Freud - Complete Works (643 page)

   There lived in Munich a
fortune-teller who enjoyed a great reputation. The Bavarian princes
used to visit her when they had any undertaking in mind. All that
she required was to be supplied with a date. (I omitted to enquire
whether this had to include the date of the
year
.) It was
understood that the date was that of the birth of some particular
person, but she did not ask whose. Having been given this date, she
would consult her astrological books, make long calculations and
finally utter a prophecy about the person concerned. In the
previous March my patient resolved to visit the fortune-teller. He
presented her with the date of his brother-in-law’s birth,
without, of course, mentioning his name or betraying the fact that
he had him in mind. The oracle pronounced as follows: ‘The
person in question will die next July or August of crayfish- or
oyster-poisoning.’ After telling me this, my patient
exclaimed: ‘It was marvellous!’

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   I could not understand this and
contradicted him vigorously: ‘What do you see in it
that’s marvellous? You’ve been working with me now for
several weeks, and if your brother-in-law had really died you would
have told me long ago. So he must be alive. The prophecy was made
in March and was to be fulfilled during the height of the summer.
It’s November now, so it has
not
been fulfilled. What
do you find so wonderful in that?

   ‘No doubt it has not come
true,’ he replied. ‘But the remarkable thing about it
is this. My brother-in-law is passionately fond of crayfish and
oysters and so on, and
last
August he really did have an
attack of crayfish-poisoning and almost died of it.’ The
matter was not further discussed.

   Let us now consider this
case.

   I believe in the narrator’s
truthfulness. He is entirely trustworthy and is at present lecturer
in philosophy at K----. I can think of no motive which could have
induced him to bamboozle me. The story was an incidental one and
served no ulterior purpose; nothing further emerged from it and no
conclusions were drawn from it. He had no intention of persuading
me of the existence of occult mental phenomena; and indeed I had an
impression that he was not at all clear about the significance of
his experience. I myself was so much struck - to tell the truth, so
disagreeably affected - that I omitted to make any analytic use of
his tale.

   And the observation seems to me
equally unobjectionable from another point of view. It is certain
that the fortune-teller was not acquainted with the man who put the
question. But consider what a degree of intimacy with an
acquaintance would be necessary before one could recognize the date
of his brother in-law’s birthday. On the other hand, you will
no doubt all agree with me in offering the most obstinate
resistance to the possibility that so detailed an event as falling
ill of crayfish poisoning could be inferred from the date of the
subject’s birth by the help of any tables or formulae
whatever. Do not forget how many people are born on the same day.
Is it credible that the similarity of the futures of people born on
the same day can be carried down to such details as this? I
therefore venture to exclude the astrological calculations entirely
from the discussion; I believe the fortune-teller might have
adopted some other procedure without affecting the outcome of the
interrogation. Accordingly, we can also, so it seems to me, leave
the fortune-teller (or, as we may say straight out, the
‘medium’) quite out of account as a possible source of
deception.

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   If you grant the genuineness and
truth of this observation, its explanation will be near. And we at
once find - and this is the case with the majority of these
phenomena - that its explanation on an occult basis is remarkably
adequate and covers what has to be explained completely, except
that it is so unsatisfying in itself. It is impossible that the
knowledge that this man - born on the day in question - had had an
attack of crayfish-poisoning could have been present in the
fortune-teller’s mind; nor can she have arrived at that
knowledge from her tables and calculations. It was, however,
present in the mind of her questioner. The event becomes completely
explicable if we are ready to assume that the knowledge was
transferred from him to the supposed prophetess - by some unknown
method which excluded the means of communication familiar to us.
That is to say, we must draw the inference that there is such a
thing as thought-transference. The fortune-teller’s
astrological activities would in that case have performed the
function of diverting her own psychical forces and occupying them
in a harmless way, so that she could become receptive and
accessible to the effects upon her of her client’s thoughts -
so that she could become a true ‘medium’. We have found
similar distracting contrivances employed (for instance, in the
case of jokes) where there is a question of securing a more
automatic discharge for some mental process.

   The application of analysis to
this case does more than this, however; it further increases its
significance. It teaches us that what has been communicated by this
means of induction from one person to another is not merely a
chance piece of indifferent knowledge. It shows that an
extraordinarily powerful wish harboured by one person and standing
in a special relation to his consciousness has succeeded, with the
help of a second person, in finding conscious expression in a
slightly disguised form - just as the invisible end of the spectrum
reveals itself to the senses on a light-sensitive plate as a
coloured extension. It seems possible to reconstruct the young
man’s train of thought after the illness and recovery of the
brother-in-law who was his hated rival: ‘Well, he’s got
over it this time; but he won’t give up his dangerous taste
on that account, and let’s hope that next time it will be the
end of him.’ It was this ‘let’s hope’ that
was changed into the prophecy. I could quote a parallel to this
from a dream (dreamt by another person), in which a prophecy was
part of the subject-matter. The analysis of the dream showed that
the content of the prophecy coincided with the fulfilment of a
wish.

   I cannot simplify my statement by
describing my patient’s death-wish against his brother-in-law
as an unconscious, repressed one. For it had been made conscious
during the treatment the year before and the consequences which had
followed from its repression had yielded to the treatment. But it
still persisted, and, though it was no longer pathogenic, it was
sufficiently intense. It might be described as a
‘suppressed’ wish.

