Freud - Complete Works (233 page)

  
¹
In the interests of simplicity I have
omitted some of the patient’s intermediate associations which
were equally to the point.

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1320

   (6) Here is a brief example from
a correspondent. The manager of a telegraph office in L. writes
that his eighteen and-a-half-year-old son, who wants to study
medicine, is already taken up with the psychopathology of everyday
life, and is trying to convince his parents of the correctness of
my assertions. I reproduce one of the experiments he undertook,
without expressing an opinion on the discussion attached to it.

   ‘My son was talking to my
wife about what we call "chance" and was demonstrating to
her that she could not name any song or any number that really
occurred to her simply "by chance". The following
conversation ensued. Son: "Give me any number you like."
- Mother: "79." - Son: "What occurs to you in that
connection?" - Mother: "I think of the lovely hat I was
looking at yesterday." - Son: "What did it cost?" -
Mother: "158 marks." - Son: "That explains it: 158
÷ 2 = 79. The hat was too dear for you and no doubt you
thought: ‘If it were half the price, I would buy
it.’"

   ‘To these assertions of my
son’s I first raised the objection that women are not in
general particularly good at figures and that anyway his mother had
certainly not worked out that 79 was half 158. His theory was
therefore based on the sufficiently improbable fact that the
subconscious is better at arithmetic than normal consciousness.
"Not at all", was the answer I received; "it may
well be that my mother did not work out the sum 158 ÷ 2 =
79, she may perfectly well have happened to see this equation -
indeed she may have thought about the hat while dreaming and then
realized what it would cost if it were only half the
price."'

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   (7) I take another numerical
analysis from Jones (1911
b
, 478). A gentleman of his
acquaintance let the number 986 occur to him and then defied Jones
to connect it with anything he thought of. ‘Using the
free-association method he first recalled a memory, which had not
previously been present in his mind, to the following effect: Six
years ago, on the hottest day he could remember, he had seen a joke
in an evening newspaper, which stated that the thermometer had
stood at 986° F., evidently an exaggeration of 98. 6° F. We
were at the time seated in front of a very hot fire from which he
had just drawn back, and he remarked, probably quite correctly,
that the heat had aroused this dormant memory. However, I was
curious to know why this memory had persisted with such vividness
as to be so readily brought out, for with most people it surely
would have been forgotten beyond recall, unless it had become
associated with some other mental experience of more significance.
He told me that in reading the joke he had laughed uproariously,
and that on many subsequent occasions he had recalled it with great
relish. As the joke was obviously a very tenuous one, this
strengthened my expectation that more lay behind. His next thought
was the general reflection that the conception of heat had always
greatly impressed him; that heat was the most important thing in
the universe, the source of all life, and so on. This remarkable
attitude of a quite prosaic young man certainly needed some
explanation, so I asked him to continue his free associations. The
next thought was of a factory-stack which he could see from his
bedroom window. He often stood of an evening watching the flame and
smoke issuing out of it, and reflecting on the deplorable waste of
energy. Heat, fire, the source of life, the waste of vital energy
issuing from an upright, hollow tube - it was not hard to divine
from such associations that the ideas of heat and fire were
unconsciously linked in his mind with the idea of love, as is so
frequent in symbolic thinking, and that there was a strong
masturbation complex present, a conclusion which he presently
confirmed.’

   Those who wish to get a good
impression of the way in which the material of numbers is worked
over in unconscious thinking may be referred to the papers by Jung
(1911) and Jones (1912).

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   In analyses of this kind which I
conduct on myself I find two things particularly striking: firstly,
the positively somnambulistic certainty with which I set off for my
unknown goal and plunge into an arithmetical train of thought which
arrives all at once at the desired number, and the speed with which
the entire subsequent work is completed; and secondly, the fact
that the numbers are so freely at the disposal of my unconscious
thinking, whereas I am a bad reckoner and have the greatest
difficulties in consciously noting dates, house numbers and such
things. Moreover in these unconscious thought-operations with
numbers I find I have a tendency to superstition, whose origin for
long remained unknown to me.¹

  
¹
[
Footnote added
1920:] Herr Rudolf
Schneider (1920) of Munich has raised an interesting objection to
the conclusiveness of such analyses of numbers. He experimented
with numbers that were presented to him - for example, with the
number that first caught his eye when he opened a history book - or
he presented someone else with a number he had chosen; and he then
noticed whether associations emerged to the imposed number which
had the appearance of having determined it. This was in fact what
did happen. In one instance which he relates that concerned
himself, the associations provided determinants just as abundant
and full of meaning as in our analyses of numbers that have arisen
spontaneously, whereas the number in Schneider’s experiments,
having been presented from outside, called for no determinant. In a
second experiment carried out on someone else, he clearly made the
problem too easy, for the number he set him was 2, and everybody
has some material which would enable him to find a determinant for
that number. - From his experiments Schneider then draws two
conclusions: first, that ‘the mind possesses the same
potentialities for finding associations to numbers as to
concepts’; and secondly, that the emergence of determining
associations to numbers that occur to the mind spontaneously does
not in any way prove that these numbers originated from the
thoughts discovered in the ‘analysis’ of them. The
former conclusion is undoubtedly correct. It is just as easy to
find an appropriate association to a number which is presented as
it is to a word which is called out - indeed it is perhaps easier,
since the ability of the few digits to form connections is
particularly great. The situation in which one finds oneself is
then simply that of what are called ‘association
experiments’, which have been studied from the greatest
variety of angles by the school of Bleuler and Jung. In this
situation the association (reaction) is determined by the word
presented (stimulus-word). This reaction could however still be of
very diverse kinds, and Jung’s experiments have shown that
even these further distinctions are not left to
‘chance’, but that unconscious ‘complexes’
participate in the determination if they have been touched on by
the stimulus-word. - Schneider’s second conclusion goes too
far. The fact that appropriate associations arise to numbers (or
words) which are
presented
tells us nothing more about the
origin of numbers (or words) which emerge
spontaneously
than
could already be taken into consideration before that fact was
known. These spontaneous ideas (words or numbers) may be
undetermined, or may have been determined by the thoughts that come
out in the analysis, or by other thoughts not disclosed in the
analysis - in which last case the analysis will have led us astray.
The important thing is to get rid of the impression that this
problem is different for numbers from what it is for verbal
associations. A critical examination of the problem and with it a
justification of the psycho-analytic technique of association lie
outside the scope of this book. In analytic practice we proceed on
the presupposition that the second of the possibilities mentioned
above meets the facts and that in the majority of instances use can
be made of it. The investigations of an experimental psychologist
(Poppelreuter [1914]) have demonstrated that it is by far the most
probable one. See further in this connection the valuable findings
in Section 9 of Bleuler’s book on autistic thinking
(1919).

