Freud - Complete Works (224 page)

The Psychopathology Of Everyday Life

1267

   Stärcke (1916) has given an
example of the way in which creative writers do not hesitate to put
a bungled action in the place of an intentional action and to make
it in this way the source of the gravest consequences:

   ‘In one of
Heijermans’ (1914) sketches there occurs an example of a
bungled action, or, more precisely, of a faulty action which the
author uses as a dramatic
motif
.

   ‘The sketch is called
"Tom and Teddie". They are a pair of divers who appear in
a variety theatre; their act is given in an iron tank with glass
walls, in which they stay under water for a considerable time and
perform tricks. Recently the wife has started an affair with
another man, an animal-trainer. Her diver-husband has caught them
together in the dressing-room just before the performance. Dead
silence, menacing looks, with the diver saying:
"Afterwards!" - The act begins. The diver is about to
perform his hardest trick: he will remain "two and a half
minutes under water in a hermetically sealed trunk". - This is
a trick they had performed often enough; the trunk was locked and
"Teddie used to show the key to the audience, who checked the
time by their watches". She also used purposely to drop the
key once or twice into the tank and then dive hurriedly after it,
so as not to be too late when the time came for the trunk to be
opened.

   ‘"This particular
evening, January 31st, saw Tom locked up as usual by the neat
fingers of his brisk and nimble wife. He smiled behind the
peep-hole - she played with the key and waited for his warning
sign. The trainer stood in the wings, in his impeccable evening
dress, with his white tie and his horse-whip. Here was the
‘other man’. To catch her attention he gave a very
short whistle. She looked at him, laughed, and with the clumsy
gesture of someone whose attention is distracted she threw the key
so wildly in the air that at exactly two minutes and twenty
seconds, by an accurate reckoning, it fell by the side of the tank
in the middle of the bunting covering the pedestal. No one had seen
it. No one could see it. Viewed from the house the optical illusion
was such that everyone saw the key fall into the water - and none
of the stage hands heard it since the bunting muffled the
sound.

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   ‘"Laughing, Teddie
clambered without delay, over the edge of the tank. Laughing - Tom
was holding out well - she came down the ladder. Laughing, she
disappeared under the pedestal to look there and, when she did not
find the key at once, she bowed in front of the bunting with a
priceless gesture, and an expression on her face as if to say
‘Gracious me! what a nuisance this is!’.

   ‘"Meanwhile Tom was
grimacing in his droll way behind the peep-hole, as if he too was
becoming agitated. The audience saw the white of his false teeth,
the champing of his lips under the flaxen moustache, the comical
bubble-blowing that they had seen earlier, when he was eating the
apple. They saw his pale knuckles as he grappled and clawed, and
they laughed as they had laughed so often already that evening.

   ‘"Two minutes and
fifty-eight seconds . . .

   ‘"Three minutes and
seven seconds . . . twelve seconds . . .

   ‘"Bravo! Bravo!
Bravo!

   ‘"Then consternation
broke out in the house and there was a shuffling of feet, when the
stage hands and the trainer began to search too and the curtain
came down before the lid had been raised.

   ‘"Six English
dancing-girls came on - then the man with the ponies, dogs and
monkeys. And so on.

   ‘"It was not till the
next morning that the public knew there had been an accident, that
Teddie had been left a widow. . . ."

   ‘It is clear from this
quotation what an excellent understanding the author must himself
have had of the nature of a symptomatic act, seeing that he
demonstrates to us so strikingly the deeper cause of the fatal
clumsiness.’

