Autobiographical note 53 страница

‘I’II help you with pleasure,’ I replied, and gave the quotation in its correct form: ‘Exoriar(e) ALIQUIS nostris ex ossibus ultor.’

‘How stupid to forget a word like that! By the way, you claim that one never forgets a thing without some reason. I should be very curious to learn how I came to forget the indefinite pronoun "aliquis" in this case.’

I took up this challenge most readily, for I was hoping for a contribution to my collection. So I said: ‘That should not take us long. I must only ask you to tell me, candidly and uncritically, whatever comes into your mind if you direct your attention to the forgotten word without any definite aim.’¹

‘Good. There springs to mind, then, the ridiculous notion of dividing up the word like this: a and liquis.’

‘What does that mean?’ ‘I don’t know.’ ‘And what occurs to you next?’ ‘What comes next is Reliquien [relics], liquefying, fluidity, fluid. Have you discovered anything so far?’

‘No. Not by any means yet. But go on.’

‘I am thinking,’ he went on with a scornful laugh, ‘of Simon of Trent, whose relics I saw two years ago in a church at Trent. I am thinking of the accusation of ritual blood-sacrifice which is being brought against the Jews again just now, and of Kleinpaul’s book in which he regards all these supposed victims as incarnations, one might say new editions, of the Saviour.’

¹ This is the general method of introducing concealed ideational elements to consciousness. Cf. my Interpretation of Dreams, p. 604.8

‘The notion is not entirely unrelated to the subject we were discussing before the Latin word slipped your memory.’

‘True. My next thoughts are about an article that I read lately in an Italian newspaper. Its title, I think, was "What St. Augustine says about Women." What do you make of that?’

‘I am waiting.’

‘And now comes something that is quite clearly unconnected with our subject.’

‘Please refrain from any criticism and---'

‘Yes, I understand. I am thinking of a fine old gentleman I met on my travels last week. He was a real original, with all the appearance of a huge bird of prey. His name was Benedict, if it’s of interest to you.’

‘Anyhow, here are a row of saints and Fathers of the Church: St. Simon, St. Augustine, St. Benedict. There was, I think, a Church Father called Origen. Moreover, three of these names are also first names, like Paul in Kleinpaul.’

‘Now it’s St. Januarius and the miracle of his blood that comes into mind - my thoughts seem to me to be running on mechanically.’

‘Just a moment: St. Januarius and St. Augustine both have to do with the calendar. But won’t you remind me about the miracle of his blood?’

‘Surely you must have heard of that? They keep the blood of St. Januarius in a phial inside a church at Naples, and on a particular holy day it miraculously liquefies. The people attach great importance to this miracle and get very excited if it’s delayed, as happened once at a time when the French were occupying the town. So the general in command - or have I got it wrong? was it Garibaldi? - took the reverend gentleman aside and gave him to understand, with an unmistakable gesture towards the soldiers posted outside, that he hoped the miracle would take place very soon. And in fact it did take place...

‘Well, go on. Why do you pause?’ 9

‘Well, something has come into my mind... but it’s too intimate to pass on.... Besides, I don’t see any connection, or any necessity for saying it.’

‘You can leave the connection to me. Of course I can’t force you to talk about something that you find distasteful; but then you mustn’t insist on learning from me how you came to forget your aliquis.’

‘Really? Is that what you think? Well then, I’ve suddenly, thought of a lady from whom I might easily hear a piece of news that would be very awkward for both of us.’

‘That her periods have stopped?’

‘How could you guess that?’

‘That’s not difficult any longer; you’ve prepared the way sufficiently. Think of the calendar saints, the blood that starts to flow on a particular day, the disturbance when the event fails to take place, the open threats that the miracle must be vouchsafed, or else... In fact you’ve made use of the miracle of St. Januarius to manufacture a brilliant allusion to women’s periods.’

‘Without being aware of it. And you really mean to say that it was this anxious expectation that made me unable to produce an unimportant word like aliquis?’

