Freud - Complete Works (226 page)

   ‘The meaning of the
symbolic symptomatic act becomes clearer if it is realized that my
colleague had scruples about telling a fairly remote acquaintance
like myself of his precarious material situation, and that the
obtrusive thought thereupon disguised itself as a symptomatic act
which expressed symbolically what was meant to be hidden and in
this way afforded the speaker relief which arose from unconscious
sources.’

The Psychopathology Of Everyday Life

1279

   The following examples will show
how much meaning may turn out to lie in an apparently unintentional
act of carrying something off or taking something away with
one.

   Dr. B. Dattner relates: ‘A
colleague paid a visit to a friend, a lady he had much admired in
the days of his youth; it was the first visit after her marriage.
He told me of this visit and expressed his surprise at the fact
that he had not succeeded in keeping his resolution to stay only a
very short time with her. He then went on to recount a singular
parapraxis which had happened to him there. His friend’s
husband, who had joined in the conversation, had looked for a box
of matches which had quite definitely been on the top of the table
when he arrived. My colleague, too, had looked through his pockets
to see whether he had not accidentally "snapped it
up",¹ but without avail. Some time later he had in fact
found "it" in his pocket, and was struck by the fact that
there was only a single match in the box. - A dream a few days
later which prominently displayed the match-box symbolism and was
concerned with this same friend of his youth confirmed my
explanation that my colleague’s symptomatic act was intended
to announce that he had prior rights and to demonstrate his claim
to exclusive possession (only one match in the box).’

   Dr. Hanns Sachs relates:
‘Our maid is particularly fond of a certain kind of cake.
There is no possible doubt of this, as it is the only thing that
she always makes well. One Sunday she brought in this particular
cake, put it down on the sideboard, removed the plates and cutlery
of the previous course and stacked them on the tray on which she
had brought in the cake; she then put the cake back on the top of
this pile instead of on the table, and disappeared with it into the
kitchen. Our first idea was that she had noticed something that
ought to be put right about the cake, but when she failed to appear
again my wife rang and asked: "Betty, what has happened to the
cake?" "How do you mean?" replied the maid, not
understanding. We had first to point out to her that she had taken
the cake away with her again. She had put it on the pile of dishes,
carried it out and put it away "without noticing". - Next
day, as we were about to eat what remained of this cake, my wife
noticed that there was just as much as we had left the day before -
in other words, that the maid had rejected her own share of her
favourite dish. When asked why she had not eaten any of the cake
she replied in some embarrassment that she had not wanted any. -
The infantile attitude is very clear on both occasions: first the
childish insatiability which did not want to share the object of
her wishes with anyone, followed by the equally childish defiant
reaction: "If you grudge it me, keep it for yourselves; I
don’t want anything at all now.”'

  
¹
[In German the word for ‘box’
(‘
Schatel
’) is feminine; so that this might
equally mean ‘snapped
her
up’.]

The Psychopathology Of Everyday Life

1280

   Chance actions and symptomatic
acts occurring in matrimonial matters often have the most serious
significance and might induce people who disregard the psychology
of the unconscious to believe in omens. It is not a happy beginning
when a young bride loses her wedding-ring on the honeymoon; but
after all it is usually only mislaid and is soon found again. - I
know a lady, now divorced from her husband, who in managing her
money affairs frequently signed documents in her maiden name, many
years before she in fact resumed it. - I was once the guest of a
young married couple and heard the young woman laughingly describe
her latest experience. The day after her return from the honeymoon
she had called for her unmarried sister to go shopping with her as
she used to do, while her husband went to his business. Suddenly
she noticed a gentleman on the other side of the street, and
nudging her sister had cried: ‘Look, there goes Herr
L.’ She had forgotten that this gentleman had been her
husband for some weeks. I felt a cold chill as I heard the story,
but I did not dare to draw the inference. The little incident only
occurred to my mind some years later when the marriage had come to
a most unhappy end.

The Psychopathology Of Everyday Life

1281

   The following observation is
quoted from one of Alphonse Maeder’s valuable studies,
published in French (Maeder, 1906). It might equally well have been
included among the examples of forgetting:

   ‘Une dame nous racontait
récemment qu’elle avait oublié d’essayer
sa robe de noce et s’en souvint la veille du mariage à
huit heures du soir; la couturière désespérait
de voir sa cliente. Ce détail suffit a montrer que la
fiancée ne se sentait pas très heureuse de porter une
robe d’épouse, elle cherchait à oublier cette
représentation pénible. Elle est aujourd’hui .
. . divorcée.’¹

   A friend who has learnt to read
signs has told me that the great actress Eleonora Duse introduces
into one of her parts a symptomatic act which clearly shows the
depths from which she draws her artistry. It is a drama of
adultery; she has just had an altercation with her husband and now
stands apart deep in thought, before the seducer approaches. During
the short interval she plays with her wedding ring, takes it off
her finger, puts it on again, and then once more takes it off. She
is now ready for the other man.

   I add here an account by Theodor
Reik (1915) of some other symptomatic acts involving rings.

   ‘We are familiar with the
symptomatic acts of married people which consist in their taking
off and replacing their wedding rings. My colleague M. produced a
series of similar symptomatic acts. He had received a ring as a
present from a girl he was in love with, with a note saying that he
must not lose it or she would know that he did not love her any
more. Subsequently he grew increasingly worried that he might lose
the ring. If he had temporarily taken it off (for example while he
was washing) it would regularly be mislaid, so that often it could
only be found again after a long search. When he was posting a
letter he could not suppress a slight fear that the ring might be
pulled off by the edges of the letter-box. On one occasion he
managed things so clumsily that the ring
did
fall into the
box. The letter he was sending off on that occasion was a parting
note to an earlier lady-love of his, and he fell guilty towards
her. Simultaneously he was filled with a longing for this other
lady which conflicted with his feelings towards his present
love-object.’

