Freud - Complete Works (777 page)

 
4812

SÁNDOR FERENCZI

(1933)

4813

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4814

SÁNDOR FERENCZI

We have learnt by experience that wishing
costs little; so we generously present one another with the best
and warmest of wishes. And of these the foremost is for a long
life. A well known Eastern tale reveals the double-sidedness of
precisely this wish. The Sultan had his horoscope cast by two wise
men. ‘Thy lot is happy, master!’ said one of them.
‘It is written in the stars that thou shalt see all thy
kinsmen die before thee.’ This prophet was executed.
‘Thy lot is happy!’ said the other too, ‘for I
read in the stars that thou shalt outlive all thy kinsmen.’
This one was richly rewarded. Both had given expression to the
fulfilment of the same wish.

   It fell to me in January, 1926,
to write an obituary of our unforgettable friend, Karl Abraham. A
few years earlier, in 1923, I could congratulate Sándor
Ferenczi on the completion of his fiftieth year. To-day, scarcely a
decade later, it grieves me that I have outlived him too. In what I
wrote for his birthday I was able to celebrate openly his
versatility and originality and the richness of his gifts; but the
discretion imposed on a friend forbade my speaking of his lovable
and affectionate personality, with its readiness to welcome
everything of significance.

   Since the days when he was led to
me by his interest in psycho-analysis, still in its youth, we have
shared many things with each other. I invited him to go with me to
Worcester, Massachusetts, when in 1909 I was called upon to lecture
there during a week of celebrations. In the morning, before the
time had come for my lecture to begin, we would walk together in
front of the University building and I would ask him to suggest
what I should talk about that day. He thereupon gave me a sketch of
what, half an hour later, I improvised in my lecture. In this way
he had a share in the origin of the
Five Lectures
. Soon
after this, at the Nuremberg Congress of 1910, I arranged that he
should propose the organization of analysts into an international
association - a scheme which we had thought out together. With
slight modifications it was accepted and is in force to this day.
For many successive years we spent the autumn holidays together in
Italy, and a number of papers that appeared later in the literature
under his or my name took their first shape in our talks there.
When the outbreak of the World War put an end to our freedom of
movement, and paralysed our analytic activity as well, he made use
of the interval to begin his analysis with me. This met with a
break when he was called up for military service, but he was able
to resume it later. The feeling of a secure common bond, which grew
up between us from so many shared experiences, was not interrupted
when, late in life unfortunately, he was united to the outstanding
woman who mourns him to-day as his widow.

Sandor Ferenczi

4815

   Ten years ago, when the
Internationale Zeitschrift
dedicated a special number to
Ferenczi on his fiftieth birthday, he had already published most of
the works which have made all analysts into his pupils. But he was
holding back his most brilliant and most fertile achievement. I
knew of it, and in the closing sentence of my contribution I urged
him to give it to us. Then, in 1924, his
Versuch einer
Genitaltheorie
appeared. This little book is a biological
rather than a psycho-analytic study; it is an application of the
attitudes and insights associated with psycho-analysis to the
biology of the sexual processes and, beyond them, to organic life
in general. It was perhaps the boldest application of
psycho-analysis that was ever attempted. As its governing thought
it lays stress on the conservative nature of the instincts, which
seek to re-establish every state of things that has been abandoned
owing to an external interference. Symbols are recognized as
evidence of ancient connections. Impressive instances are adduced
to show how the characteristics of what is psychical preserve
traces of primaeval changes in the bodily substance. When one has
read this work, one seems to understand many peculiarities of
sexual life of which one had never previously been able to obtain a
comprehensive view, and one finds oneself the richer for hints that
promise a deep insight into wide fields of biology. It is a vain
task to attempt already to-day to distinguish what can be accepted
as an authentic discovery from what seeks, in the fashion of a
scientific phantasy, to guess at future knowledge. We lay the
little book aside with a feeling: ‘This is almost too much to
take in at a first reading; I will read it again after a
while.’ But it is not only I who feel like this. It is
probable that some time in the future there will really be a
‘bio-analysis’, as Ferenczi has prophesied, and it will
have to cast back to the
Versuch einer Genitaltheorie
.