‘It seems to me undeniable. You need only recall the division you made into a-liquis, and your associations: relics, liquefying, fluid. St. Simon was sacrificed as a child - shall I go on and show how he comes in? You were led on to him by the subject of relics.

‘No, I’d much rather you didn’t. I hope you don’t take these thoughts of mine too seriously, if indeed I really had them. In return I will confess to you that the lady is Italian and that I went to Naples with her. But mayn’t all this just be a matter of chance?’

‘I must leave it to your own judgement to decide whether you can explain all these connections by the assumption that they are matters of chance. I can however tell you that every case like this that you care to analyse will lead you to "matters of chance" that are just as striking.’¹

¹ This short analysis has received much attention in the literature of the subject and has provoked lively discussion. Basing himself directly on it, Bleuler (1919) has attempted to determine mathematically the credibility of psycho-analytic interpretations, and has come to the conclusion that it has a higher probability value than thousands of medical ‘truths’ which have gone unchallenged, and that it owes its exceptional position only to the fact that we are not yet accustomed to take psychological probabilities into consideration in science.

0 I have several reasons for valuing this brief analysis; and my thanks are due to my former travelling-companion who presented me with it. In the first place, this is because I was in this instance allowed to draw on a source that is ordinarily denied to me. For the examples collected here of disturbances of a psychical function in daily life I have to fall back mainly on self-observation. I am anxious to steer clear of the much richer material provided by my neurotic patients, since it might otherwise be objected that the phenomena in question are merely consequences and manifestations of neurosis. My purpose is therefore particularly well served when a person other than myself, not suffering from nervous illness, offers himself as the object of such an investigation. This analysis is significant in a further respect: it throws light on the case of a word being forgotten without a substitute for it appearing in the memory. It thus confirms my earlier assertion that the appearance or non-appearance in the memory of incorrect substitutes cannot be made the basis for any radical distinction.¹

¹ Closer scrutiny somewhat diminishes the contrast between the analyses of Signorelli and of aliquis in regard to substitutive memories. In the latter example too it appears that the forgetting was accompanied by a substitutive formation. When subsequently I asked my companion whether in the course of his efforts to recall the missing word no substitute whatever came into his mind, he reported that at first he had felt a temptation to introduce an ab into the line (perhaps the detached portion of a-liquis) - nostris ab ossibus; and he went on to say that the exoriare had thrust itself on him with peculiar clarity and obstinacy, ‘evidently,’ he added with his characteristic scepticism, ‘because it was the first word in the line.’ When I asked him to attend all the same to the associations starting from exoriare, he produced exorcism. I can therefore very well believe that the intensification of exoriare when it was reproduced actually had the value of a substitutive formation of this sort. This substitute would have been arrived at from the names of the saints viâ the association ‘exorcism.’ These however are refinements to which one need attach no importance. (On the other hand Wilson, 1922, stresses the fact that the intensification of exoriare is of great significance to the understanding of the case, since exorcism would be the best symbolic substitute for repressed thoughts about getting rid of the unwanted child by abortion. I gratefully accept this correction, which does not weaken the validity, of the analysis.) It seems possible, however, that the appearance of any kind of substitute memory is a constant sign - even though perhaps only a characteristic and revealing sign - of tendentious forgetfulness which is motivated by repression. It would seem that substitutive formation occurs even in cases not marked by the appearance of incorrect names as substitutes, and that in these it lies in the intensification of an element that is closely related to the forgotten name. For example, in the Signorelli case, so long as the painter’s name remained inaccessible, the visual memory that I had of the series of frescoes and of the self-portrait which is introduced into the corner of one of the pictures was ultra-clear - at any rate much more intense than visual memory-traces normally appear to me. In another case, also described in my 1898 paper, which concerned a visit which I was very reluctant to pay to an address in a strange town, I had forgotten the name of the street beyond all hope of recovery, but my memory of the house number, as if in derision, was ultra-clear, whereas normally I have the greatest difficulty in remembering numbers.

