   ‘The fact that what I was
looking for in this case was so quick in presenting itself may
perhaps be due also to my immediate withdrawal from the company
where it was censored to an empty room.’

The Psychopathology Of Everyday Life

1117

   I have since undertaken numerous
other analyses where forgetting or faulty reproduction of a set of
words took place, and the consistent result of these investigations
has inclined me to assume that the mechanism of forgetting
demonstrated above in the instances of ‘
aliquis
’
and ‘The Bride of Corinth’ has an almost universal
validity. It is generally a little awkward to give an account of
such analyses since, like those just mentioned, they constantly
lead to matters which are of an intimate sort and are distressing
to the person analysed. I shall therefore not give any further
examples. What is common to all these cases, irrespective of the
material, is the fact that the forgotten or distorted matter is
brought by some associative path into connection with an
unconscious thought-content - a thought-content which is the source
of the effect manifested in the form of forgetting.

   I now return to the forgetting of
names. So far we have not exhaustively considered either the
case-material or the motives behind it. As this is exactly the kind
of parapraxis that I can from time to time observe abundantly in
myself, I am at no loss for examples. The mild attacks of migraine
from which I still suffer usually announce themselves hours in
advance by my forgetting names, and at the height of these attacks,
during which I am not forced to abandon my work, it frequently
happens that all proper names go out of my head. Now it is
precisely cases like mine which could furnish the grounds for an
objection on principle to our analytic efforts. Should it not
necessarily be concluded from such observations that the cause of
forgetfulness, and in particular of the forgetting of names, lies
in circulatory and general functional disturbances of the cerebrum,
and should we not therefore spare ourselves the search for
psychological explanations of these phenomena? Not at all, in my
view; that would be to confuse the mechanism of a process, which is
of the same kind in all cases, with the factors favouring the
process, which are variable and not necessarily essential. Instead
of a discussion, however, I shall bring forward an analogy to deal
with the objection.

   Let us suppose that I have been
imprudent enough to go for a walk at night in a deserted quarter of
the city, and have been attacked and robbed of my watch and purse.
I report the matter at the nearest police station in the following
words: ‘I was in such and such a street, and there
loneliness
and
darkness
took away my watch and
purse.’ Although I should not have said anything in this
statement that was not true, the wording of my report would put me
in danger of being thought not quite right in the head. The state
of affairs could only be described correctly by saying that
favoured
by the loneliness of the place and under the
shield
of darkness
unknown malefactors
robbed me of
my valuables. Now the state of affairs in the forgetting of names
need not be any different; favoured by tiredness, circulatory
disturbances and intoxication, an unknown psychical force robs me
of my access to the proper names belonging to my memory - a force
which can in other cases bring about the same failure of memory at
a time of perfect health and unimpaired efficiency.

The Psychopathology Of Everyday Life

1118

   If I analyse the cases of the
forgetting of names that I observe in myself, I almost always find
that the name which is withheld from me is related to a topic of
close personal importance to me, and one capable of evoking in me
strong and often distressing affects. In accordance with the
convenient and commendable practice of the Zurich school (Bleuler,
Jung, Riklin) I can also formulate this fact as follows: The lost
name has touched on a ‘personal complex’ in me. The
relation of the name to myself is one that I should not have
expected and is usually arrived at through superficial associations
(such as verbal ambiguity or similarity in sound); it can be
characterized quite generally as an oblique relation. Its nature
will best be illustrated by some simple examples.

   (1) A patient asked me to
recommend him a health resort on the Riviera. I knew of such a
resort quite close to Genoa, and I also remembered the name of a
German colleague of mine who practised there; but the name of the
resort itself escaped me, well as I thought I knew that too. There
was nothing left for me but to ask the patient to wait while I
hurriedly consulted the ladies of my family. ‘What on earth
is the name of the place near Genoa where Dr. N. has his little
sanatorium, the one in which so and so was under treatment for so
long?’ ‘Of course you of all people would be the one to
forget the name. The place is called
Nervi
.’ I must
admit I have plenty to do with
nerves
.

   (2) Another patient was talking
about a neighbouring summer resort, and declared that besides its
two well-known inns there was a third one there with which a
certain memory of his was connected; he would tell me the name in a
moment. I disputed the existence of this third inn, and appealed to
the fact that I had spent seven summers at the place and must
therefore know it better than he did. But under the provocation of
my contradiction he had already got hold of the name. The inn was
called the ‘Hochwartner’. At this point I was obliged
to give in and I even had to confess that I had lived for seven
whole summers close by the inn whose existence I had denied. Why in
this instance should I have forgotten both the name and the thing?
I believe it was because the name was only too similar in sound to
that of a colleague, a specialist in Vienna and, once again, had
touched upon the ‘professional complex’ in me.

