Freud - Complete Works (232 page)

The Psychopathology Of Everyday Life

1314

   (2) In a letter to a friend I
informed him I had just then finished correcting the proofs of
The Interpretation of Dreams
and did not intend to make any
more changes in the work, ‘even if it contains 2467
mistakes’. I at once tried to explain this number to myself
and added the little analysis as a postscript to my letter. The
best plan will be to quote it as I wrote it down at the time, just
after I had caught myself in the act:

   ‘Let me hastily add a
contribution to the psychopathology of everyday life. You will find
that in the letter I put down the number 2467 as a bold arbitrary
estimate of the number of mistakes which will be found in the dream
book. What I meant was some very big number; but that particular
one emerged. However, nothing in the mind is arbitrary or
undetermined. You will therefore rightly expect that the
unconscious had hastened to determine the number which was left
open by consciousness. Now, immediately before, I had read in the
newspaper that a General E. M. had retired from the post of Master
of Ordnance. I should explain that I am interested in this man.
While I was serving as a medical officer-cadet he came to the sick
quarters one day (he was then a colonel) and said to the medical
officer: ‘You must make me well in a week, because I have
some work to do for which the Emperor is waiting.’ After that
episode I decided to follow his career, and lo and behold! now he
has reached the end of it, having become Master of Ordnance, and is
already (1899) on the retired list. I wanted to work out how long
he had taken over this. Assuming that it was in 1882 that I saw him
in hospital, it must have been seventeen years. I told my wife this
and she remarked: "Oughtn’t you to be on the retired
list too, then?" "Heaven forbid!" I exclaimed. After
this conversation I sat down to write to you. But the earlier train
of thought went on in my mind, and with good reason. I had
miscalculated; I have a fixed point in my memory to prove it. I
celebrated my majority, i. e. my twenty-fourth birthday, under
military arrest (having been absent without leave). So that was in
1880, or nineteen years ago. That gives you the "24"
in  2467. Now take my present age - 43 - add 24, and you have
67. In other words, in answer to the question whether
I
meant to retire too, my wish gave me another twenty-four
years’ work. I was obviously annoyed at having failed to get
very far myself during the period in which I have followed Colonel
M.’s career; and yet I was celebrating a kind of triumph over
his career being at an end, while I still have everything in front
of me. So one can say with justice that not even the number 2467
which I threw out unthinkingly was without its determinants from
the unconscious.’

The Psychopathology Of Everyday Life

1315

   (3) Since this first example in
which an apparently arbitrarily chosen number was explained I have
often repeated the same experiment, and with the same result; but
the content of the majority of cases is so intimate that they
cannot be reported.

   For that very reason, however, I
will take the opportunity of adding here a very interesting
analysis of a ‘numerical association’, which Dr. Adler
(1905) of Vienna obtained from a ‘perfectly healthy’
informant. ‘Yesterday evening’, this informant reports,
‘I got down to
The Psychopathology of Everyday Life
,
and would have read the whole of the book straight away if I had
not been prevented by a remarkable incident. For what happened was
that, when I read that every number which we summon seemingly
arbitrarily into consciousness has a definite meaning, I decided to
make an experiment. There came to my mind the number 1734. The
following ideas then rapidly occurred to me: 1734÷17=102;
102÷17=6. I then divided the number into 17 and 34. I am 34
years old. I believe, as I think I once told you, that 34 is the
last year of youth, and for that reason I felt very miserable on my
last birthday. The end of my 17th year saw the beginning of a very
pleasant and interesting period in my development. I divide my life
into portions of 17 years. What do the divisions mean? In thinking
of the number 102 it occurred to me that No. 102 in the Reclam
Universal Library is Kotzebue’s play
Menschenhass und
Reue
.

