Freud - Complete Works (234 page)

  
¹
[
Footnote added
1907:] These
conceptions of the strict determination of apparently arbitrary
psychical acts have already borne rich fruit in psychology, and
perhaps also in the juridical field. By applying them, Bleuler and
Jung have made intelligible the reactions in what is known as the
‘association experiment’, in which the subject of the
test, when he hears a word called out (the stimulus-word), answers
it with one that comes to his mind in connection with it (the
reaction), the intervening time being measured (the reaction-time).
In his
Studies in Word Association
(1906), Jung has shown
what a subtle reagent for psychical states we possess in the
association experiment as thus interpreted. Wertheimer and Klein,
both pupils of Hans Gross, the Professor of Criminal Law in Prague,
have developed out of these experiments a technique for the
establishment of the facts in criminal proceedings which is at
present being examined by psychologists and jurists.

The Psychopathology Of Everyday Life

1325

   (C) Although the motivation of
the parapraxes described in the preceding chapters is something of
which from the very nature of the case conscious thought must lack
knowledge, it would nevertheless be desirable to discover a
psychological proof of the existence of that motivation; indeed,
for reasons which a closer knowledge of the unconscious reveals, it
is probable that such proofs are somewhere discoverable. There are
in fact two spheres in which it is possible to demonstrate
phenomena that appear to correspond to an unconscious, and
therefore displaced, knowledge of that motivation.

   (
a
) A striking and
generally observed feature of the behaviour of paranoics is that
they attach the greatest significance to the minor details of other
people’s behaviour which we ordinarily neglect, interpret
them and make them the basis of far-reaching conclusions. For
example, the last paranoic seen by me concluded that there was a
general understanding in his environment, because when his train
was moving out of the station the people had made a particular
movement with one hand. Another noted the way people walked in the
street, how they flourished their walking sticks, and so
on.¹

   The category of what is
accidental and requires no motivation, in which the normal person
includes a part of his own psychical performances and parapraxes,
is thus rejected by the paranoic as far as the psychical
manifestations of other people are concerned. Everything he
observes in other people is full of significance, everything can be
interpreted. How does he reach this position? Probably here as in
so many similar cases he projects on to the mental life of other
people what is unconsciously present in his own. In paranoia many
sorts of things force their way through to consciousness whose
presence in the unconscious of normal and neurotic people we can
demonstrate only through psycho-analysis.² In a certain sense,
therefore, the paranoic is justified in this, for he recognizes
something that escapes the normal person: he sees more clearly than
someone of normal intellectual capacity, but the displacement on to
other people of the state of affairs which he recognizes renders
his knowledge worthless. I hope I shall not now be expected to
justify the various paranoic interpretations. But the partial
justification which we concede to paranoia in respect of this view
taken by it of chance actions will help us towards a psychological
understanding of the sense of conviction that the paranoic attaches
to all these interpretations.
There is in fact some truth in
them
; those, too, of our errors of judgement which are not to
be counted as pathological acquire their sense of conviction in
just the same way. This feeling is justified for a certain part of
the erroneous train of thought, or for its source of origin; and it
is then extended by us to the rest of the context.

  
¹
From other points of view this
interpretation of immaterial and accidental indications given by
other people has been classed as a ‘delusion of
reference’.

  
²
For example, the phantasies of hysterics
concerning sexual and cruel maltreatment correspond, at times even
down to details, with the complaints of persecuted paranoics. It is
curious, but not unintelligible, that we meet the identical content
in the form of reality in the contrivances of perverts for the
satisfaction of their desires.

The Psychopathology Of Everyday Life

1326

   (
b
) Another indication
that we possess unconscious and displaced knowledge of the
motivation in chance actions and parapraxes is to be found in the
phenomenon of superstition. I will make my meaning clear by a
discussion of the small experience that started me on these
reflections.

   On my return from my holidays my
thoughts immediately turned to the patients who were to claim my
attention in the year’s work that was just beginning. My
first visit was to a very old lady for whom I had for many years
performed the same professional services twice every day (
p. 1245
). Owing to the uniformity of the
circumstances, unconscious thoughts have very often managed to find
expression while I was on my way to the patient and while I was
treating her. She is over ninety years old; it is therefore natural
to ask oneself at the beginning of each year’s treatment how
much longer she is likely to live. On the day I am speaking about I
was in a hurry and called a cab to take me to her house. Every
cabman on the rank in front of my house knew the old lady’s
address, as they had all often taken me there. But on this day it
happened that the cabman did not draw up in front of her house but
in front of a house with the same number in a nearby street which
ran parallel and was in fact of a similar appearance. I noticed the
error and reproached the cabman with it, and he apologized. Now is
it of any significance that I was driven to a house where the old
lady was not to be found? Certainly not to me, but if I were
superstitious
I should see an omen in the incident, the
finger of fate announcing that this year would be the old
lady’s last. Very many omens recorded by history have been
based on a symbolism no better than this.
I
of course
explain the occurrence as an accident without any further
meaning.