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CHAPTER IX

SYMPTOMATIC AND CHANCE ACTIONS

The actions described so far, in which we
recognized the carrying out of an unconscious intention, made their
appearance in the form of disturbances of other intended actions
and concealed themselves behind the pretext of clumsiness. The
‘chance’ actions which are now to be discussed differ
from ‘bungled’ actions merely in the fact that they
scorn the support of a conscious intention and are therefore in no
need of a pretext. They appear on their own account, and are
permitted because they are not suspected of having any aim or
intention. We perform them ‘without thinking there is
anything in them’, ‘quite accidentally’,
‘just to have something to do’; and such information,
it is expected, will put an end to any enquiry into the
significance of the action. In order to be able to enjoy this
privileged position, these actions, which no longer put forward the
excuse of clumsiness, have to fulfil certain conditions: they must
be
unobtrusive
and their effects must be slight.

   I have collected a large number
of such chance actions from myself and from others, and after
closely examining the different examples I have come to the
conclusion that the name of
symptomatic acts
is a better one
for them. They give expression to something which the agent himself
does not suspect in them, and which he does not as a rule intend to
impart to other people but to keep to himself. Thus, exactly like
all the other phenomena which we have so far considered, they play
the part of symptoms.

   The richest supply of such chance
or symptomatic acts is in fact to be obtained during the
psycho-analytic treatment of neurotics. I cannot resist quoting two
examples from this source which show how extensively and in what
detail these insignificant occurrences are determined by
unconscious thoughts. The borderline between symptomatic acts and
bungled actions is so ill-defined that I might equally well have
included these examples in the last chapter.

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   (1) During a session a young
married woman mentioned by way of association that she had been
cutting her nails the day before and ‘had cut into the flesh
while she was trying to remove the soft cuticle at the bottom of
the nail’. This is of so little interest that we ask
ourselves in surprise why it was recalled and mentioned at all, and
we begin to suspect that what we are dealing with is a symptomatic
act. And in fact it turned out that the finger which was the victim
of her small act of clumsiness was the ring-finger, the one on
which a wedding ring is worn. What is more, it was her wedding
anniversary; and in the light of this the injury to the soft
cuticle takes on a very definite meaning, which can easily be
guessed. At the same time, too, she related a dream which alluded
to her husband’s clumsiness and her anaesthesia as a wife.
But why was it the ring-finger on her
left
hand which she
injured, whereas a wedding ring is worn on the
right
hand?
Her husband is a lawyer, a ‘doctor of law’, and as a
girl her affections belonged in secret to a physician (jokingly
called ‘
Doktor der Linke
’ ). A
‘left-handed marriage’, too, has a definite
meaning.

   (2) A young unmarried lady said
to me: ‘Yesterday I quite unintentionally tore a hundred
florin note in two and gave half to a lady who was visiting me. Am
I to take this as a symptomatic act as well?’ Closer
investigation disclosed the following particulars. The hundred
florin note: - She devoted part of her time and means to charitable
work. Together with another lady she was providing for the bringing
up of an orphan. The hundred florins were the contribution sent to
her by the other lady. She had put them in an envelope and placed
it on her writing table for the time being.

   The visitor was a lady of good
standing whom she was assisting in another charitable cause. This
lady wished to make a note of the names of a number of people whose
support could be enlisted. There was no paper at hand, so my
patient reached for the envelope on her desk, and without thinking
of what it contained tore it in two; one piece she kept herself, so
as to have a duplicate set of names, and the other she handed to
her visitor. It should be observed that her act, though certainly
inappropriate, was perfectly harmless. If a hundred florin note is
torn up, it does not, as is well known, lose any of its value so
long as it can be put together again completely from the fragments.
The importance of the names on the piece of paper was a guarantee
that the lady would not throw it away, and it was equally certain
that she would restore the valuable contents as soon as she noticed
them.

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   But what was the unconscious
thought to which this chance action, made possible by
forgetfulness, was meant to give expression? The visitor stood in a
very definite relation to my patient’s treatment. It was this
lady who had formerly recommended me to her as a doctor, and, if I
am not mistaken, my patient felt herself under an obligation to her
for this advice. Was the half of the hundred florin note perhaps
meant to represent a fee for her services as an intermediary? 
That would still be very strange.