The Psychopathology Of Everyday Life

1316

   ‘My present psychical state
is one of misanthropy and remorse. No. 6 in the U.L. (I know a
whole quantity of its numbers by heart) is Müllner’s
Die Schuld
[
Guilt
]. The thought plagues me constantly
that the guilt is mine for my failure to become what I could have
been with my abilities. It further occurred to me that No. 34 in
the U.L. contains a tale by the same Müllner entitled
Der
Kaliber
[
The Calibre
]. I divided the word into
"Ka" and "Liber"; it further occurred to me
that it contains the words "Ali" and "Kali"
["potassium"]. This reminded me of my once making up
rhymes with my (six-year old) son Ali. I asked him to find a rhyme
to Ali. He could not think of any, and as he wanted me to give him
one I said: "
Ali reinigt den Mund mit hypermangansaurem
Kali
." ["Ali cleans his mouth with potassium
permanganate."] We laughed a lot and Ali was very
lieb
[sweet]. During the last few days I have been obliged to notice
with regret that he is "
ka
(
kein
)
lieber
Ali
" ["not the sweet Ali" ("
ka
lieber
" pronounced as "
Kaliber
")].

   ‘I then asked myself: what
is No. 17 in the U.L.? but I could not bring it to mind. But I
quite certainly knew it earlier, so I assumed I wanted to forget
that number. All reflection was in vain. I wanted to go on reading,
but I only read mechanically, without understanding a word, as the
17 was tormenting me. I put out the light and continued my search.
Finally I came to the conclusion that No. 17 must be a play of
Shakespeare’s. But which one? I thought of
Hero and
Leander
- clearly a stupid attempt on the part of my will to
lead me astray. Finally I got up and looked in the catalogue of the
U.L.- No. 17 is
Macbeth
. To my bewilderment I was forced to
realize that I knew almost nothing at all of the play, although I
had given it as much attention as other plays of
Shakespeare’s. I only thought of: murderer, Lady Macbeth,
witches, "fair is foul" and that at one time I had found
Schiller’s version of Macbeth very fine. There is no doubt
then that I wished to forget the play. The further thought occurred
to me that 17 and 34 divided by 17 gives the result 1 and 2.
Numbers 1 and 2 in the U.L. are Goethe’s
Faust
.
Formerly I found very much of Faust in myself.’

The Psychopathology Of Everyday Life

1317

   We must regret that the
physician’s discretion did not allow us any insight into the
significance of this series of associations. Adler observes that
the man did not succeed in synthesizing his remarks. They would
seem to us scarcely worth reporting if something had not emerged
during their continuation which gave us the key to understanding
the number 1734 and the whole series of associations.

   ‘This morning indeed I had
an experience that strongly supports the correctness of the
Freudian view. My wife, whom I had woken up when I got out of bed
the night before, asked me why I had wanted the U.L. catalogue. I
told her the story. She found it was all hair-splitting, only - a
very interesting point - she accepted
Macbeth
, which I had
resisted so forcibly. She said that nothing whatever came to her
mind when she thought of a number. I answered: "Let us test
it." She gave the number 117. I immediately replied: "17
is a reference to what I have told you. Moreover I said to you
yesterday that when a wife is in her 82nd year and her husband in
his 35th year there is gross incompatibility." For the last
few days I have been teasing my wife by saying she is a little old
woman of 82. 82 + 35 = 117.’

   Thus the man, who was not able to
find determinants for his own number, found the solution at once
when his wife gave him a number purporting to be arbitrarily
chosen. In reality the wife understood very well what complex her
husband’s number was derived from, and chose her own number
from the same complex - which was certainly common to both of them,
for in his case it concerned their relative ages. It is therefore
easy for us to translate the number that had occurred to the
husband. It expresses, as Adler suggests, a suppressed wish of his
which, fully developed, would run: ‘Only a wife of 17 is
suitable for a man of 34 like me.’

   In case anyone should think too
lightly of such ‘trifles’, I may add that I recently
learned from Dr. Adler that a year after the publication of this
analysis the man was divorced from his wife.¹

   Adler gives similar explanations
of the origin of obsessive numbers.