The Psychopathology Of Everyday Life

1327

   The case would have been quite
different if I had made the journey on foot, and while ‘deep
in thought’, or through ‘absent-mindedness’ had
come to the house in the parallel street instead of the right one.
This I should not explain as an accident but as an action that had
an unconscious aim and required interpretation. My interpretation
of ‘going astray’ like thus would probably have had to
be that I did not expect to see the old lady for much longer.

   I am therefore different from a
superstitious person in the following way:

   I do not believe that an event in
whose occurrence my mental life plays no part can teach me any
hidden thing about the future shape of reality; but I believe that
an unintentional manifestation of my own mental activity
does
on the other hand disclose something hidden, though
again it is something that belongs only to my mental life. I
believe in external (real) chance, it is true, but not in internal
(psychical) accidental events. With the superstitious person it is
the other way round. He knows nothing of the motivation of his
chance actions and parapraxes, and believes in psychical accidental
events; and, on the other hand, he has a tendency to ascribe to
external chance happenings a meaning which will become manifest in
real events, and to regard such chance happenings as a means of
expressing something that is hidden from him in the external world.
The differences between myself and the superstitious person are
two: first, he projects outwards a motivation which I look for
within; secondly, he interprets chance as due to an event, while I
trace it back to a thought. But what is hidden from him corresponds
to what is unconscious for me, and the compulsion not to let chance
count as chance but to interpret it is common to both of
us.¹

  
¹
[
Footnote added
1924:] At this point
I may quote a neat example which Ossipow (1922) has used for
discussing the difference between the superstitious,
psycho-analytic and mystical point of view. He had been married in
a small Russian provincial town and immediately afterwards started
for Moscow with his young wife. At a station two hours before his
destination he had a wish to go to the station exit and take a look
at the town. The train was due to halt there long enough, as he
thought, but when he returned a few minutes later it had already
left with his young wife. When he told his old nurse at home of
this accident she shook her head and declared: ‘No good will
come of this marriage.’ At the time Ossipow laughed at this
prophecy. But when, five months later, he was separated from his
wife, he could not avoid in retrospect viewing his action in
leaving the train as an ‘unconscious protest’ against
his marriage. Years later, the town where this parapraxis happened
took on a great importance for him, as a person lived there with
whom fate later linked him closely. This person, and even the fact
of this person’s existence, had been completely unknown to
him at the time. But the
mystical
explanation of his
behaviour would be that he had left the Moscow train and his wife
at that town because the future that was in store for him in
relation to this other person was seeking to declare
itself.

The Psychopathology Of Everyday Life

1328

   I assume that this conscious
ignorance and unconscious knowledge of the motivation of accidental
psychical events is one of the psychical roots of superstition.
Because
the superstitious person knows nothing of the
motivation of his own chance actions, and
because
the fact
of this motivation presses for a place in his field of recognition,
he is forced to allocate it, by displacement, to the external
world. If such a connection exists, it can hardly be limited to
this single application. In point of fact I believe that a large
part of the mythological view of the world, which extends a long
way into the most modern religions,
is nothing but psychology
projected into the external world
. The obscure
recognition¹ (the endopsychic perception, as it were) of
psychical factors and relations in the unconscious is mirrored - it
is difficult to express it in other terms, and here the analogy
with paranoia must come to our aid - in the construction of a
supernatural reality
, which is destined to be changed back
once more by science into the
psychology of the unconscious
.
One could venture to explain in this way the myths of paradise and
the fall of man, of God, of good and evil, of immortality, and so
on, and to transform
metaphysics
into
metapsychology
.
The gap between the paranoic’s displacement and that of the
superstitious person is less wide than it appears at first sight.
When human beings began to think, they were, as is well known,
forced to explain the external world anthropomorphically by means
of a multitude of personalities in their own image; chance events,
which they interpreted superstitiously, were thus actions and
manifestations of persons. They behaved, therefore, just like
paranoics, who draw conclusions from insignificant signs given them
by other people, and just like all normal people, who quite rightly
base their estimate of their neighbours’ characters on their
chance and unintentional actions. It is only in our modern,
scientific but as yet by no means perfected
Weltanschauung
that superstition seems so very much out of place; in the
Weltanschauung
of pre-scientific times and peoples it was
justified and consistent.

  
¹
A recognition which, of course, has nothing
of the character of a [true] recognition.

The Psychopathology Of Everyday Life

1329

   The Roman who gave up an
important undertaking if he saw an ill-omened flight of birds was
therefore in a relative sense justified; his behaviour was
consistent with his premisses. But if he withdrew from the
undertaking because he had stumbled on the threshold of his door
(‘
un Romain retournerait
’) he was also in an
absolute sense superior to us unbelievers; he was a better
psychologist than we are striving to be. For his stumbling must
have revealed to him the existence of a doubt, a counter-current at
work within him, whose force might at the moment of execution
subtract from the force of his intention. For we are only sure of
complete success if all our mental forces are united in striving
towards the desired goal. How did Schiller’s Tell, who
hesitated so long to shoot the apple on his son’s head,
answer the Governor’s question why he had provided himself
with a second arrow?

                                               
Mit diesem zweiten Pfeil durchschoss ich - Euch,

                                               
Wenn ich mein liebes Kind getroffen hätte,

                                               
Und
Euer
- wahrlich, hätt’ ich
nicht
gefehlt.
¹