Freud - Complete Works (754 page)

New Introductory Lectures On Psycho-Analysis

4659

   These are the facts of the case.
I expect they will seem to you paltry; but listen a little longer,
there is more behind them.

   When he was young, P. had spent
some years in England and since then had retained a permanent
interest in English literature. He possessed a rich English library
and used to bring me books from it. I owe to him an acquaintance
with such authors as Bennett and Galsworthy, of whom till then I
had read little. One day he lent me a novel of Galsworthy’s
with the title
The Man of Property
, whose scene is laid in
the bosom of a family invented by the author, bearing the name of
‘Forsyte’. Galsworthy himself was evidently captivated
by this creation of his, for in later volumes he repeatedly came
back to the members of this family and finally collected all the
tales relating to them under the title of
The Forsyte Saga
.
Only a few days before the occurrence I am speaking of, he had
brought me a fresh volume from this series. The name
‘Forsyte’, and everything typical that the author had
sought to embody in it, had played a part, too, in my conversations
with P. and it had become part of the secret language which so
easily grows up between two people who see a lot of each other. Now
the name ‘Forsyte’ in these novels differs little from
that of my visitor ‘Forsyth’ and, as pronounced by a
German, the two can scarcely be distinguished; and there is an
English word with a meaning - ‘foresight’ - which we
should also pronounce in the same way and which would be translated
‘
Voraussicht
’ or ‘
Vorsicht
’.
Thus P. had in fact selected from his personal concerns the very
name with which I was occupied at the same time as a result of an
occurrence of which he was unaware.

   That begins to look better, you
will agree. But we shall, I think, receive a stronger impression of
the striking phenomenon and even obtain an insight into its
determinants, if we throw some analytic light upon two other
associations brought up by P. during the same session.

New Introductory Lectures On Psycho-Analysis

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   Firstly: One day of the previous
week I had waited in vain for Herr P. at eleven o’clock, and
had then gone out to visit Dr. Anton von Freund in his
pension
. I was surprised to find that Herr P. lived on
another floor of the same building in which the
pension
was
located. In connection with this I had later told P. that I had in
a sense paid him a visit in his house; but I know definitely that I
did not tell him the name of the person I visited in the
pension
. And now, shortly after mentioning ‘Herr von
Vorsicht’ he asked me whether perhaps the Freud-Ottorego who
was giving a course of lectures on English at the Volks
universität’ was my daughter. And for the first time
during our long period of intercourse he gave my name the distorted
form to which I have indeed become habituated by functionaries,
officials and compositors: instead of ‘Freud’ he said
‘Freund’.

   Secondly: At the end of the same
session he told me a dream, from which he had woken in a fright - a
regular ‘
Alptraum
’, he said. He added that not
long ago he had forgotten the English word for that, and when
someone had asked him said that the English for
‘
Alptraum
’ was ‘a mare’s
next’. This was nonsense, of course, he went on; ‘a
mare’s nest’ meant something incredible, a
cock-and-bull story: the translation of
‘
Alptraum
’ was ‘nightmare’. The only
element in common between this association and the previous one
seemed to be the element ‘English’. I was however
reminded of a small incident which had occurred about a month
earlier. P. was sitting with me in the room when another visitor, a
dear friend from London, Dr. Ernest Jones, unexpectedly came in
after a long separation. I signed to him to go into the next room
while I finished with P. The latter, however, had at once
recognized him from his photograph hanging in the waiting-room, and
even expressed a wish to be introduced to him. Now Jones is the
author of a monograph on the
Alptraum
- the nightmare. I did
not know whether P. was acquainted with it; he avoided reading
analytic literature.

