Freud - Complete Works (217 page)

  
²
In the days while I was engaged in writing
these pages the following almost incredible instance of forgetting
happened to me. On the first of January I was going through my
medical engagement book so that I could send out my accounts. Under
the month of June I came across the name ‘M---l’ but
could not recall who it belonged to. My bewilderment grew when I
turned the pages and discovered that I treated the case in a
sanatorium and made daily visits over a period of weeks. A patient
treated under such conditions cannot be forgotten by a doctor after
scarcely six months. Could it have been a man, I asked myself, a
case of general paralysis, an uninteresting case? Finally the
record of the fees I had received brought back to me all the facts
that had striven to escape my memory. M---l was a fourteen-year-old
girl, the most remarkable case I had had in recent years, one which
taught me a lesson I am not likely ever to forget and whose outcome
cost me moments of the greatest distress. The child fell ill of an
unmistakable hysteria, which did in fact clear up quickly and
radically under my care. After this improvement the child was taken
away from me by her parents. She still complained of abdominal
pains which had played the chief part in the clinical picture of
her hysteria. Two months later she died of sarcoma of the abdominal
glands. The hysteria, to which she was at the same time
predisposed, used the tumour as a provoking cause, and I, with my
attention held by the noisy but harmless manifestations of the
hysteria, had perhaps overlooked the first signs of the insidious
and incurable disease.

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1229

   There are thus abundant signs to
be found in healthy, non-neurotic people that the recollection of
distressing impressions and the occurrence of distressing thoughts
are opposed by a resistance.¹ But the full significance of
this fact can be estimated only when the psychology of
neurotic
people is investigated. We are forced to regard as
one of the main pillars of the mechanism supporting hysterical
symptoms an
elementary endeavour
of this kind
to fend
off
ideas that can arouse feelings of unpleasure - an endeavour
which can only be compared with the flight-reflex in the presence
of painful stimuli. The assumption that a defensive trend of this
kind exists cannot be objected to on the ground that one often
enough finds it impossible, on the contrary, to get rid of
distressing memories that pursue one, and to banish distressing
affective impulses like remorse and the pangs of conscience. For we
are not asserting that this defensive trend is able to put itself
into effect in every case, that in the interplay of psychical
forces it may not come up against factors which, for other
purposes, aim at the opposite effect and bring it about in spite of
the defensive trend. It may be surmised that
the architectonic
principle of the mental apparatus lies in a stratification - a
building up of superimposed agencies
; and it is quite possible
that this defensive endeavour belongs to a lower psychical agency
and is inhibited by higher agencies. At all events, if we can trace
back processes such as those found in our examples of forgetting to
this defensive trend, that fact speaks in favour of its existence
and power.(As we have seen, a number of things are forgotten on
their own account; where this is not possible, the defensive trend
shifts its target and causes something else related to the target
at least to be forgotten, something less important which has come
into associative connection with the thing that is really
objectionable.

  
¹
[
Footnote added
1910:] A. Pick
(1905) has recently brought together a number of quotations from
authors who appreciate the influence of affective factors on the
memory and who - more or less clearly - recognize the contribution
towards forgetting made by the endeavour to fend off unpleasure.
But none of us has been able to portray the phenomenon and its
psychological basis so exhaustively and at the same time so
impressively as Nietzsche in one of his aphorisms (
Jenseits von
Gut und Böse
, IV, 68): ‘"I did this", says
my Memory. "I cannot have done this", says my Pride and
remains inexorable. In the end - Memory yields.’

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1230

   The view developed here, that
distressing memories succumb especially easily to motivated
forgetting, deserves to find application in many spheres where no
attention, or too little, has so far been paid to it. Thus it seems
to me that it has still not yet been sufficiently strongly
emphasized in assessing testimony in courts of law,¹ where the
process of putting a witness on oath is clearly expected to have
much too great a purifying influence on the play of his psychical
forces. It is universally acknowledged that where the origin of a
people’s traditions and legendary history are concerned, a
motive of this kind, whose aim is to wipe from memory whatever is
distressing to national feeling, must be taken into consideration.
Closer investigation would perhaps reveal a complete analogy
between the ways in which the traditions of a people and the
childhood memories of the individual come to be formed. - The great
Darwin laid down a ‘golden rule’ for the scientific
worker based on his insight into the part played by unpleasure as a
motive for forgetting.²

