Freud - Complete Works (218 page)

  
¹
Cf. Bernheim (1891).

The Psychopathology Of Everyday Life

1234

   There are two situations in life
in which even the layman is aware that forgetting - as far as
intentions are concerned - cannot in any way claim to be considered
as an elementary phenomenon not further reducible, but entitles him
to conclude that there are such things as
unavowed motives
.
What I have in mind are love-relationships and military discipline.
A lover who has failed to keep a
rendezvous
will find it
useless to make excuses for himself by telling the lady that
unfortunately he completely forgot about it. She will not fail to
reply: ‘A year ago you wouldn’t have forgotten. You
evidently don’t care for me any longer.’ Even if he
should seize on the psychological explanation mentioned above and
try to excuse his forgetfulness by pleading pressure of business,
the only outcome would be that the lady, who will have become as
sharp-sighted as a doctor is in psycho-analysis, would reply:
‘How curious that business distractions like these never
turned up in the past!’ The lady is not of course wanting to
deny the possibility of forgetting; it is only that she believes,
not without reason, that practically the same inference - of there
being some reluctance present - can be drawn from unintentional
forgetting as from conscious evasion.

   Similarly, under conditions of
military service, the difference between a failure to carry out
orders which is due to forgetting and one which is deliberate is
neglected on principle - and justifiably so. A soldier
must
not forget what military service orders him to do. If he
does
forget in spite of knowing the order, that is because
the motives that drive him to carry out the military order are
opposed by other, counter-motives. A one year volunteer who at
inspection tries to offer the excuse that he has
forgotten
to polish his buttons is sure to be punished. But this punishment
is trifling in comparison to the one to which he would expose
himself if he admitted to himself and his superiors that the motive
for his failure to carry out orders was that ‘I’m
heartily sick of this wretched spit-and-polish’. For the sake
of this saving of punishment - for reasons of economy, so to speak
- he makes use of forgetting as an excuse, or it comes about as a
compromise.

The Psychopathology Of Everyday Life

1235

   Both the service of women and
military service demand that everything connected with them should
be immune to forgetting. In this way they suggest the notion that,
whereas in unimportant matters forgetting is permissible, in
important matters it is a sign that one wishes to treat them as
unimportant, i.e. to deny their importance.¹ This view, which
takes psychical considerations into account, cannot in fact be
rejected here. No one forgets to carry out actions that seem to
himself important, without incurring suspicion of being mentally
disordered. Our investigation can therefore only extend to the
forgetting of intentions of a more or less minor character; we
cannot consider any intention as being
wholly
indifferent,
for otherwise it would certainly never have been formed.

   As with the functional
disturbances described on earlier pages, I have made a collection
of the cases of omitting to do something as a result of forgetting
which I have observed in myself, and I have endeavoured to explain
them. I have invariably found that they could be traced to
interference by unknown and unavowed motives - or, as one may say,
to a
counter-will
. In a number of these cases I found myself
in a position which was similar to being under conditions of
service; I was under a constraint, against which I had not entirely
given up struggling, so that I made a demonstration against it by
forgetting. This accounts for the fact that I am especially prone
to forget to send congratulations on occasions such as birthdays,
anniversaries, wedding celebrations and promotions. I keep on
making new resolutions on the subject and become more and more
convinced that I shall not succeed. I am now on the point of giving
the effort up and of yielding consciously to the motives that
oppose it. While I was in a transitional stage, a friend asked me
to send a congratulatory telegram on a certain day on his behalf
along with my own, but I warned him that I should forget both; and
it was not surprising that the prophecy came true. It is due to
painful experiences in the course of my life that I am unable to
manifest sympathy on occasions where the expression of sympathy
must necessarily he exaggerated, as an expression corresponding to
the slight amount of my feeling would not be allowable. Since I
have come to recognize that I have often mistaken other
people’s ostensible sympathy for their real feelings, I have
been in revolt against these conventional expressions of sympathy,
though on the other hand I recognize their social usefulness.
Condolences in the case of death are excepted from this divided
treatment: once I have decided to send them I do not fail to do so.
Where my emotional activity no longer has anything to do with
social duty, its expression is never inhibited by forgetting.

