Freud - Complete Works (230 page)

The Psychopathology Of Everyday Life

1304

CHAPTER XI

COMBINED PARAPRAXES

Two of the last-mentioned examples - my own
error which transferred the Medici to Venice, and that of the young
man who succeeded in getting a conversation with his fiancée
on the telephone in defiance of my prohibition - have not in fact
been described entirely accurately. Careful consideration reveals
that they are a combination of an act of forgetting and an error. I
can illustrate this combination still more clearly from some other
examples.

   (1) A friend tells me of the
following experience. ‘Some years ago I allowed myself to be
elected to the committee of a certain literary society, as I
thought that the organization might one day be able to help me to
have my play produced; and I took a regular part, though without
being much interested, in the meetings, which were held every
Friday. Then, a few months ago, I was given the promise of a
production at the theatre at F.; and since then I have regularly
forgotten
the meetings of the society. When I read your book
on the subject I felt ashamed of my forgetfulness. I reproached
myself with the thought that it was shabby behaviour on my part to
stay away now that I no longer needed these people, and resolved on
no account to forget the next Friday. I kept on reminding myself of
this resolution until I carried it into effect and stood at the
door of the room where the meetings were held. To my astonishment
it was locked; the meeting was over. I had in fact made a mistake
over the day; it was now Saturday!’

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   (2) The next example combines a
symptomatic act with a case of mislaying. It reached me in a
somewhat roundabout way, but comes from a reliable source.

   A lady travelled to Rome with her
brother-in-law, who is a famous artist. The visitor was received
with great honour by the German community in Rome, and among other
presents he was given an antique gold medal. The lady was vexed
that her brother-in-law did not appreciate the lovely object
sufficiently. When she returned home (her place in Rome having been
taken by her sister) she discovered while unpacking that she had
brought the medal with her - how, she did not know. She at once
sent a letter with the news to her brother-in-law, and announced
that she would send the article she had walked off with back to
Rome next day. But next day the medal had been so cleverly mislaid
that it could not be found and sent off; and it was at this point
that the meaning of her ‘absent mindedness’ dawned on
the lady: she wanted to keep the object for herself.

   (3) There are some cases in which
the parapraxis obstinately repeats itself, at the same time
changing the method that it employs:

   For reasons unknown to him,
Ernest Jones (1911
b
, 483) once left a letter lying on his
desk for several days without posting it. At last he decided to
send it off, but he had it returned to him from the ‘Dead
Letter Office’ since he had forgotten to address it. After he
had addressed it he again took it to the post, but this time it had
no stamp. He was then no longer able to over look his reluctance to
sending the letter off at all.

   (4) The vain attempts to carry
out an action in opposition to an internal resistance are most
impressively depicted in a short communication by Dr. Karl Weiss
(1912) of Vienna:

   ‘The following episode will
show how persistently the unconscious can make itself felt if it
has a motive for preventing an intention from being carried out,
and how hard it is to guard against that persistence. An
acquaintance asked me to lend him a book and to bring it to him the
next day. I immediately promised I would, but was aware of a lively
feeling of unpleasure which I could not at first explain. Later on
it became clear to me: the person in question had for years owed me
a sum of money which he apparently had no idea of repaying. I
thought no more of the matter, but I remembered it the next morning
with the same feeling of unpleasure and at once said to myself
"Your unconscious will arrange for you to forget the book; but
you don’t want to be disobliging, so you will take all
possible steps not to forget it." I came home, wrapped up the
book and put it beside me on the desk where I write my letters.
After some time I went out; I took a few steps and remembered I had
left the letters I wanted to post on my desk. (One of them, by the
way, was a letter in which I was obliged to write something
disagreeable to someone from whom I was hoping to get support over
a certain matter.) I turned back, took the letters and again set
off. In the tram it occurred to me that I had promised my wife to
buy something for her, and I was very pleased with the thought that
it would only make a small parcel. At that point the association
"parcel"-"book" suddenly occurred to me, and I
now noticed that I was not carrying the book. So I had not only
forgotten it the first time I went out, but had also persisted in
overlooking it when I took the letters that it lay
beside.’

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   (5) The same situation is found
in an instance which Otto Rank (1912) analysed exhaustively:

   ‘A scrupulously orderly and
pedantically precise man reported the following experience, which
was quite unusual for him. One afternoon he was in the street and
wanted to know the time; and he found he had left his watch at home
- a thing he did not remember ever having done before. As he had an
evening engagement for which he had to be punctual, and as he had
not enough time to fetch his own watch before it, he took advantage
of a visit to a lady, a friend of his, to borrow her watch for the
evening. This was all the more feasible since he already had an
engagement to visit the lady next morning, and he promised to
return the watch on that occasion. Next day, however, when he
wanted to hand over the watch he had borrowed to its owner, he
found to his astonishment that now he had left
it
at home.
This time he had his own watch on him. He then firmly resolved to
return the ladies’ watch the same afternoon and actually
carried out his resolution. But when he wanted to see the time upon
leaving her, he found to his immense annoyance and astonishment
that he had again forgotten his own watch.

