Freud - Complete Works (216 page)

The Psychopathology Of Everyday Life

1224

   (5) Another case of mislaying
merits our interest on account of the conditions under which the
mislaid object was rediscovered. A youngish man told me the
following story: ‘Some years ago there were misunderstandings
between me and my wife. I found her too cold, and although I
willingly recognized her excellent qualities we lived together
without any tender feelings. One day, returning from a walk, she
gave me a book which she had bought because she thought it would
interest me. I thanked her for this mark of
‘attention’, promised to read the book and put it on
one side. After that I could never find it again. Months passed by,
in which time I occasionally remembered the lost book and made vain
attempts to find it. About six months later my dear mother, who was
not living with us, fell ill. My wife left home to nurse her
mother-in-law. The patient’s condition became serious and
gave my wife an opportunity of showing the best side of herself.
One evening I returned home full of enthusiasm and gratitude for
what my wife had accomplished. I walked up to my desk, and without
any definite intention but with a kind of somnambulistic certainty
opened one of the drawers. On the very top I found the long lost
book I had mislaid.’

   (6)) A case of mislaying which
shares the last characteristic of the above example - namely, the
remarkable sureness shown in finding the object again once the
motive for its being mislaid had expired - is reported by
Stärcke (1916):

   ‘A girl had spoilt a piece
of material in cutting it out to make a collar; so the dressmaker
had to come and do her best to put it right. When she had arrived
and the girl wanted to fetch the badly-cut collar, she went to the
drawer where she thought she had put it; but she could not find it.
She turned the contents upside down without discovering it. Sitting
down in exasperation she asked herself why it had suddenly
disappeared and whether there was not some reason why she did not
want
to find it. She came to the conclusion that of course
she felt ashamed in front of the dressmaker for having bungled
something so simple as a collar. After this reflection she stood
up, went to another cupboard and was able to lay her hands straight
away on the badly-cut collar.’

The Psychopathology Of Everyday Life

1225

   (7) The following example of
‘mislaying’ is of a type that has become familiar to
every psycho-analyst. I may remark that the patient responsible for
it found the solution himself:

   ‘A patient, whose
psycho-analytic treatment was interrupted by the summer holidays at
a time when he was in a state of resistance and felt unwell, put
his bunch of keys in its usual place - or so he thought - when he
undressed for the night. Then he remembered that there were a few
more things that he needed for his journey next day - the last day
of treatment and the date on which his fee was due - and he went to
get them out of the writing-desk, in which he had also put his
money. But the keys had disappeared. He began to make a systematic
but increasingly agitated search of his small flat - with no
success. Since he recognized the "mislaying" of the keys
as a symptomatic act - that is, as something he had done
intentionally - he woke his servant in order to continue the search
with the aid of an "unprejudiced" person. After another
hour he gave it up and was afraid he had lost the keys. Next
morning he ordered new keys from the makers of the desk, and they
were hastily made for him. Two friends, who had come home with him
in the same cab, thought they remembered hearing something fall
with a clink on the ground as he stepped out of the cab. He was
convinced that his keys had fallen from his pocket. That evening
the servant triumphantly presented him with the keys. They had been
found lying between a thick book and a thin pamphlet (a work by one
of my pupils) which he wanted to take away to read on his holiday.
They were so cleverly placed that no one would have suspected they
were there. He found himself afterwards unable to replace them so
that they were equally invisible. The unconscious dexterity with
which an object is mislaid on account of hidden but powerful
motives is very reminiscent of "somnambulistic
certainty". The motive, as one would expect, was ill-temper at
the treatment being interrupted and secret rage at having to pay a
high fee when he was feeling so unwell.’