The Psychopathology Of Everyday Life

1119

   (3) On another occasion, as I was
on the point of booking a ticket at Reichenhall railway station,
the name of the next main station would not come into my mind. It
was perfectly familiar to me, and I had passed through it very
frequently. I had actually to look it up in the time-table. It was
‘
Rosenheim
’. But I then knew at once owing to
what association I had lost it. An hour before, I had paid a visit
to my sister at her home close to Reichenhall; as my sister’s
name is Rosa this was also a ‘
Rosenheim
’. The
‘family complex’ had robbed me of this name.

   (4) I have a whole quantity of
examples to illustrate further the positively predatory activities
of the ‘family complex’.

   There came to my consulting-room
one day a young man who was the younger brother of a woman patient.
I had seen him countless times and used to refer to him by his
first name. When I wanted to speak about his visit I found I had
forgotten his first name (which was, I knew, not at all an unusual
one ), and nothing could help me to recover it. I thereupon went
out into the street to read the names over the shops, and
recognized his name the first time I ran across it. The analysis of
the episode showed me that I had drawn a parallel between the
visitor and my own brother, a parallel which was trying to come to
a head in the repressed question: ‘Would my brother in the
same circumstances have behaved in a similar way, or would he have
done the opposite?’ The external link between the thoughts
concerned with my own and with the other family was made possible
by the chance fact that in both cases the mothers had the same
first name of Amalia. Later in retrospect I also understood the
substitute names, Daniel and Franz, which had forced themselves on
me without making me any wiser. These, like Amalia too, are names
from Schiller’s
Die Räuber
which were the subject
of a jest made by
Daniel
Spitzer, the ‘Vienna
walker’.

The Psychopathology Of Everyday Life

1120

   (5) Another time I was unable to
recall a patient’s name; it belonged to associations from my
youth. My analysis followed a very devious path before it provided
me with the name I was looking for. The patient had expressed a
fear of losing his sight; this awoke the memory of a young man who
had been blinded by a gunshot; and this in turn was connected with
the figure of yet another youth, who had injured himself by
shooting. This last person had the same name as the first patient,
though he was not related to him. However, I did not find the name
until I had become conscious that an anxious expectation was being
transferred by me from these two young men who had been injured to
a member of my own family.

   There thus runs though my
thoughts a continuous current of ‘personal reference’,
of which I generally have no inkling, but which betrays itself by
such instances of my forgetting names. It is as if I were obliged
to compare everything I hear about other people with myself; as if
my personal complexes were put on the alert whenever another person
is brought to my notice. This cannot possibly be an individual
peculiarity of my own: it must rather contain an indication of the
way in which we understand ‘something other than
ourself’ in general. I have reasons for supposing that other
people are in this respect very similar to me.

   The neatest instance of this sort
was reported to me by a Herr Lederer, who had experienced it
himself. While he was on his honeymoon in Venice he came across a
gentleman with whom he was superficially acquainted and whom he had
to introduce to his young wife. Since however he had forgotten the
stranger’s name, he helped himself out the first time by
means of an unintelligible mumble. On meeting the gentleman a
second time, as he was bound to do in Venice, he drew him aside and
asked him to save him from embarrassment by telling him his name,
which he had unfortunately forgotten. The stranger’s reply
gave evidence of an unusual knowledge of human nature. ‘I can
readily imagine your failing to remember my name. I have the same
name as you -
Lederer
!’ - One cannot help having a
slightly disagreeable feeling when one comes across one’s own
name in a stranger. Recently I was very sharply aware of it when a
Herr S. Freud
presented himself to me in my consulting hour.
(However, I must record the assurance of one of my critics that in
this respect his feelings are the opposite of mine.)

   (6) The effects that can be
produced by personal reference can also be seen in the following
example, reported by Jung (1907, 52):

   ‘A Herr Y. fell in love
with a lady; but he met with no success, and shortly afterwards she
married a Herr S. There after, Herr Y., in spite of having known
Herr X. for a long time and even having business dealings with him,
forgot his name over and over again, so that several times he had
to enquire what it was from other people when he wanted to
correspond with Herr X’.

   The motivation of the forgetting
is however more transparent in this case than in the preceding ones
that fall within the constellation of personal reference. Here the
forgetting seems a direct consequence of Herr Y’s antipathy
to his more fortunate rival; he wants to know nothing about him:
‘never thought of shall he be.’