  
¹
In explanation of
Macbeth
, No. 17 in
the U. L., Adler informs me that in his seventeenth year this man
joined a society of anarchists with regicide as its aim. This was
no doubt why the content of
Macbeth
was forgotten. At that
time, too, he had invented a code in which letters were replaced by
numbers.

The Psychopathology Of Everyday Life

1318

   (4) Moreover the choice of what
have been called  ‘favourite numbers’ is not
unrelated to the life of the person concerned and is not without a
certain psychological interest. A man who admitted having a special
preference for the numbers 17 and 19 was able to specify after a
little reflection that at the age of 17 he had gone to the
university and so attained the academic freedom he had long
desired, and that at 19 he had taken his first long journey and
soon after had made his first scientific discovery. But the
fixation of this preference occurred a decade later, when the same
numbers took on a significance in his erotic life. - Indeed, even
those numbers which a person uses especially often in a particular
connection, in an apparently arbitrary way, can be traced by
analysis to an unexpected meaning. Thus it struck a patient of mine
one day that when annoyed he was especially fond of saying:
‘I’ve told you that already from 17 to 36 times’,
and he asked himself whether there was any motive for it. It at
once occurred to him that he was born on the 27th day of the month
whereas his younger brother was born on the 26th, and that he had
reason to complain that fate so often robbed him of the good things
in life in order to bestow them on this younger brother. He
therefore represented this partiality on the part of fate by
deducting ten from the date of his own birthday and adding it to
his brother’s. ‘I am the elder and yet I am cut short
like this.’

The Psychopathology Of Everyday Life

1319

   (5) I shall dwell longer on
analyses of numerical associations, since I know of no other
separate observations that would prove so forcefully the existence
of highly composite thought-processes which are yet quite unknown
to consciousness. At the same time I know of no better example of
analyses in which the part contributed by the physician
(suggestion) - so often held responsible - is so definitely ruled
out. I shall therefore give a report here (with his consent) of the
analysis of a number which occurred to a patient of mine. I need
only add that he is the youngest child in a large family and at an
early age lost his greatly admired father. While he was in a
particularly cheerful mood the number 426718 came to his mind, and
he asked himself: ‘What ideas occur to me in that connection?
First of all, a joke I have heard: "When a doctor treats a
cold it lasts for 42 days; when it is not treated, it lasts 6
weeks."' This corresponds to the first figures in the
number (42 = 6 x 7). In the stoppage that followed this first
solution I drew his attention to the fact that the six-figure
number he had chosen contained all the first digits except for 3
and 5. He then immediately found the continuation of the
interpretation. ‘There are 7 of us brothers and sisters, and
I am the youngest. In the order of our age, 3 corresponds to my
sister A., and 5 to my brother L.; they were my two enemies. As a
child I used to pray to God every night for him to remove these two
tormenting spirits from life. It seems to me now that in this
choice of numbers I was myself fulfilling this wish; 3 and 5, the
wicked brother and the hated sister, are passed over.’ - If
the number represents the order of your brothers and sisters, what
does the 18 at the end mean? There were only 7 of you after all, -
‘I have often thought that if my father had lived longer I
should not have remained the youngest child. If there had been 1
more we should have been 8 and I should have had a younger child
after me to whom I should have played the elder brother.’

   With this the number was
explained, but we had still to establish the connection between the
first part of the interpretation and the second one. This followed
very easily from the necessary precondition of the last figures:
‘if my father had lived longer’. ‘42 = 6 x 7'
signified derision at the doctors who had not been able to help his
father, and, in this form, therefore, it expressed his wish for his
father to go on living. The whole number in fact corresponded to
the fulfilment of his two infantile wishes about his family circle
- that his bad brother and sister should die and that a baby should
be born after him, or, expressed in the shortest form: ‘If
only those two had died instead of my beloved
father!’¹