The Psychopathology Of Everyday Life

1226

   (8) ‘A man’, Brill
relates, ‘was urged by his wife to attend a social function
in which he really took no interest . . . Yielding
to his wife’s entreaties, he began to take his dress-suit
from the trunk when he suddenly thought of shaving. After
accomplishing this he returned to the trunk and found it locked.
Despite a long, earnest search the key could not be discovered. No
locksmith was available on Sunday evening, so that the couple had
to send their regrets. When he had the trunk opened the next
morning the lost key was found within. The husband had
absent-mindedly dropped the key into the trunk and sprung the lock.
He assured me that this was wholly unintentional and unconscious,
but we know that he did not wish to go to this social affair. The
mislaying of the key therefore lacked no motive.’

   Ernest Jones observed in himself
that he was in the habit of mislaying his pipe whenever he had
smoked too much and felt unwell in consequence. The pipe then
turned up in all sorts of places where it did not belong and where
it was not normally put away.

   (9) An innocent case, in which
the motivation was admitted, is reported by Dora Müller
(1915):

   ‘Fräulein Erna A. told
me two days before Christmas: "Can you imagine? Yesterday
evening I took a piece of my ginger-bread from the packet and ate
it; at the same time I thought I would have to offer some to
Fräulein S." (her mother’s companion) "when
she came to say goodnight to me. I didn’t particularly want
to, but I made up my mind to do so all the same. Later on when she
came I reached out to get the packet from my table; but it was not
there. I had a look for it and found it inside my cupboard. I had
put the packet away there without realizing." No analysis was
necessary; the narrator herself understood the sequence of events.
The impulse of wanting to keep the cake all to herself, which had
just been repressed, had nevertheless achieved its end in the
automatic act, though in this case it was cancelled out once more
by the subsequent conscious act.’

The Psychopathology Of Everyday Life

1227

   (10) Sachs describes how, by a
similar act of mislaying, he once avoided the duty of working:
‘Last Sunday afternoon I hesitated for some time over whether
I should work or take a walk and pay a visit at the end of it; but
after a bit of a struggle I decided in favour of the former. After
about an hour I noticed that my supply of paper was exhausted. I
knew that somewhere in a drawer there was a stack of paper that I
had had for years, but I looked in vain for it in my writing desk
and in other places where I thought I might find it, although I
went to a lot of trouble and rummaged round in every possible place
- old books, pamphlets, letters and so on. Thus I finally found
myself compelled to break off my work and go out after all. When I
returned home in the evening, I sat down on the sofa, and, sunk in
thought and half absent-mindedly, gazed at the book-case in front
of me. A box caught my eye and I remembered that I had not examined
its contents for a long time. So I went over and opened it. At the
very top was a leather portfolio containing unused paper. But it
was only when I had taken it out and was on the point of putting it
in the drawer of my desk that it occurred to me that this was the
very same paper I had been unsuccessfully looking for in the
afternoon. I must add here that although I am not ordinarily
thrifty I am very careful with paper and keep any scraps that can
be used. It was obviously this practice of mine, which is nourished
by an instinct, that enabled my forgetfulness to be corrected as
soon as the immediate motive for it had disappeared.’

   If a survey is made of cases of
mislaying, it in fact becomes hard to believe that anything is ever
mislaid except as a result of an unconscious intention.

The Psychopathology Of Everyday Life

1228

   (11) One day in the summer of
1901 I remarked to a friend with whom I used at that time to have a
lively exchange of scientific ideas: ‘These problems of the
neuroses are only to be solved if we base ourselves wholly and
completely on the assumption of the original bisexuality of the
individual.’ To which he replied: ‘That’s what I
told you two and a half years ago at Br. when we went for that
evening walk. But you wouldn’t hear of it then.’ It is
painful to be requested in this way to surrender one’s
originality. I could not recall any such conversation or this
pronouncement of my friend’s. One of us must have been
mistaken and on the ‘
cui prodest?
’
principle¹ it must have been myself. Indeed, in the course of
the next week I remembered the whole incident, which was just as my
friend had tried to recall it to me; I even recollected the answer
I had given him at the time: ‘I’ve not accepted that
yet; I’m not inclined to go into the question.’ But
since then I have grown a little more tolerant when, in reading
medical literature, I come across one of the few ideas with which
my name can be associated, and find that my name has not been
mentioned.