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   It will not surprise us to find
that not only numbers but also verbal associations of another kind
regularly prove on analytic investigation to be fully
determined.

   (8) A good example of the
derivation of an obsessive word - a word that cannot be got rid of
- is to be found in Jung (1906). ‘A lady told me that for
some days the word "Taganrog" had been constantly on her
lips without her having any idea where it came from. I asked the
lady for information about the affectively stressed events and
repressed wishes of the very recent past. After some hesitation she
told me that she would very much like a morning gown, but her
husband did not take the interest in it that she had hoped.
"
Morgenrock
", "
Tag-an-rock
" -
their partial similarity in sound and meaning is obvious. The
Russian form was determined by the fact that at about the same time
the lady had come to know someone from Taganrog.’

   (9) I am indebted to Dr. E.
Hitschmann for the elucidation of another case, in which in a
particular locality a line of poetry repeatedly forced its way up
as an association, without its origin and connections having been
apparent.

   ‘E., a doctor of law,
relates: Six years ago I travelled from Biarritz to San Sebastian.
The railway line crosses the River Bidassoa, which at this point
forms the frontier between France and Spain. From the bridge there
is a fine view - on one side, of a broad valley and the Pyrenees,
and on the other, of the distant sea. It was a beautiful, bright
summer’s day; everything was filled with sun and light, I was
on my holiday travels and was happy to be coming to Spain. At that
point the following lines occurred to me:

                                                               
Aber frei ist schon die Seele,

                                                               
Schwebet in dem Meer von Licht.
¹

   ‘I recall that at the time
I pondered on where the lines came from and could not recollect the
place. To judge by the rhythm the words must have come from a poem,
which, however, had entirely escaped my memory. I believe that
later, when the lines came to my mind repeatedly, I asked a number
of people about them without being able to learn anything.

   ‘Last year, when I was
returning from Spain I passed over the same stretch of railway. It
was a pitch-dark night and it was raining. I looked out of the
window to see whether we were already coming into the frontier
station, and noticed that we were on the Bidassoa bridge.
Immediately the lines given above returned to my memory, and again
I could not recall their origin.

   ‘Several months later when
I was at home, I came across a copy of Uhland’s poems. I
opened the volume and my glance fell on the lines: "Aber frei
ist schon die Seele, schwebet in dem Meer von Licht", which
form the conclusion of a poem called "Der Waller". I read
the poem and had a very dim recollection of having once known it
many years ago. The scene of action is in Spain and this seemed to
me to form the only connection between the quoted lines and the
place on the railway line described by me. I was only half
satisfied with my discovery and went on mechanically turning the
pages of the book. The lines "Aber frei ist schon . . ."
etc. are printed at the bottom of a page. On turning over the page
I found a poem on the other side with the title "Bidassoa
Bridge".

   ‘I may add that the
contents of this poem seemed almost more unfamiliar than those of
its predecessor, and that its first lines run:

                               
‘Auf der Bidassoabrücke steht ein Heiliger
altersgrau,

                               
Segnet rechts die span’schen Berge, segnet links den
fränk’schen Gau.’
²

  
¹
[‘But the soul is already free, it
floats in the sea of light.’]

  
²
[‘On the Bidassoa bridge there stands
a saint grey with age: on the right he blesses the Spanish
mountains, on the left he blesses the Frankish
land.’]

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1324

.

   (B) Perhaps the insight we have
gained into the determining of names and numbers that are chosen
with apparent arbitrariness may help to solve another problem. Many
people, as is well known, contest the assumption of complete
psychical determinism by appealing to a special feeling of
conviction that there is a free will. This feeling of conviction
exists; and it does not give way before a belief in determinism.
Like every normal feeling it must have something to warrant it. But
so far as I can observe, it does not manifest itself in the great
and important decisions of the will: on these occasions the feeling
that we have is rather one of psychical compulsion, and we are glad
to invoke it on our behalf. (‘Here I stand: I can do no
other.’) On the other hand, it is precisely with regard to
the unimportant, indifferent decisions that we would like to claim
that we could just as well have acted otherwise: that we have acted
of our free - and unmotivated - will. According to our analyses it
is not necessary to dispute the right to the feeling of conviction
of having a free will. If the distinction between conscious and
unconscious motivation is taken into account, our feeling of
conviction informs us that conscious motivation does not extend to
all our motor decisions.
De minimus non curat lex
. But what
is thus left free by the one side receives its motivation from the
other side, from the unconscious; and in this way determination in
the psychical sphere is still carried out without any
gap.¹