Sandor Ferenczi

4816

   After this summit of achievement,
it came about that our friend slowly drifted away from us. On his
return from a period of work in America he seemed to withdraw more
and more into solitary work, though he had previously taken the
liveliest share in all that happened in analytic circles. We learnt
that one single problem had monopolized his interest. The need to
cure and to help had become paramount in him. He had probably set
himself aims which, with our therapeutic means, are altogether out
of reach to-day. From unexhausted springs of emotion the conviction
was borne in upon him that one could effect far more with
one’s patients if one gave them enough of the love which they
had longed for as children. He wanted to discover how this could be
carried out within the framework of the psycho-analytic situation;
and so long as he had not succeeded in this, he kept apart, no
longer certain, perhaps, of agreement with his friends. Wherever it
may have been that the road he had started along would have led
him, he could not pursue it to the end. Signs were slowly revealed
in him of a grave organic destructive process which had probably
overshadowed his life for many years already. Shortly before
completing his sixtieth year he succumbed to pernicious anaemia. It
is impossible to believe that the history of our science will ever
forget him.

May
1933

4817

THE SUBTLETIES OF A FAULTY ACTION

(1935)

4818

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4819

THE SUBTLETIES OF A FAULTY
ACTION

I was preparing a birthday present for a woman
friend - a small engraved gem for insertion into a ring. It was
fixed in the centre of a piece of stout cardboard and on this I
wrote the following words: ‘Voucher for the supply by Messrs.
L., jewellers, of a gold ring . . . for the attached stone bearing
an engraved ship with sail and oars.’ But at the point at
which I have here left a gap, between ‘ring’ and
‘for’ there stood a word which I was obliged to cross
out since it was entirely irrelevant. It was the little word
‘
bis
’. Why should I have written it at all?

   When I read the short inscription
through, I was struck by the fact that it contained the word
‘
für
’ twice in rapid succession:
‘
for
the supply’ - ‘
for
the
attached stone’. That sounded ugly and should be avoided. It
then occurred to me that ‘
bis
’ had been
substituted for ‘
für
’ in an attempt to
escape this stylistic awkwardness. No doubt that was so; but it was
an attempt that made use of remarkably inadequate means. The
preposition ‘
bis
’ was quite out of place in this
context and could not possibly be substituted for the necessary
‘
für
’. So why precisely
‘
bis
’?

   But perhaps the word
‘
bis
’ was not the preposition determining a
time-limit. It may have been something totally different - the
Latin ‘
bis
’ - ‘for a second time’,
which has retained its meaning in French. ‘
Ne bis in
idem
’ is a maxim of Roman law. ‘
Bis!
bis!
’ cries a Frenchman if he wants a performance
repeated. So that must be the explanation of my senseless slip of
the pen. I was being warned against the second
‘
für
’, against a repetition of the same
word. Something else must be put instead of it. The chance identity
in sound between the foreign word ‘
bis
’ which
embodied the criticism of the original phraseology and the German
preposition made it possible to insert ‘
bis
’
instead of ‘
für
’ as though by a slip of the
pen. But this mistake gained its purpose not by being
made
,
but only after it had been
corrected
. I had to cross out the
‘
bis
’ and in so doing I had myself, so to speak,
done away with the repetition which was disturbing me. A variant,
not without interest, of the mechanism of a parapraxis!

The Subtleties Of A Faulty Action

4820

   I felt very much pleased with
this solution. But in self-analysis the danger of incompleteness is
particularly great. One is too soon satisfied with a part
explanation, behind which resistance may easily be keeping back
something that is more important perhaps. I related this little
analysis to my daughter, and she immediately saw how it went
on:

   ‘But you gave her a stone
like that for a ring once before.
That’s
probably the
repetition you want to avoid. One doesn’t like always to be
making the same present.’ I was convinced by this; the
objection was obviously to a repetition of the same
present
,
not of the same
word
. There had been a displacement on to
something trivial with the object of diverting attention from
something more important: an aesthetic difficulty, perhaps, in
place of an instinctual conflict.

   For it was easy to discover the
further sequel. I was looking for a motive for not making a present
of the stone, and that motive was provided by the reflection that I
had already made the same (or a very similar) present. Why should
this objection have been concealed and disguised? Very soon I saw
clearly why. I wanted not to give the stone away at all. I liked it
very much myself.