   Finding fault with one’s
wife, a friendship which has turned into its opposite, a
doctor’s error in diagnosis, a rebuff by some one with
similar interests, borrowing someone else’s ideas - it can
hardly be accidental that a collection of instances of forgetting,
gathered at random, should require me to enter into such
distressing subjects in explaining them. On the contrary, I suspect
that everyone who is willing to enquire into the motives behind his
lapses of memory will be able to record a similar sample list of
objectionable subjects. The tendency to forget what is disagreeable
seems to me to be a quite universal one; the capacity to do so is
doubtless developed with different degrees of strength in different
people. It is probable that many instances of
disowning
which we encounter in our medical work are to be traced to
forgetting
.¹ It is true that our view of such
forgetting limits the distinction between the two forms of
behaviour to purely psychological factors and allows us to see in
both modes of reaction the expression of the same motive. Of all
the numerous examples of the disavowal of unpleasant memories which
I have observed on the part of relatives of patients, one remains
in my recollection as especially singular. A mother was giving me
information about the childhood of her neurotic son, now in his
puberty, in the course of which she said that, like his brothers
and sisters, he had been a bed-wetter till late on - a fact which
is certainly of some significance in the case history of a neurotic
patient. A few weeks later, when she was wanting to find out about
the progress of the treatment, I had occasion to draw her attention
to the signs of a constitutional disposition to illness on the
young man’s part, and in doing so I referred to the
bed-wetting which she had brought out in the anamnesis. To my
astonishment she contested this fact in regard both to him and to
the other children, and asked me how I could know it. Finally I
told her that she herself had informed me a short time before. She
must therefore have forgotten it.²

  
¹
[
Footnote added
1907:] If we ask
someone whether he suffered from a luetic infection ten or fifteen
years ago, we are too apt to overlook the fact that, from a
psychical point of view, he will have regarded this illness quite
differently from, let us say, an acute attack of rheumatism. - In
the anamneses which parents give about their daughters’
neurotic illnesses, it is hardly possible to distinguish with
certainty between what has been forgotten and what is being
concealed, since everything standing in the way of a girl’s
future marriage is systematically set aside, i.e. repressed, by the
parents. - [
Added
1910:] A man who had recently lost his
dearly-loved wife from an affection of the lungs reported the
following instance to me in which misleading answers given to the
doctor’s enquiries could only be ascribed to forgetting of
this kind. ‘As my poor wife’s pleuritis had still not
improved after many weeks, Dr. P. was called into consultation. In
taking the anamnesis he asked the usual questions, including
whether there were any cases of lung illness in my wife’s
family. My wife said there were none and I could not recall any
either. As Dr. P. was leaving, the conversation turned, as though
accidentally, to the subject of excursions and my wife said:
"Yes, it’s a long journey, too, to Langersdorf,
where
my poor brother’s buried
." This brother died about
fifteen years ago after suffering for years from tuberculosis. My
wife was very fond of him and often spoken to me about him. In fact
it now occurred to me that at the time that her pleuritis was
diagnosed she was very worried and remarked gloomily: "My
brother died of a lung complaint too." But now, the memory was
so strongly repressed that even after her remark about the
excursion to Langersdorf she was not led to correct the information
she had given about illnesses in her family. I myself became aware
of the lapse of memory at the very moment she spoke of
Langersdorf.’ - [
Added
1912:] A completely analogous
experience is related by Jones in the work to which I have referred
several times already. A physician, whose wife suffered from an
abdominal complaint the diagnosis of which was uncertain, remarked
by way of comforting her: ‘It is fortunate at any rate that
there has been no tuberculosis in your family.’ ‘Have
you forgotten’, answered his wife in the greatest
astonishment, ‘that my mother died of tuberculosis and that
my sister recovered from it only after having been given up by the
doctors?’