  
¹
[‘A lady was telling us recently how
she had forgotten to try on her wedding dress and remembered it at
eight o’clock on the eve of her wedding. The dressmaker had
given up hope of seeing her customer. This detail was enough to
show that the bride did not feel very happy about wearing a
wedding-dress; she was trying to forget the painful performance.
To-day . . . she is divorced.’]

The Psychopathology Of Everyday Life

1282

   The theme of the ring leaves one
once again with the impression of how hard it is for a
psycho-analyst to discover anything new that has not been known
before by some creative writer. In Fontane’s novel
Vor dem
Sturm
Justizrat Turgany declares during a game of forfeits:
‘You may be sure, ladies, that the deepest secrets of nature
are revealed in the pledging of forfeits.’ Among the examples
he uses to support his claim there is one that deserves our special
interest: ‘I recall a professor’s wife - she had
reached the age of
embonpoint
- who again and again pulled
off her wedding ring to offer it as a forfeit. Do not ask me to
describe the happiness of her marriage.’ He then went on:
‘In the same company there was a gentleman who never tired of
depositing his English pocket-knife, with its ten blades, corkscrew
and flint and steel, in the ladies’ laps, until the bladed
monster, after tearing several silk dresses, finally disappeared
amid general cries of indignation.’

   We shall not be surprised if an
object of such rich symbolic meaning as a ring should be made to
play a part in some significant parapraxes, even where it does not,
in the form of a wedding ring or an engagement ring, mark an erotic
tie. The following example of an occurrence of this sort has been
put at my disposal by Dr. M. Kardos:

   ‘Several years ago a man
who is much my junior attached himself to me; he shares my
intellectual endeavours and stands to me somewhat in the relation
of a pupil to his teacher. On one particular occasion I presented
him with a ring; and this ring has several times given rise to
symptomatic acts or parapraxes, whenever anything in our
relationship has met with his disapproval. A short time ago he was
able to report the following case, which is particularly neat and
transparent. We used to meet once a week, when he regularly came to
see me and talk with me; but on one occasion he made an excuse to
stay away, as a
rendezvous
with a young lady seemed more
attractive to him. The following morning he noticed - not, however,
until long after he had left the house - that the ring was not on
his finger. He did not worry any more about it, since he assumed he
had left it behind on his bedside table, where he put it every
evening, and would find it there when he got home. As soon as he
reached home he looked for it, without success, and then began a
systematic search of the room, which was equally fruitless. At last
it crossed his mind that the ring had been lying on the bedside
table - just as had been the case, in fact, for more than a year -
beside a small pocket-knife that he normally carried in his
waistcoat pocket; the suspicion thus occurred to him that he might
have "absent-mindedly" pocketed the ring with the knife.
So he felt in his pocket and found that the missing ring was in
fact there. "His wedding-ring in his waistcoat pocket" is
a proverbial way of referring to the place where the ring is kept
by a husband who intends to betray the wife who gave it to him. My
friend’s feeling of guilt had therefore caused him first to
punish himself ("you no longer deserve to wear this
ring") and secondly to confess his unfaithfulness, though only
in the form of an unwitnessed parapraxis. It was only in a
roundabout way, while he was describing this parapraxis - an
eventuality which could, incidentally, have been foreseen - that he
came to confess his little "unfaithfulness".’

   I also know of an elderly man who
married a very young girl and who decided to spend the wedding
night in a hotel in town instead of on the honeymoon journey.
Hardly had they reached the hotel when he noticed in alarm that he
was without his wallet, which contained all the money for the
honeymoon; he had either mislaid it or lost it. He was still able
to reach his servant by telephone; the latter found the missing
wallet in the discarded wedding suit and brought it to the hotel to
the waiting bridegroom who had accordingly entered upon his
marriage without means. He was thus able to start his journey with
his young bride next morning. In the night, however, he had, as he
had apprehensively foreseen, proved ‘incapable
'.¹

  
¹
[‘
Unvermögend
’,
‘without means’, ‘without power’, and so
‘impotent’.]

The Psychopathology Of Everyday Life

1283

   It is consoling to reflect that
there is an unsuspected extension of the human habit of
‘losing things’ - namely, symptomatic acts, and that
this habit is consequently welcome, at least to a secret intention
of the loser’s. It is often only an expression of the low
estimation in which the lost object is held, or of a secret
antipathy towards it or towards the person that it came from; or
else the inclination to lose the object has been transferred to it
from other more important objects by a symbolic association of
thoughts. Losing objects of value serves to express a variety of
impulses; it may either be acting as a symbolic representation of a
repressed thought - that is, it may be repeating a warning that one
would be glad enough to ignore -, or (most commonly of all) it may
be offering a sacrifice to the obscure powers of destiny to whom
homage is still paid among us to-day.

   Here are a few examples to
illustrate these remarks about losing things.

   Dr. B. Dattner: ‘A
colleague told me he had unexpectedly lost his "Penkala"
pencil which he had had for over two years and which he valued
highly because of its superior quality. Analysis revealed the
following facts. The day before, my colleague had received a
thoroughly disagreeable letter from his brother-in-law, which
concluded with the sentence: "I have neither the inclination
nor the time at present to encourage you in your frivolity and
laziness." The affect connected with this letter was so
powerful that next day my colleague promptly sacrificed the pencil,
which was a present from this brother-in-law
, so as not to
feel under too great an obligation to him.’