   The explanation of this
parapraxis was found without raising any great difficulties.
Indeed, a consoling thought soon occurred to me: regrets of this
kind only enhance the value of a gift. What sort of gift would it
be if one were not a little bit sorry to part with it? Nevertheless
the episode enables one to realize once more how complicated the
most unobtrusive and apparently simplest mental processes may be. I
made a slip in writing out some instructions - put in a
‘
bis
’ where a ‘
für
’ was
needed - I noticed it and corrected it: a small mistake, or rather
attempt at a mistake, and yet based upon this large number of
premisses and dynamic determinants! Indeed, the mistake could not
have occurred if the material had not been particularly
favourable.

 
4821

A
DISTURBANCE OF MEMORY ON THE ACROPOLIS

(1936)

4822

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4823

A DISTURBANCE OF MEMORY ON THE ACROPOLIS

AN
OPEN LETTER TO ROMAIN ROLLAND ON THE

OCCASION OF HIS SEVENTIETH BIRTHDAY

My dear Friend,

   I have been urgently pressed to
make some written contribution to the celebration of your
seventieth birthday and I have made long efforts to find something
that might in any way be worthy of you and might give expression to
my admiration for your love of the truth, for your courage in your
beliefs and for your affection and good will towards humanity; or,
again, something that might bear witness to my gratitude to you as
a writer who has afforded me so many moments of exaltation and
pleasure. But it was in vain. I am ten years older than you and my
powers of production are at an end. All that I can find to offer
you is the gift of an impoverished creature, who has ‘seen
better days’.

   You know that the aim of my
scientific work was to throw light upon unusual, abnormal or
pathological manifestations of the mind - that is to say, to trace
them back to the psychical forces operating behind them and to
indicate the mechanisms at work. I began by attempting this upon
myself and then went on to apply it to other people and finally, by
a bold extension, to the human race as a whole. During the last few
years, a phenomenon of this sort, which I myself had experienced a
generation ago, in 1904, and which I had never understood, has kept
on recurring to my mind. I did not at first see why; but at last I
determined to analyse the incident - and I now present you with the
results of that enquiry. In the process, I shall have, of course,
to ask you to give more attention to some events in my private life
than they would otherwise deserve.

A Disturbance Of Memory On The Acropolis

4824

   Every year, at that time, towards
the end of August or the beginning of September, I used to set out
with my younger brother on a holiday trip, which would last for
some weeks and would take us to Rome or to some other region of
Italy or to some part of the Mediterranean sea-board. My brother is
ten years younger than I am, so he is the same age as you - a
coincidence which has only now occurred to me. In that particular
year my brother told me that his business affairs would not allow
him to be away for long: a week would be the most that he could
manage and we should have to shorten our trip. So we decided to
travel by way of Trieste to the island of Corfu and there spend the
few days of our holiday. At Trieste he called upon a business
acquaintance who lived there, and I went with him. Our host
enquired in a friendly way about our plans and, hearing that it was
our intention to go to Corfu, advised us strongly against it:
‘What makes you think of going there at this time of year? It
would be too hot for you to do anything. You had far better go to
Athens instead. The Lloyd boat sails this afternoon; it will give
you three days there to see the town and will pick you up on its
return voyage. That would be more agreeable and more worth
while.’

   As we walked away from this
visit, we were both in remarkably depressed spirits. We discussed
the plan that had been proposed, agreed that it was quite
impracticable and saw nothing but difficulties in the way of
carrying it out; we assumed, moreover, that we should not be
allowed to land in Greece without passports. We spent the hours
that elapsed before the Lloyd offices opened in wandering about the
town in a discontented and irresolute frame of mind. But when the
time came, we went up to the counter and booked our passages for
Athens as though it were a matter of course, without bothering in
the least about the supposed difficulties and indeed without having
discussed with one another the reasons for our decision. Such
behaviour, it must be confessed, was most strange. Later on we
recognized that we had accepted the suggestion that we should go to
Athens instead of Corfu instantly and most readily. But, if so, why
had we spent the interval before the offices opened in such a
gloomy state and foreseen nothing but obstacles and
difficulties?