New Introductory Lectures On Psycho-Analysis

4661

   I should like to begin by putting
before you an investigation of what analytic understanding can be
arrived at of the background of P.’s associations and of the
motives for them. P. was placed similarly to me in relation to the
name ‘Forsyte’ or ‘Forsyth’; it meant the
same to him, and it was entirely to him that I owed my acquaintance
with the name. The remarkable fact was that he brought the name
into the analysis unheralded, only the briefest time after it had
become significant to me in another sense owing to a new event -
the London doctor’s arrival. But the manner in which the name
emerged in his analytic session is perhaps not less interesting
than the fact itself. He did not say, for instance: ‘The name
"Forsyte", out of the novels you are familiar with, has
just occurred to me.’ He was able, without any conscious
relation to that source, to weave the name into his own experiences
and to produce it thence - a thing that might have happened long
before but had not happened till then. What he
did
say now
was: ‘I’m a Forsyth too: that’s what the girl
calls me.’ It is hard to mistake the mixture of jealous
demand and melancholy self-depreciation which finds its expression
in this remark. We shall not be going astray if we complete it in
some such way as this: ‘It’s mortifying to me that your
thoughts should be so intensely occupied with this new arrival. Do
come back to me; after all I’m a Forsyth too though
it’s true I’m only a Herr von Vorsicht, as the girl
says.’ And thereupon his train of thought, passing along the
associative threads of the element ‘English’ went back
to two earlier events, which were able to stir up the same feelings
of jealousy. ‘A few days ago you paid a visit to my house -
not, alas, to me but to a Herr von Freund.’ This thought
caused him to distort the name ‘Freud’ into
‘Freund’. The ‘Freud-Ottorego’ from the
lecture-syllabus must come in here because as a teacher of English
she provided the manifest association. And now came the
recollection of another visitor a few weeks before, of whom he was
no doubt equally jealous, but for whom he also felt he was no
match, for Dr. Jones was able to write a monograph on the nightmare
whereas he was at best only able to produce such dreams himself.
His mention of his mistake about the meaning of ‘a
mare’s nest’ comes into this connection, for it can
only mean to say: ‘After all I’m not a genuine
Englishman any more than I’m a genuine Forsyth.’

   Now I cannot describe his
feelings of jealousy as either out of place or unintelligible. He
had been warned that his analysis, and at the same time our
contact, would come to an end as soon as foreign pupils and
patients returned to Vienna; and that was in fact what happened
shortly afterwards. What we have so far achieved, however, has been
a piece of analytic work - the explanation of three associations
brought up by him in the same session and nourished by the same
motive: and this has not much to do with the other question of
whether these associations could or could not have been made
without thought-transference. This question arises in the case of
each of the three associations and thus falls into three separate
questions: Could P. have known that Dr. Forsyth had just paid me
his first visit? Could he know the name of the person I had visited
in his house? Did he know that Dr. Jones had written a monograph on
the nightmare? Or was it only
my
knowledge about these
things that was revealed in his associations? It will depend on the
reply to these separate questions whether my observation allows of
a conclusion favourable to thought-transference.

New Introductory Lectures On Psycho-Analysis

4662

   Let us leave the first question
aside for a while; the other two can be dealt with more easily. The
case of my visit to his
pension
makes a particularly
convincing impression at first sight. I am certain that in my
short, joking reference to my visit to his house I mentioned no
name. I think it is most unlikely that P. made enquiries at the
pension
as to the name of the person concerned; I believe
rather that the existence of that person remained entirely unknown
to him. But the evidential value of this case is totally destroyed
by a chance circumstance. The man whom I had visited at the
pension
was not only called ‘Freund’; he was a
true friend to us all. He was Dr. Anton von Freund whose donation
had made the foundation of our publishing house possible. His early
death, together with that of our colleague Karl Abraham a few years
later, are the gravest misfortunes which have befallen the growth
of psycho-analysis. It is possible, therefore, that I had said to
Herr P.: ‘I visited a friend in your house’ and with
this possibility the occult interest of his second association
vanishes.