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II

   In the city of F--- a child grew
up who was the eldest of a family of five, all girls. The youngest
was ten years younger than herself; she once dropped this child out
of her arms when it was a baby; later she called it ‘her
child’. Her mother was older than her father and not an
agreeable person. Her father - and it was not in years only that he
was the younger - saw a lot of the little girls and impressed them
by his many dexterities. Unfortunately he was not impressive in any
other way: he was incompetent at business and was unable to support
the family without help from relatives. The eldest girl became at
an early age the repository of all the worries that arose from his
lack of earning power.

   Once she had left behind the
rigid and passionate character of her childhood, she grew up into a
regular mirror of all the virtues. Her high moral feelings were
accompanied by a narrowly limited intelligence. She became a
teacher in an elementary school and was much respected. The timid
homage paid to her by a young relation who was a music teacher left
her unmoved. No other man had hitherto attracted her notice.

   One day a relative of her
mother’s appeared on the scene, considerably older than she
was, but still (for she was only nineteen) a youngish man. He was a
foreigner who lived in Russia as the head of a large commercial
undertaking and had grown very rich. It took nothing less than a
world war and the overthrow of a great despotism to impoverish him.
He fell in love with his young and severe cousin and asked her to
be his wife. Her parents put no pressure on her, but she understood
their wishes. Behind all her moral ideals she felt the attraction
of the fulfilment of a wishful phantasy of helping her father and
rescuing him from his necessitous state. She calculated that her
cousin would give her father financial support so long as he
carried on his business and pension him when he finally gave it up,
and that he would provide her sisters with dowries and
trousseaux
so that they could get married. And she fell in
love with him, married him soon afterwards and followed him to
Russia.

   Except for a few occurrences
which were not entirely understandable at first sight and whose
significance only became evident in retrospect, everything went
very well in the marriage. She grew into an affectionate wife,
sexually satisfied, and a providential support to her family. Only
one thing was wanting: she was childless. She was now 27 years old
and in the eighth year of her marriage. She lived in Germany, and
after overcoming every kind of hesitation she went for a
consultation to a German gynaecologist. With the usual
thoughtlessness of a specialist, he assured her of recovery if she
underwent a small operation. She agreed, and on the eve of the
operation discussed the matter with her husband. It was the hour of
twilight and she was about to turn on the lights when her husband
asked her not to: he had something to say to her and he would
prefer to be in darkness. He told her to countermand the operation,
as the blame for their childlessness was his. During a medical
congress two years earlier he had learnt that certain illnesses can
deprive a man of the capacity to procreate children. An examination
had shown that such was the case with him. After this revelation
the operation was abandoned. She herself suffered from a temporary
collapse, which she vainly sought to disguise. She had only been
able to love him as a substitute father, and she had now learnt
that he never could be a father. Three paths were open to her, all
equally impassable: unfaithfulness, renunciation of her wish for a
child, or separation from her husband. The last of them was
excluded for the best practical reasons and the middle one for the
strongest unconscious ones, which you can easily guess: her whole
childhood had been dominated by the thrice disappointed wish to get
a child from her father. There remained one other way out, which is
what interests us in her case. She fell seriously ill of a
neurosis. For a time she put up a defence against various
temptations with the help of an anxiety neurosis, but later her
symptoms changed into severe obsessional acts. She spent some time
in institutions and eventually, after her illness had lasted for
ten years, came to me. Her most striking symptom was that when she
was in bed she used to fasten [
anstecken
= bring into
contact] her sheets to the blankets with safety-pins. In this way
she was revealing the secret of her husband’s contagion
[Ansteckung], to which her childlessness was due.

   On one occasion, when she was
perhaps 40 years old, the patient told me an episode dating back to
the time when her depression was beginning, before the outbreak of
her obsessional neurosis. To divert her mind, her husband had taken
her with him on a business trip to Paris. The couple were sitting
with a business friend of her husband’s in the hall of their
hotel when they became aware of some kind of stir and movement. She
asked one of the hotel servants what was happening and was told
that Monsieur le Professeur had arrived for consultations in his
little room near the hotel entrance. Monsieur le Professeur, it
appeared, was a famous fortune-teller; he asked no questions, but
got his clients to press down a hand into a dish full of sand and
foretold the future by studying the imprint. My patient declared
that she would go in and have her fortune told. Her husband
dissuaded her, saying it was nonsense. But after he had gone off
with his business friend she took off her wedding-ring and slipped
into the fortune-teller’s cabinet. He made a long study of
the imprint of her hand and then spoke as follows: ‘In the
near future you will have to go through some severe struggles, but
all will turn out well. You will get married and have two children
by the time you are 32.’ In telling this story she gave every
sign of being greatly impressed by it without understanding it. My
comment that it was nevertheless unfortunate that the date laid
down by the prophecy had already gone by some eight years made no
impression on her. I reflected that perhaps she was admiring the
confident boldness of the prophecy - like the faithful disciple of
the long-sighted Rabbi.

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   Unluckily my memory, which is
usually so trustworthy, is not certain whether the first part of
the prophecy ran: ‘All will turn out well. You will get
married.’ Or whether it was: ‘You will become
happy.’ My attention was focused too completely on my sharp
impression of the final phrase with its striking details. But
actually the first remarks, about struggles that will have a happy
ending, are among the vague expressions that figure in all
prophecies - even in those that can be purchased ready-made. The
contrast afforded by the two numbers specified in the final phrase
is all the more remarkable. Nevertheless, it would certainly have
been of interest to know whether the Professor really spoke of her
marriage
. It is true that she had taken off her wedding-ring
and, at the age of 27, had looked very youthful and might easily
have been taken for an unmarried girl. But, on the other hand, it
would not have needed any great refinement of observation to
discover the trace of the ring on her finger.