  
¹
[
Footnote added
1912:] In Bernard
Shaw’s play
Caesar and Cleopatra
, Caesar, as he is
leaving Egypt, is worried for a time by the idea that there is
something he has meant to do but has forgotten. Finally he
remembers: he has forgotten to say goodbye to Cleopatra! This small
detail is meant to illustrate - incidentally in complete contrast
to the historical truth - how little Caesar cared for the young
Egyptian princess. (From Jones, 1911
b
, 488
n
.)

The Psychopathology Of Everyday Life

1236

   Writing from a prisoner-of-war
camp, Lieutenant T. reports an instance of a forgetting of this
kind, in which an intention that had in the first place been
suppressed broke through in the form of ‘counter-will’
and led to an unpleasant situation:

   ‘The most senior officer in
a prisoner-of-war camp for officers was insulted by one of his
fellow prisoners. To avoid further complications he wished to use
the only authoritative measure at his disposal and have the officer
removed and transferred to another camp. It was only on the advice
of several friends that he decided - contrary to his secret wish -
to abandon his plan and seek to satisfy his honour immediately,
although this was bound to have a variety of disagreeable results.
The same morning, as senior officer, he had to call the roll of the
officers, under the supervision of the camp-guard. He had known his
fellow officers for quite a long time and had never before made any
mistakes over this. This time he passed over the name of the man
who had insulted him, with the result that when all the others had
been dismissed this man alone was obliged to remain behind till the
error was cleared up. The name that had been overlooked was
perfectly plainly written in the middle of a sheet. The incident
was regarded by one party as a deliberate insult, and by the other
as an unfortunate accident that was likely to be misinterpreted.
Later on, however, after making the acquaintance of Freud’s
Psychopathology of Everyday Life
, the chief actor in the
episode was able to form a correct picture of what had
occurred.’

The Psychopathology Of Everyday Life

1237

   The conflict between a
conventional duty and the unavowed view which we privately take of
it similarly provides an explanation for those cases in which we
forget to carry out actions that we promised to do as a favour to
someone. Here the regular result is that it is only the would-be
benefactor who believes that forgetting has the power to act as an
excuse; the person who asked the favour gives what is
unquestionably the right answer: ‘He is not interested in the
matter, otherwise he would not have forgotten.’ There are
some people who are known as being forgetful in general, and who
are for that reason excused their lapses in the same kind of way as
short-sighted people who fail to greet us in the street.¹
These people forget all their small promises, and they fail to
carry out any of the commissions they receive. In this way they
show themselves unreliable in little things, and they demand that
we should not take these minor offences amiss - that is, that we
should not attribute them to their character but refer them to an
organic idiosyncracy.² I am not one of these people myself,
and have had no opportunity of analysing the actions of a person of
this kind, so that, by examining the choice of occasions for
forgetting, I might discover its motivation. I cannot however help
suspecting on the basis of analogy that in these cases the motive
is an unusually large amount of unavowed contempt for other people
which exploits the constitutional factor for its own
ends.³

  
¹
Women, with their subtler understanding of
unconscious mental processes, are as a rule more apt to take
offence when someone does not recognize them in the street and
therefore fails to greet them, than to think of the most obvious
explanations - namely that the offender is short-sighted, or was so
engrossed in his thoughts that he did not notice them. They
conclude that he would have seen them if he had ‘set any
store by them’.

  
²
[
Footnote added
1910:] Ferenczi
reports that he himself was once an ‘absent-minded
person’ [
ein ‘Zerstreuter
’] and that he
was noted by acquaintances for the frequency and strangeness of his
parapraxes. But, he says, the signs of this absent-mindedness have
almost completely disappeared since he began treating patients by
psycho-analysis and found himself obliged to turn his attention to
the analysis of his own self as well. He thinks that one gives up
these parapraxes in proportion as one learns to enlarge one’s
own responsibility. He therefore justly maintains that
absent-mindedness is a condition which is dependent on unconscious
complexes and which can be cured by psycho-analysis. One day,
however, he was blaming himself for having committed a technical
error in a patient’s psycho-analysis. That day all his former
absent-minded habits reappeared. He stumbled several times as he
walked along the street (a representation of his
faux pas
[false step - blunder] in the treatment), left his pocket book at
home, tried to pay a kreutzer too little for his tram-fare, found
his clothes were not properly buttoned, and so on.