   The impression made by the third
association evaporates equally quickly. Could P. know that Jones
had published a monograph on the nightmare if he never read any
analytic literature? Yes, he could. He possessed books from our
publishing house and could in any case have seen the titles of the
new publications advertised on the wrappers. This cannot be proved,
but neither can it be disproved. We can reach no decision,
therefore, along this path. To my regret, this observation of mine
suffers from the same weakness as so many similar ones: it was
written down too late and was discussed at a time when I was no
longer seeing Herr P. and could not question him further.

New Introductory Lectures On Psycho-Analysis

4663

   Let us go back to the first
event, which even taken by itself supports the apparent fact of
thought-transference. Could P. know that Dr. Forsyth had been with
me a quarter of an hour before him? Could he have any knowledge at
all of his existence or of his presence in Vienna? We must not give
way to an inclination to deny both questions flatly. I can see a
way that leads to a partly affirmative answer. I may after all have
told Herr P. that I was expecting a doctor from England for
instruction in analysis, as a first dove after the Deluge. This
might have happened in the summer of 1919, for Dr. Forsyth had made
arrangements with me by letter some months before his arrival. I
may even have mentioned his name, though that seems to me most
improbable. In view of the other connection which the name carried
for both of us, a discussion of it must inevitably have followed,
of which something would have remained in my memory. Nevertheless
such a discussion may have taken place and I may have totally
forgotten it afterwards, so that it became possible for the
emergence of ‘Herr von Vorsicht’ in the analytic
session to strike me as a miracle. If one regards oneself as a
sceptic, it is a good plan to have occasional doubts about
one’s scepticism too. It may be that I too have a secret
inclination towards the miraculous which thus goes half way to meet
the creation of occult facts.

   If we have thus got one
miraculous possibility out of the way, there is another waiting for
us, and the most difficult of all. Assuming that Herr P. knew that
there was a Dr. Forsyth and that he was expected in Vienna in the
autumn, how is it to be explained that he became receptive to his
presence on the very day of his arrival and immediately after his
first visit? One might say it was chance - that is, leave it
unexplained. But it was precisely in order to exclude chance that I
discussed P.’s other two associations, in order to show you
that he was really occupied with jealous thoughts about people who
visited me. Or one might, not to neglect the most extreme
possibility, experiment with the hypothesis that P. had observed a
special excitement about me (which, to be sure, I myself knew
nothing of) and drew his conclusion from it. Or Herr P. (though he
arrived a quarter of an hour after the Englishman left) met him on
the short stretch of street which they both had to pass along,
recognized him by his characteristically English appearance and,
being in a permanent state of jealous expectation, thought:
‘Ah, so that’s Dr. Forsyth with whose arrival my
analysis is to come to an end! And he’s probably just come
straight from the Professor.’ I cannot carry these
rationalistic speculations any further. We are once again left with
a
non liquet
; but I must confess that I have a feeling that
here too the scales weigh in favour of thought-transference.
Moreover, I am certainly not alone in having been in the position
of experiencing ‘occult’ events like this in the
analytic situation. Helene Deutsch published some similar
observations in 1926 and studied the question of their being
determined by the transference relations between patient and
analyst.

New Introductory Lectures On Psycho-Analysis

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   I am sure you will not feel very
well satisfied with my attitude to this problem - with my not being
entirely convinced but prepared to be convinced. You may perhaps
say to yourselves: ‘Here’s another case of a man who
has done honest work as a scientist all through his life and has
grown feeble-minded, pious and credulous in his old age.’ I
am aware that a few great names must be included in this class, but
you should not reckon me among them. At least I have not become
pious, and I hope not credulous. It is only that, if one has gone
about all one’s life bending in order to avoid a painful
collision with the facts, so too in one’s old age one still
keeps one’s back ready to bow before new realities. No doubt
you would like me to hold fast to a moderate theism and show myself
relentless in my rejection of everything occult. But I am incapable
of currying favour and I must urge you to have kindlier thoughts on
the objective possibility of thought-transference and at the same
time of telepathy as well.