A Disturbance Of Memory On The Acropolis

4825

   When, finally, on the afternoon
after our arrival, I stood on the Acropolis and cast my eyes around
upon the landscape, a surprising thought suddenly entered my mind:
‘So all this really
does
exist, just as we learnt at
school!’ To describe the situation more accurately, the
person who gave expression to the remark was divided, far more
sharply than was usually noticeable, from another person who took
cognizance of the remark; and both were astonished, though not by
the same thing. The first behaved as though he were obliged, under
the impact of an unequivocal observation, to believe in something
the reality of which had hitherto seemed doubtful. If I may make a
slight exaggeration, it was as if someone, walking beside Loch
Ness, suddenly caught sight of the form of the famous Monster
stranded upon the shore and found himself driven to the admission:
‘So it really
does
exist - the sea-serpent we’ve
never believed in!’ The second person, on the other hand, was
justifiably astonished, because he had been unaware that the real
existence of Athens, the Acropolis, and the landscape around it had
ever been objects of doubt. What he had been expecting was rather
some expression of delight or admiration.

   Now it would be easy to argue
that this strange thought that occurred to me on the Acropolis only
serves to emphasize the fact that seeing something with one’s
own eyes is after all quite a different thing from hearing or
reading about it. But it would remain a very strange way of
clothing an uninteresting commonplace. Or it would be possible to
maintain that it was true that when I was a schoolboy I had
thought
I was convinced of the historical reality of the
city of Athens and its history, but that the occurrence of this
idea on the Acropolis had precisely shown that in my unconscious I
had
not
believed in it, and that I was only now acquiring a
conviction that ‘reached down to the unconscious’. An
explanation of this sort sounds very profound, but it is easier to
assert than to prove; moreover, it is very much open to attack upon
theoretical grounds. No. I believe that the two phenomena, the
depression at Trieste and the idea on the Acropolis, were
intimately connected. And the first of these is more easily
intelligible and may help us towards an explanation of the
second.

   The experience at Trieste was, it
will be noticed, also no more than an expression of incredulity:
‘We’re going to see Athens? Out of the question! - it
will be far too difficult!’ The accompanying depression
corresponded to a regret that it
was
out of the question: it
would have been so lovely. And now we know where we are. It is one
of those cases of ‘too good to be true’ that we come
across so often. It is an example of the incredulity that arises so
often when we are surprised by a piece of good news, when we hear
we have won a prize, for instance, or drawn a winner, or when a
girl learns that the man whom she has secretly loved has asked her
parents for leave to pay his addresses to her.

A Disturbance Of Memory On The Acropolis

4826

   When we have established the
existence of a phenomenon, the next question is of course as to its
cause. Incredulity of this kind is obviously an attempt to
repudiate a piece of reality; but there is something strange about
it. We should not be in the least astonished if an attempt of this
kind were aimed at a piece of reality that threatened to bring
unpleasure: the mechanism of our mind is, so to speak, planned to
work along just such lines. But why should such incredulity arise
in something which, on the contrary, promises to bring a high
degree of pleasure? Truly paradoxical behaviour! But I recollect
that on a previous occasion I dealt with the similar case of the
people who, as I put it, are ‘wrecked by success’. As a
rule people fall ill as a result of frustration, of the
non-fulfilment of some vital necessity or desire. But with these
people the opposite is the case; they fall ill, or even go entirely
to pieces, because an overwhelmingly powerful wish of theirs has
been fulfilled. But the contrast between the two situations is not
so great as it seems at first. What happens in the paradoxical case
is merely that the place of the external frustration is taken by an
internal one. The sufferer does not permit himself happiness: the
internal frustration commands him to cling to the external one. But
why? Because - so runs the answer in a number of cases - one cannot
expect Fate to grant one anything so good. In fact, another
instance of ‘too good to be true’, the expression of a
pessimism of which a large portion seems to find a home in many of
us. In another set of cases, just as in those who are wrecked by
success, we find a sense of guilt or inferiority, which can be
translated: ‘I’m not worthy of such happiness, I
don’t deserve it.’ But these two motives are
essentially the same, for one is only a projection of the other.
For, as has long been known, the Fate which we expect to treat us
so badly is a materialization of our conscience, of the severe
super-ego within us, itself a residue of the punitive agency of our
childhood.