   In a very similar way to the
forgetting of names, the forgetting of impressions can be
accompanied by faulty recollection; and this, where it finds
credence, is described as paramnesia. Paramnesia in pathological
cases - in paranoia it actually plays the part of a constituent
factor in the formation of the delusion - has brought forth an
extensive literature in which I have entirely failed to find any
hint whatever as to its motivation. As this is also a subject which
belongs to the psychology of the neuroses it is inappropriate to
consider it in the present context. Instead, I shall describe a
singular paramnesia of my own, in which the motivation provided by
unconscious, repressed material and the manner and nature of the
connection with this material can be recognized clearly enough.

  
¹
Cf. Gross (1898).

  
²
[
Footnote added
1912] Ernest Jones
has drawn attention to the following passage in Darwin’s
autobiography, which convincingly reflects his scientific honesty
and his psychological acumen:

  
‘I had, during many years, followed a golden rule, namely,
that whenever a published fact, a new observation or thought came
across me, which was opposed to my general results, to make a
memorandum of it without fail and at once; for I had found by
experience that such facts and thoughts were far more apt to escape
from the memory than favourable ones.’

The Psychopathology Of Everyday Life

1231

   While I was writing the later
chapters of my book on dream-interpretation, I happened to be at a
summer resort without access to libraries and works of reference,
and I was forced to incorporate in my manuscript from memory all
sorts of references and quotations, subject to later correction. In
writing the passage on day-dreams I thought of the excellent
example of the poor book-keeper in Alphonse Daudet’s
Le
Nabab
, in whose person the writer was probably portraying his
own reveries. I imagined I had a distinct memory of one of the
phantasies which this man - I called him Monsieur Jocelyn - hatched
out on his walks through the streets of Paris; and I began to
reproduce it from memory. It was a phantasy of how Monsieur Jocelyn
boldly threw himself at the head of a runaway horse in the street,
and brought it to a stop; how the carriage door opened and a great
personage stepped out, pressed Monsieur Jocelyn’s hand and
said: ‘You are my saviour. I owe my life to you. What can I
do for you?’

   Any inaccuracies in my own
account of this phantasy could, I assured myself, easily be
corrected at home when I had the book in front of me. But when I
finally looked through
Le Nabab
to check this passage in my
manuscript, which was ready to go to press, I found, to my very
great shame and consternation, no mention of any such reverie on
the part of Monsieur Jocelyn; in fact the poor book-keeper did not
have this name at all but was called Monsieur Joyeuse. This second
error quickly gave me the key to the solution of the first one -
the paramnesia. ‘Joyeux’, of which
‘Joyeuse’ is the feminine form, is the only possible
way in which I could translate my own name, Freud, into French.
Where then could the phantasy, which I had remembered wrongly and
ascribed to Daudet, have come from? It could only be a product of
my own, a day-dream which I had formed myself and which had not
become conscious or which had once been conscious and had since
been totally forgotten. Perhaps I invented it myself in Paris where
I frequently walked about the streets, lonely and full of longings,
greatly in need of a helper and protector, until the great Charcot
took me into his circle. Later I more than once met the author of
Le Nabab
in Charcot’s house.¹

  
¹
[
Footnote added
1924:] Some time ago
one of my readers sent me a small volume from Franz
Hoffmann’s
Jugendbibliothek
in which a rescue scene
like the one in my phantasy in Paris is recounted in detail. The
agreement between the two extends even to certain not quite
ordinary expressions that occur in both. It is not easy to avoid
suspecting that I had in fact read this children’s book while
I was myself a boy. The library at my secondary school contained
Hoffmann’s series and was always ready to offer these books
to pupils in place of any other mental pabulum. The phantasy which,
at the age of 43, I thought I remembered as having been produced by
someone else, and which I was subsequently forced to recognize as a
creation of my own at the age of 28, may therefore easily have been
an exact reproduction of an impression which I had received
somewhere between the ages of 11 and 13. After all, the rescue
phantasy which I attributed to the unemployed book-keeper in
Le
Nabab
was merely meant to prepare the way for the phantasy of
my own rescue, to make my longing for a patron and protector
tolerable to my pride. This being so, it will not surprise anyone
with an understanding of the mind to hear that in my conscious life
I myself was highly resistant to the idea of being dependent on a
protector’s favour, and that I found it hard to tolerate the
few real situations in which something of that nature occurred.
Abraham (1922
b
) has brought to light the deeper meaning of
phantasies with such a content and has provided an almost
exhaustive explanation of their special features.