  
³
[
Footnote added
1912:] In this
connection Ernest Jones observes: ‘Often the resistance is of
a general order. Thus a busy man forgets to post letters entrusted
to him - to his slight annoyance - by his wife, just as he may
"forget" to carry out her shopping
orders.’

The Psychopathology Of Everyday Life

1238

   In other cases the motives for
forgetting are less easy to discover, and when found arouse greater
surprise. Thus, for instance, in former years I noticed that, out
of a fairly large number of visits to patients, I only forgot those
to non-paying patients or to colleagues. My shame at this discovery
led me to adopt the habit of making a note beforehand in the
morning of the visits I intended to make during the day. I do not
know if other doctors have arrived at the same practice by the same
road. But in this way we get some idea of what causes the so called
neurasthenic patient to jot down, in his notorious
‘notes’, the various things he wants to tell the
doctor. The ostensible reason is that he has no confidence in the
reproductive capacity of his memory. That is perfectly correct, but
the scene usually proceeds as follows. The patient has recounted
his various complaints and enquiries in a very long-winded manner.
After he has finished he pauses for a moment, then pulls out the
jottings and adds apologetically: ‘I’ve made some
notes, as I can’t remember things.’ As a rule he finds
that they contain nothing new. He repeats each point and answers it
himself: ‘Yes, I’ve asked about that already.’
With the notes he is probably only demonstrating one of his
symptoms: the frequency with which his intentions are disturbed
through the interference of obscure motives.

   I pass on to ailments that
afflict the greater number of my healthy acquaintances as well as
myself. I confess that - especially in former years - I was very
apt to forget to return borrowed books, which I kept for long
periods, and that it came about especially easily that I put off
paying bills by forgetting them. One morning not long ago I left
the tobacconist’s where I had made my daily purchase of
cigars without having paid for them. It was a most harmless
omission, as I am well known there and could therefore expect to be
reminded of my debt next day. But my trivial act of negligence, my
attempt to contract a debt, was certainly not unconnected with
budgetary thoughts which had occupied my mind during the preceding
day. Among the majority even of what are called
‘respectable’ people traces of divided behaviour can
easily be observed where money and property are concerned. It may
perhaps be generally true that the primitive greed of the suckling,
who wants to take possession of every object (in order to put it
into his mouth), has only been incompletely overcome by
civilization and upbringing.¹

  
¹
For the sake of preserving the unity of the
subject I may perhaps interrupt the general arrangement I have
adopted, and, in addition to what I have said above, point out that
people’s memories show a particular partiality in money
matters. Paramnesias of having already paid for something can often
be very obstinate, as I know from my own experience. When free play
is given to avaricious aims apart from the serious interests of
life - for fun, in fact -, as in card-playing, the most honourable
men show an inclination to make errors and mistakes in memory and
counting, and, without quite knowing how, they even find themselves
involved in petty cheating. The psychically refreshing nature of
these games is partly due to liberties of this kind. We must admit
the truth of the saying that in play we can get to know a
person’s character - that is, if we are not thinking of his
manifest
character. - If waiters still make
unintentional mistakes in the bill, the same explanation obviously
applies to them. - In commercial circles a certain delay can
frequently be observed in paying out sums of money (for settling
accounts and so on) which in point of fact brings the owner no
profit and can only be understood in psychological terms - as an
expression of a counter-will against paying out money. - [
The
next sentence was added
in 1912:] Brill puts the matter with
epigrammatic brevity: ‘We are more apt to mislay letters
containing bills than cheques.’ - The fact that women in
particular evince a special amount of unpleasure at paying their
doctor is connected with the most intimate impulses, which are very
far from having been elucidated. Women patients have usually
forgotten their purse and so cannot pay at the time of
consultation; they then regularly forget to send the fee after they
reach home, and thus arrange things so that one has treated them
for nothing - ‘for the sake of their
beaux
yeux
’. They pay one, as it were, by the sight of their
countenance.