   ‘The repetition of this
parapraxis seemed so pathological to a man with his love of
orderliness that he would have been glad to learn of its
psychological motivation; and this was promptly revealed by the
psycho-analytic enquiry as to whether anything disagreeable had
happened to him on the crucial day when he was forgetful for the
first time, and in what connection it had occurred. He immediately
related how after lunch - shortly before he went out forgetting his
watch - he had had a conversation with his mother, who told him
that an irresponsible relative, who had already caused him much
worry and expense, had pawned his [the relative’s] watch,
but, as it was needed in the house, was asking him [the narrator]
to provide the money to redeem it. He was very much upset by what
was a more or less forced loan, and it recalled to his mind all the
annoyances that the relative had caused him over many years. His
symptomatic act therefore proves to have had more than one
determinant. In the first place it gave expression to a train of
thought that ran somewhat as follows: "I won’t allow
money to be extorted from me in this way, and if a watch is needed
I shall leave my own at home." But since he needed it in the
evening for keeping an appointment, this intention could only come
into effect by an unconscious path, in the form of a symptomatic
act. In the second place, what the act of forgetting signified came
to this: "The perpetual sacrifice of money on this
good-for-nothing will be the utter ruin of me, so that I shall have
to give up everything." Although, according to him, his
indignation at this piece of news was only momentary, the
repetition of the same symptomatic act nevertheless shows that it
continued to operate intensively in the unconscious, somewhat as
though his consciousness were saying: "I can’t get this
story out of my head."¹ In view of this attitude of the
unconscious, it will come as no surprise to us that the same thing
should have happened to the borrowed ladies’ watch. But
perhaps there were also special motives that favoured this
transference on to the "innocent" ladies’ watch.
Probably the most obvious motive is that he would no doubt have
liked to keep it to take the place of the watch of his own which he
had sacrificed, and that he therefore forgot to return it the next
day. He would also perhaps have been glad to have the watch as a
souvenir of the lady. Furthermore, forgetting the ladies’
watch gave him the opportunity of paying the lady he admired a
second visit. He was in any case obliged to call on her in the
morning in connection with another matter, and by forgetting the
watch he seems, as it were, to indicate that it was a shame to use
this visit, which had been arranged some time before, for the
incidental purpose of returning the watch. Moreover, having twice
forgotten his own watch, and in that way being able to return the
other watch, goes to show that unconsciously he was trying to avoid
carrying both watches at once. He was obviously seeking to avoid
giving this appearance of superfluity, which would have been in
striking contrast to his relative’s want. But on the other
hand he contrived by these means to counter his apparent intentions
of marrying the lady, by warning himself that he had indissoluble
obligations to his family (his mother). Finally, another reason for
forgetting a ladies’ watch may be sought in the fact that the
evening before he had, as a bachelor, felt embarrassment in front
of his friends about looking at the ladies’ watch, and only
did so surreptitiously; and to avoid a repetition of this awkward
situation he did not like to carry it any longer. But as he had on
the other hand to return it, the result here too was an
unconsciously performed symptomatic act, which proved to be a
compromise-formation between conflicting emotional impulses, and a
dearly-bought victory by the unconscious agency.’

  
¹
‘The continued operation of an idea
in the unconscious manifests itself sometimes in the form of a
dream following the parapraxis, and sometimes in a repetition of
the parapraxis or in a failure to correct it.’

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   Here are three cases observed by
J. Stärcke (1916, 108-9):

   (6)
Mislaying, breaking and
forgetting as an expression of a counter-will that has been pushed
back
. ‘I had got together a number of illustrations for a
scientific work, when one day my brother asked me to lend him some
which he wanted to use as lantern slides in a lecture. Though I was
momentarily aware of thinking I would prefer it if the
reproductions I had collected at much pains were not exhibited or
published in any way before I could do so myself, I promised him I
would look out the negatives of the pictures he wanted and make
lantern slides from them. These negatives however I was unable to
find. I looked through the whole pile of boxes full of the relevant
negatives, and a good two hundred negatives passed through my
hands, one after the other; but the negatives I was looking for
were not there. I had a suspicion that in fact I seemed not to want
my brother to have the pictures. After I had made this unfriendly
thought conscious and had combated it, I noticed I had put the top
box of the pile on one side, and had not looked through it; and
this box contained the negatives I was looking for. On the lid of
this box there was a brief note of the contents, and it is likely
that I had given it a hasty glance before I put the box aside. The
unfriendly thought, however, seemed not yet to have been totally
subdued, for there were a variety of further happenings before the
slides were dispatched. I pressed too hard on one of the slides and
broke it, while I was holding it in my hand and was wiping the
glass clean. (In the ordinary way I never break a lantern slide
like that.) When I had made a new copy of this slide it fell from
my hand, and was only saved from being smashed by my stretching out
my foot and breaking its fall. When I mounted the lantern slides
the whole pile fell to the ground once more, fortunately without
any being broken. And finally, several days passed before I
actually packed them and sent them off; for though I intended to do
so afresh every day, each time I forgot my intention once
again.’

   (7)
Repeated forgetfulness -
eventual performance bungled
. ‘One day I had to send a
postcard to an acquaintance; but I kept on postponing doing so for
several days. I strongly suspected that this was due to the
following causes: he had informed me by letter that a certain
person would come to see me in the course of the week from whom I
was not particularly anxious to have a visit. When the week had
passed and the prospect of the unwanted visit had become very
slender I finally wrote the post card, in which I informed him when
I should be free. When writing the postcard I thought at first of
adding that I had been prevented from writing earlier by
druk
werk
("laborious, exacting or burdensome work"); but
in the end I did not do so as no reasonable human being believes
this stock excuse any longer. Whether this little untruth was
nevertheless bound to makes its appearance I do not know; but when
I pushed the postcard into the letter box I accidentally put it
into the lower opening:
Drukwerk
("printed
matter").’