The chief importance however of the aliquis example lies in another of the ways in which it differs from the Signorelli specimen. In the latter, the reproducing of a name was disturbed by the after-effect of a train of thought begun just before and then broken off, whose content, however, had no clear connection with the new topic containing the name of Signorelli. Contiguity in time furnished the only relation between the repressed topic and the topic of the forgotten name; but this was enough to enable the two topics to find a connection in an external association.¹ Nothing on the other hand can be seen in the aliquis example of an independent repressed topic of this sort, which had engaged conscious thinking directly before and then left its echoes in a disturbance. The disturbance in reproduction occurred in this instance from the very nature of the topic hit upon in the quotation, since opposition unconsciously arose to the wishful idea expressed in it. The circumstances must be construed as follows. The speaker had been deploring the fact that the present generation of his people was deprived of its full rights; a new generation, he prophesied like Dido, would inflict vengeance on the oppressors. He had in this way expressed his wish for descendants. At this moment a contrary thought intruded. ‘Have you really so keen a wish for descendants? That is not so. How embarrassed you would be if you were to get news just now that you were to expect descendants from the quarter you know of. No: no descendants - however much we need them for vengeance.’ This contradiction then asserts itself by exactly the same means as in the Signorelli example - by setting up an external association between one of its ideational elements and an element in the wish that has been repudiated; this time, indeed, it does so in a most arbitrary fashion by making use of a roundabout associative path which has every appearance of artificiality. A second essential in which the present case agrees with the Signorelli instance is that the contradiction has its roots in repressed sources and derives from thoughts that would lead to a diversion of attention.

So much for the dissimilarity and the inner affinity between these two typical specimens of the forgetting of words. We have got to know a second mechanism of forgetting - the disturbance of a thought by an internal contradiction which arises from the repressed. Of the two processes this is, I think, the easier to understand; and we shall repeatedly come across it again in the course of this discussion.

¹ I am not entirely convinced of the absence of any internal connection between the two groups of thoughts in the Signorelli case. After all, if the repressed thoughts on the topic of death and sexual life are carefully followed up, one will be brought face to face with an idea that is by no means remote from the topic of the frescoes at Orvieto.

CHAPTER III THE FORGETTING OF NAMES AND SETS OF WORDS

Observations such as those mentioned above, of what happens when a portion of a set of words in a foreign tongue is forgotten, may make us curious to know whether the forgetting of sets of words in our own language demands an essentially different explanation. We are not usually surprised, it is true, if a formula learnt by heart, or a poem, can be reproduced only inaccurately some time later, with alterations and omissions. Since, however, this forgetting does not have a uniform effect on what has been learnt as a whole but seems on the contrary to break off isolated portions of it, it may be worth the trouble to submit to analytic investigation a few instances of such faulty reproduction.

A younger colleague of mine told me in conversation that he thought it likely that the forgetting of poetry in one’s own language could very well have motives similar to the forgetting of single elements from a set of words in a foreign tongue. At the same time he offered to be the subject of an experiment. I asked him on what poem he would like to make the test, and he chose ‘Die Braut von Korinth,’ a poem of which he was very fond and of which he thought he knew at least some stanzas by heart. At the beginning of his reproduction he was overcome by a rather remarkable uncertainty. ‘Does it run "Travelling from Corinth to Athens",’ he asked, ‘or "Travelling to Corinth from Athens"?’ I also had a moment’s hesitation, until I laughingly observed that the title of the poem ‘The Bride of Corinth’ left no doubt which way the young man was travelling. The reproduction of the first stanza then proceeded smoothly or at any rate without any striking falsifications. My colleague seemed to search for a while for the first line of the second stanza; he soon continued, and recited as follows:

Aber wird er auch willkommen scheinen,

Jetzt jeder Tag was Neues bringt?