   Further material was however
forthcoming. A little time before, a woman who was an intermediary
of a very different kind had enquired of a relative of the
patient’s whether the young lady would perhaps like to make a
certain gentleman’s acquaintance; and that morning, a few
hours before the lady’s visit, the suitor’s letter of
proposal had arrived and had caused much amusement. So when the
lady opened the conversation by enquiring after my patient’s
health, the latter might well have thought: ‘You certainly
found me the right doctor, but if you could help me to get the
right husband’ (with the further thought: ‘and to get a
child’) ‘I should be
more
grateful.’ This
thought, which was kept repressed, formed the starting-point from
which the two intermediaries became fused into one, and she handed
her visitor the fee which her phantasy was ready to give the other
woman. This solution becomes entirely convincing when I add that I
had been telling the patient about such chance or symptomatic acts
only the evening before. She thereupon took the first opportunity
of producing something analogous.

The Psychopathology Of Everyday Life

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   These extremely frequent chance
and symptomatic acts might be arranged in three groups, according
to whether they occur habitually, regularly under certain
conditions, or sporadically. Actions of the first group (such as
playing with one’s watch-chain, fingering one’s beard
and so on), which can almost be taken as characteristics of the
person concerned, trench upon the multifarious movements known as
tics
and no doubt deserve to be dealt with in connection
with them. In the second group I include playing with a stick or
scribbling with a pencil that one happens to be holding, jingling
coins in one’s pocket, kneading bread-crumbs and other
plastic materials, fiddling with one’s clothing in all kinds
of ways and so forth. During psychical treatment idle play of this
sort regularly conceals a sense and meaning which are denied any
other form of expression. Generally the person concerned is quite
unaware that he is doing anything of the kind or that he has
modified his usual play in certain ways; and he fails to see and
hear the effects of these actions. He does not, for example, hear
the noise made by the jingling of coins, and, if his attention is
drawn to it, he behaves as though he were astonished and
incredulous. All the things that a person does with his clothing,
often without realizing it, are no less important and deserve the
doctor’s attention. Every change in the clothing usually
worn, every small sign of carelessness - such as an unfastened
button - every trace of exposure, is intended to express something
which the wearer of the clothes does not want to say straight out
and which for the most part he is unaware of. The interpretations
of these small chance actions, and the evidence for these
interpretations, emerge each time with sufficient certainty from
the material which accompanies them during the session, from the
topic that is under discussion and from the associations that occur
when attention is drawn to the apparently chance action. Because of
this I shall not proceed to support my assertions with examples
accompanied by analyses; but I mention these actions because I
believe that they have the same meaning in the case of normal
people as they have in my patients.

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   I cannot refrain from showing by
at least one example how close the connection can be between a
symbolic action performed through force of habit and the most
intimate and important aspects of a healthy person’s
life:¹

   ‘As Professor Freud has
taught us, symbolism plays a greater role in the childhood of
normal people than earlier psycho-analytical experiences had led
one to expect. In this connection the following short analysis may
be of some interest, especially in view of its medical
subject-matter.

   ‘A doctor on rearranging
his furniture in a new house came across an old-fashioned, straight
wooden stethoscope, and, after pausing to decide where he should
put it, was impelled to place it on the side of his writing-desk in
such a position that it stood exactly between his chair and the one
reserved for his patients. The act in itself was somewhat odd, for
two reasons. In the first place he does not use a stethoscope at
all often (he is in fact a neurologist) and if he needs one he uses
a binaural one. In the second place all his medical apparatus and
instruments were kept in drawers, with the sole exception of this
one. However, he gave no further thought to the matter until one
day a patient, who had never seen a straight stethoscope, asked him
what it was. On being told, she asked why he kept it just there; he
answered in an off-hand way that that place was as good as any
other. This started him thinking, however, and he wondered whether
there had been any unconscious motive in his action, and being
familiar with the psycho-analytical method he decided to
investigate the matter.