A Disturbance Of Memory On The Acropolis

4827

   This, I think, explains our
behaviour in Trieste. We could not believe that we were to be given
the joy of seeing Athens. The fact that the piece of reality that
we were trying to repudiate was to begin with only a
possibility
determined the character of our immediate
reactions. But when we were standing on the Acropolis the
possibility had become an actuality, and the same disbelief found a
different but far clearer expression. In an undistorted form this
should have been: ‘I could really not have imagined it
possible that I should ever be granted the sight of Athens with my
own eyes - as is now indubitably the case!’ When I recall the
passionate desire to travel and see the world by which I was
dominated at school and later, and how long it was before that
desire began to find its fulfilment, I am not surprised at its
after-effect on the Acropolis; I was then forty-eight years old. I
did not ask my younger brother whether he felt anything of the same
sort. A certain amount of reserve surrounded the whole episode; and
it was this which had already interfered with our exchanging
thoughts at Trieste.

   If I have rightly guessed the
meaning of the thought that came to me on the Acropolis and if it
did in fact express my joyful astonishment at finding myself at
that spot, the further question now arises why this meaning should
have been subjected in the thought itself to such a distorted and
distorting disguise.

   The essential subject-matter of
the thought, to be sure, was retained even in the distortion - that
is, incredulity: ‘By the evidence of my senses I am now
standing on the Acropolis, but I cannot believe it.’ This
incredulity, however, this doubt of a piece of reality, was doubly
displaced in its actual expression: first, it was shifted back into
the past, and secondly it was transposed from my relation to the
Acropolis on to the very existence of the Acropolis. And so
something occurred which was equivalent to an assertion that at
some time in the past I had doubted the real existence of the
Acropolis - which, however, my memory rejected as being incorrect
and, indeed, impossible.

A Disturbance Of Memory On The Acropolis

4828

   The two distortions involve two
independent problems. We can attempt to penetrate deeper into the
process of transformation. Without for the moment particularizing
as to how I have arrived at the idea, I will start from the
presumption that the original factor must have been a sense of some
feeling of the unbelievable and the unreal in the situation at the
moment. The situation included myself, the Acropolis and my
perception of it. I could not account for this doubt; I obviously
could not attach the doubt to my sensory impressions of the
Acropolis. But I remembered that in the past I had had a doubt
about something which had to do with this precise locality, and I
thus found the means for shifting the doubt into the past. In the
process, however, the subject-matter of the doubt was changed. I
did not simply recollect that in my early years I had doubted
whether I myself would ever see the Acropolis, but I asserted that
at that time I had disbelieved in the reality of the Acropolis
itself. It is precisely this effect of the displacement that leads
me to think that the actual situation on the Acropolis contained an
element of doubt of reality. I have certainly not yet succeeded in
making the process clear; so I will conclude by saying briefly that
the whole psychical situation, which seems so confused and is so
difficult to describe, can be satisfactorily cleared up by assuming
that at the time I had (or might have had) a momentary feeling:
‘
What I see here is not real
.’ Such a feeling is
known as a ‘feeling of derealization’. I made an
attempt to ward that feeling off, and I succeeded, at the cost of
making a false pronouncement about the past.

   These derealizations are
remarkable phenomena which are still little understood. They are
spoken of as ‘sensations’, but they are obviously
complicated processes, attached to particular mental contents and
bound up with decisions made about those contents. They arise very
frequently in certain mental diseases, but they are not unknown
among normal people, just as hallucinations occasionally occur in
the healthy. Nevertheless they are certainly failures in
functioning and, like dreams, which, in spite of their regular
occurrence in healthy people, serve us as models of psychological
disorder, they are abnormal structures. These phenomena are to be
observed in two forms: the subject feels either that a piece of
reality or that a piece of his own self is strange to him. In the
latter case we speak of ‘depersonalizations’;
derealizations and depersonalizations are intimately connected.
There is another set of phenomena which may be regarded as their
positive counterparts - what are known as ‘
fausse
reconnaissance
’, ‘
déià
vu
’, ‘
déjà
raconté
’ etc., illusions in which we seek to
accept something as belonging to our ego, just as in the
derealizations we are anxious to keep something out of us. A
naïvely mystical and unpsychological attempt at explaining the
phenomena of ‘
déjà vu
’ endeavours
to find evidence in it of a former existence of our mental self.
Depersonalization leads us on to the extraordinary condition of
‘
double conscience
’, which is more correctly
described as ‘split personality’. But all of this is so
obscure and has been so little mastered scientifically that I must
refrain from talking about it any more to you.