Denn er ist noch Heide mit den Seinen

Und sie sind Christen und - getauft.¹

Before he reached this point I had already pricked up my ears in surprise; and after the end of the last line we were both in agreement that some distortion had occurred here. But as we did not succeed in correcting it, we hurried to the bookcase to get hold of Goethe’s poems, and found to our surprise that the second line of the stanza had a completely different wording, which had, as it were, been expelled from my colleague’s memory and replaced by something that did not seem to belong. The correct version runs:

Aber wird er auch willkommen scheinen,

Wenn er teuer nicht die Gunst erkauft?²

‘Getauft’ [‘baptized,’ two lines below] rhymes with ‘erkauft’, and it struck me as singular that the connected group of ‘heathen’, ‘Christian’ and ‘baptized’ should have given him so little help in restoring the text.

‘Can you explain,’ I asked my colleague, ‘how you have so completely expunged a line in a poem that you claim you know so well, and have you any notion from what context you can have taken the substitute?’

¹ [Literally: ‘But will he in fact seem welcome,

Now, when every day brings something new?

For he is still a heathen with his kindred

And they are Christians and baptized.’]

² [‘But will he in fact seem welcome if he does not buy the favour dearly?’] 4

He was in a position to provide an explanation, though obviously with some reluctance. ‘The line "Jetzt, wo jeder Tag was Neues bringt" seems familiar to me; I must have used the words a short time ago in referring to my practice - as you know, I am highly satisfied with its progress at the present time. But how does the sentence fit in here? I could think of a connection. The line "Wenn er teuer nicht die Gunst erkauft’ was obviously one which I found disagreeable. It is connected with a proposal of marriage which was turned down on the first occasion, and which, in view of the great improvement in my material position, I am now thinking of repeating. I cannot tell you any more, but if I am accepted now, it certainly cannot be enjoyable for me to reflect that some sort of calculation tipped the scale both then and now.’

This struck me as intelligible, even without my needing to know further particulars. But I continued with my questions: ‘How in any case have you and your private affairs become involved in the text of the "Bride of Corinth"? Is yours perhaps a case that involves differences in religious belief like those that play an important part in the poem?’

(Keimt ein Glaube neu,

Wird oft Lieb’ und Treu

Wie ein böses Unkraut ausgerauft.)¹

My guess was wrong; but it was curious to see how a single well-aimed question gave him a sudden perspicacity, so that he was able to bring me as an answer something of which he had certainly been unaware up to that time. He gave me a pained, even an indignant look, muttered a later passage from the poem:

Sieh sie an genau!

Morgen ist sie grau.²

and added shortly: ‘She is rather older than I.’ To avoid distressing him further I broke off the enquiry. The explanation struck me as sufficient. But it was certainly surprising that the attempt to trace a harmless failure of memory back to its cause should have had to come up against matters in the subject’s private life that were so remote and intimate, and that were cathected with such distressing affect.

¹ [‘When a faith is newly sprung up, love and troth are often torn out like an evil weed.’]

² [‘Look on her carefully. Tomorrow she will be grey.’] My colleague has incidentally made changes in this beautiful passage from the poem, somewhat altering both the wording and what the words refer to. The ghostly maiden says to her bridegroom:

‘Meine Kette hab’ ich dir gegeben;

Deine Locke nehm’ ich mit mir fort.

Sieh sie an genau!

Morgen bist du grau,

Und nur braun erscheinst du wieder dort.’

[‘My necklace I have given thee; your lock of hair I take away with me. Look on it carefully. Tomorrow you will be grey, and you will appear brown again only there.’ (The context shows that ‘sie’ (‘it’ or ‘her’) in the third line refers to the lock of hair. In a different context the line could mean: ‘Look on her carefully’.)]5 Here is another instance, given by Jung (1907, 64), of the forgetting of a set of words in a well-known poem. I shall quote the author’s own words.