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1232

   Another paramnesia, which it was
possible to explain satisfactorily, is reminiscent
fausse
reconnaissance
, a subject that will be discussed later. I had
told one of my patients, an ambitious and capable man, that a young
student had recently gained admittance to the circle of my
followers on the strength of an interesting work, ‘
Der
Künstler, Versuch einer Sexualpsychologie
’. When
this work appeared in print a year and a quarter later, my patient
maintained that he could remember with certainty having read an
announcement of this book somewhere (perhaps in a
bookseller’s prospectus) even before - a month or six months
before - I had first mentioned it to him. This announcement, he
said, had come into his mind at the time; and he further remarked
that the author had changed the title: it no longer read
‘
Versuch
’ but ‘
Ansätze zu einer
Sexualpsychologie
. Careful enquiry of the author and a
comparison of all the dates nevertheless showed that my patient was
claiming to recall something impossible. No announcement of this
work had appeared anywhere before publication, and certainly none a
year and a quarter before it went to press. When I omitted to
interpret this paramnesia, my patient produced a repetition of it
of the same kind. He believed he had recently seen a work on
agoraphobia in a bookshop window and was now looking through all
the publishers’ catalogues in order to get a copy. I was then
able to explain to him why his efforts were bound to be fruitless.
The work on agoraphobia existed only in his phantasy, as an
unconscious intention: he meant to write it himself. His ambition
to emulate the young man and become one of my followers on the
strength of a similar scientific work was responsible for the first
paramnesia and then for its repetition. Whereupon he recalled that
the bookseller’s announcement which had led him to make this
false recognition dealt with a work entitled ‘
Genesis, das
Gesetz der Zeugung
’. However, it was I who was
responsible for the change in the title mentioned by him, for I
could remember having myself been guilty of that inaccuracy -
‘
Versuch
’ instead of
‘
Ansätze
’ - in repeating the title.

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1233

(B)
THE FORGETTING OF
INTENTIONS

   No group of phenomena is better
qualified than the forgetting of intentions for demonstrating the
thesis that, in itself, lack of attention does not suffice to
explain parapraxes. An intention is an impulse to perform an
action: an impulse which has already found approval but whose
execution is postponed to a suitable occasion. Now it can happen
that during the interval thus created a change of such a kind
occurs in the motives involved that the intention is not carried
out; but in that case it is not forgotten: it is re-examined and
cancelled. The
forgetting
of intentions, to which we are
subject every day and in every possible situation, is
not
a
thing that we are in the habit of explaining in terms of such a
revision in the balance of motives. In general we leave it
unexplained; or we try to find a psychological explanation by
supposing that at the time when the intention was due to be carried
out the attention necessary for the action was no longer at hand -
attention which was, after all, an indispensable precondition for
the coming into being of the intention and had therefore been
available for the action at that time. Observation of our normal
behaviour in regard to intentions leads us to reject this attempt
at an explanation as being arbitrary. If I form an intention in the
morning which is to be carried out in the evening, I may be
reminded of it two or three times in the course of the day. It
need
not however become conscious at all throughout the day.
When the time for its execution draws near, it suddenly springs to
my mind and causes me to make the necessary preparations for the
proposed action. If I am going for a walk and take a letter with me
which has to be posted, it is certainly not necessary for me, as a
normal individual, free from neurosis, to walk all the way with it
in my hand and to be continually on the look-out for a letter-box
in which to post it; on the contrary I am in the habit of putting
it in my pocket, of walking along and letting my thoughts range
freely, and I confidently expect that one of the first letter-boxes
will catch my attention and cause me to put my hand in my pocket
and take out the letter. Normal behaviour after an intention has
been formed coincides fully with the experimentally-produced
behaviour of people to whom what is described as a
‘post-hypnotic suggestion at long range’ has been given
under hypnosis.¹ This phenomenon is usually described in the
following way. The suggested intention slumbers on in the person
concerned until the time for its execution approaches. Then it
awakes and impels him to perform the action.