‘A man was trying to recite the well-known poem that begins "Ein Fichtenbaum steht einsam..."¹ In the line beginning "Ihn schläfert"² he became hopelessly stuck; he had completely forgotten the words "mit weisser Decke ". Forgetting something in so familiar a verse struck me as surprising, and I therefore made him reproduce what occurred to him in connection with "mit weisser Decke". He had the following train of associations: "A white sheet makes one think of a shroud - a linen sheet to cover a dead body" - (a pause) - "now a close friend occurs to me - his brother died recently quite suddenly - he is supposed to have died of a heart attack - he was also very stout - my friend is also stout, and I have thought before now that it might also happen to him - probably he takes too little exercise - when I heard of his brother’s death I suddenly became anxious that it might also happen to me; for in our family we have in any case a tendency to fatness, and my grandfather, too, died of a heart attack; I have noticed that I too am over-stout and I have therefore begun a course of slimming recently."

‘Thus,’ comments Jung, ‘the man had, unconsciously, identified himself at once with the fir-tree wrapped in the white shroud.’

¹ [‘A fir-tree stands alone.’]

² [The relevant lines are:

Ihn schläfert; mit weisser Decke

Umhüllen ihn Eis und Schnee.

He slumbers; with a white sheet

Ice and snow cover him.]6 The following example of the forgetting of a set of words which I owe to my friend Sándor Ferenczi of Budapest, differs from the preceding ones in that it concerns a phrase coined by the subject himself and not a sentence taken from a writer. It may also present us with the somewhat unusual case in which the forgetting ranges itself on the side of our good sense, when the latter threatens to succumb to a momentary desire. The parapraxis thus comes to serve a useful function. When we have sobered down once more we appreciate the rightness of this internal current, which had previously only been able to express itself in a failure to function - a forgetting, a psychical impotence.

‘At a social gathering someone quoted "Tout comprendre c’est tout pardonner". I made the comment that the first part of the sentence was enough; "pardoning" was a piece of arrogance: it should be left to God and the priests. One of those present thought this observation very good, and this emboldened me to say - probably with the intention of securing the good opinion of the benevolent critic - that I had recently thought of something better. But when I tried to repeat it I found it had escaped me. I immediately withdrew from the company and wrote down the screen-associations. There first occurred to me the names of the friend and of the street in Budapest that witnessed the birth of the idea I was looking for; next came the name of another friend, Max, whom we usually call Maxi. This led me to the word "maxim" and to the recollection that what we were after was, like my original remark, a variation on a well-known maxim. Strangely enough my next thought was not a maxim but the following sentence: "God created man in His own image" and the same idea in reverse: "Man created God in his." Thereupon the memory of what I was looking for immediately appeared. On that occasion my friend had said to me in Andrássy Street: "Nothing human is foreign to me", whereupon I had answered, in allusion to the discoveries of psycho-analysis: "You ought to have gone further and have admitted that nothing animal is foreign to you."

‘But after I had at last remembered what I wanted, I was less than ever able to repeat it in the company I happened to be in. The young wife of the friend whom I had reminded of the animal nature of the unconscious was among those present, and I had to recognize that she was by no means prepared to receive such disagreeable truth. My forgetting spared me a number of unpleasant questions from her and a pointless discussion. This and nothing else must have been the motive for my "temporary amnesia".

‘It is interesting that a screen-association was provided by a sentence in which the Deity is debased to the status of a human invention, while in the missing sentence there is an allusion to the animal in man. Capitis diminutio is therefore the element common to both. The whole subject is clearly only the continuation of the train of thought about understanding and forgiving which the conversation had instigated.

‘The fact that what I was looking for in this case was so quick in presenting itself may perhaps be due also to my immediate withdrawal from the company where it was censored to an empty room.’

7 I have since undertaken numerous other analyses where forgetting or faulty reproduction of a set of words took place, and the consistent result of these investigations has inclined me to assume that the mechanism of forgetting demonstrated above in the instances of ‘aliquis’ and ‘The Bride of Corinth’ has an almost universal validity. It is generally a little awkward to give an account of such analyses since, like those just mentioned, they constantly lead to matters which are of an intimate sort and are distressing to the person analysed. I shall therefore not give any further examples. What is common to all these cases, irrespective of the material, is the fact that the forgotten or distorted matter is brought by some associative path into connection with an unconscious thought-content - a thought-content which is the source of the effect manifested in the form of forgetting.

I now return to the forgetting of names. So far we have not exhaustively considered either the case-material or the motives behind it. As this is exactly the kind of parapraxis that I can from time to time observe abundantly in myself, I am at no loss for examples. The mild attacks of migraine from which I still suffer usually announce themselves hours in advance by my forgetting names, and at the height of these attacks, during which I am not forced to abandon my work, it frequently happens that all proper names go out of my head. Now it is precisely cases like mine which could furnish the grounds for an objection on principle to our analytic efforts. Should it not necessarily be concluded from such observations that the cause of forgetfulness, and in particular of the forgetting of names, lies in circulatory and general functional disturbances of the cerebrum, and should we not therefore spare ourselves the search for psychological explanations of these phenomena? Not at all, in my view; that would be to confuse the mechanism of a process, which is of the same kind in all cases, with the factors favouring the process, which are variable and not necessarily essential. Instead of a discussion, however, I shall bring forward an analogy to deal with the objection.

Let us suppose that I have been imprudent enough to go for a walk at night in a deserted quarter of the city, and have been attacked and robbed of my watch and purse. I report the matter at the nearest police station in the following words: ‘I was in such and such a street, and there loneliness and darkness took away my watch and purse.’ Although I should not have said anything in this statement that was not true, the wording of my report would put me in danger of being thought not quite right in the head. The state of affairs could only be described correctly by saying that favoured by the loneliness of the place and under the shield of darkness unknown malefactors robbed me of my valuables. Now the state of affairs in the forgetting of names need not be any different; favoured by tiredness, circulatory disturbances and intoxication, an unknown psychical force robs me of my access to the proper names belonging to my memory - a force which can in other cases bring about the same failure of memory at a time of perfect health and unimpaired efficiency.

If I analyse the cases of the forgetting of names that I observe in myself, I almost always find that the name which is withheld from me is related to a topic of close personal importance to me, and one capable of evoking in me strong and often distressing affects. In accordance with the convenient and commendable practice of the Zurich school (Bleuler, Jung, Riklin) I can also formulate this fact as follows: The lost name has touched on a ‘personal complex’ in me. The relation of the name to myself is one that I should not have expected and is usually arrived at through superficial associations (such as verbal ambiguity or similarity in sound); it can be characterized quite generally as an oblique relation. Its nature will best be illustrated by some simple examples.

(1) A patient asked me to recommend him a health resort on the Riviera. I knew of such a resort quite close to Genoa, and I also remembered the name of a German colleague of mine who practised there; but the name of the resort itself escaped me, well as I thought I knew that too. There was nothing left for me but to ask the patient to wait while I hurriedly consulted the ladies of my family. ‘What on earth is the name of the place near Genoa where Dr. N. has his little sanatorium, the one in which so and so was under treatment for so long?’ ‘Of course you of all people would be the one to forget the name. The place is called Nervi.’ I must admit I have plenty to do with nerves.

(2) Another patient was talking about a neighbouring summer resort, and declared that besides its two well-known inns there was a third one there with which a certain memory of his was connected; he would tell me the name in a moment. I disputed the existence of this third inn, and appealed to the fact that I had spent seven summers at the place and must therefore know it better than he did. But under the provocation of my contradiction he had already got hold of the name. The inn was called the ‘Hochwartner’. At this point I was obliged to give in and I even had to confess that I had lived for seven whole summers close by the inn whose existence I had denied. Why in this instance should I have forgotten both the name and the thing? I believe it was because the name was only too similar in sound to that of a colleague, a specialist in Vienna and, once again, had touched upon the ‘professional complex’ in me.

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