Autobiographical note 55 страница

‘At this point the stupid student’s name suddenly came back to him: "Lindeman". Since he had already recalled that the name ended in "man", it was "Linde " that had remained repressed for longer. When he has asked what came to his mind when he thought of "Linde", he at first said "Absolutely nothing." When I urged that something connected with this word would no doubt occur to him, he remarked with an upward gaze and a gesture of his hand in the air: "A linden - well, a linden is a beautiful tree." Nothing further would come to his mind. No one spoke and everyone went on with their reading or other activity, till a few moments later Z. quoted the following passage in a dreamy voice:

Steht er mit festen

Gefügigen Knochen

Auf der erde,

So reicht er nicht auf

Nur mit der Linde

Oder der Rebe

Sich zu vergleichen.¹

‘I gave a cry of triumph. "There’s our Erdmann," I said. "The man who ‘stands on the earth’, that is to say the earthman or Erdmann, cannot reach up far enough to bear comparison with the linden (Lindeman) or the vine (wine merchant). In other words, our Lindeman, the stupid student, who later became a wine merchant, was certainly an ass, but our Erdmann is a much greater ass than that, and cannot even be compared with this Lindeman." - Such derisive or abusive language in the unconscious is quite usual; so it seemed to me that the chief cause of the name being forgotten had probably now been found.

¹ [Literally: ‘If he stands with firm, pliant bones on the earth, he does not reach up far enough to bear comparison even with the linden or the vine.’]2

‘I now asked what the poem was from which the lines were quoted. Z. said it was a poem by Goethe, which he thought began:

Edel sei der Mensch

Hilfreich und gut!¹

and which later contained the lines:

Und hebt er sich aufwärts,

So spielen mit ihm die Winde.²

‘The next day I looked up this poem of Goethe’s, and it turned out that the case was even prettier (though also more complex) than it had seemed at first.

(a) ‘The first lines that he quoted run (cf. above):

Steht er mit festen

Markigen Knochen...³

‘"Gefügige Knochen" would be a rather peculiar combination; but I shall not go further into this point.

(b) ‘The next lines of this stanza run (cf. above):

... Auf der wohlgegründeten

Dauernden Erde,

Reicht er nicht auf,

Nur mit der Eiche

Oder der Rebe

Sich zu vergleichen.4

So in the whole poem there is no mention of a linden. The change of "oak" into "linden" had taken place (in his unconscious) only in order to make the play on the words "earth-linden-vine" possible.

(c) ‘This poem is called "Grenzen der Menschheit" and compares the omnipotence of the gods with man’s puny strength. But the poem beginning:

Edel sei der Mensch,

Hilfreich und gut!

is a different one, appearing some pages further on. Its title is "Das Göttliche [The Divine Nature]", and it too contains thoughts about gods and men. As the matter was not gone into further I can at the most offer an opinion that thoughts about life and death, the temporal and the eternal, and the subject’s own frail life and future death also played a part in bringing about the occurrence of this case.’

¹ [‘Let Man be noble, helpful and good.’]

² [‘And if he raises himself upwards the winds play with him.’]

³ [‘If he stands with firm, sturdy bones...’]

4 [‘... on the firmly-based, enduring earth, he does not reach up far enough to bear comparison even with the oak or the vine.’]3

In some of these examples all the subtleties of psycho-analytic technique have to be called upon in order to explain the forgetting of a name. Anyone who wishes to learn more about such work may be referred to a paper by Ernest Jones of London (1911a). It has been translated into German.

(18) Ferenczi has observed that forgetting a name may also make its appearance as a hysterical symptom. In this situation it displays a very different mechanism from that of a parapraxis. The nature of this distinction may be seen from what he says:

‘At the moment I am treating a patient, a spinster getting on in years, in whose mind the most familiar and best-known proper names fail to appear, although her memory is otherwise good. In the course of the analysis it has become clear that this symptom is intended by her as a documentation of her ignorance. This demonstrative parade of her ignorance is, however, really a reproach against her parents, who did not let her have any higher education. Her tormenting obsession to clean things ("housewife’s psychosis") also comes in part from the same source. What she means by this is something like: "You have turned me into a housemaid."'

4 I could cite further instances of the forgetting of names and explore the matter much more fully if I were not reluctant to anticipate at this first stage almost all the points of view that will come up for discussion under later topics. But I may perhaps allow myself to summarize in a few sentences the conclusions to be drawn from the analyses that have been reported here:

The mechanism of names being forgotten (or, to be more accurate, the mechanism of names escaping the memory, of being temporarily forgotten) consists in the interference with the intended reproduction of the name by an alien train of thought which is not at the time conscious. Between the name interfered with and the interfering complex either a connection exists from the outset, or else such a connection has established itself, often in ways that appear artificial, viâ superficial (external) associations.

Among the interfering complexes those of personal reference (i.e. the personal, family and professional complexes) prove to have the greatest effect.

A name which has more than one meaning and consequently belongs to more than one group of thoughts (complexes) is frequently interfered with in its connection with one train of thought owing to its participation in another, stronger complex.

Among the motives for these interferences the purpose of avoiding arousing unpleasure by remembering is conspicuous.

In general two main types of name-forgetting may be distinguished: those cases where the name itself touches on something unpleasant, and those where it is brought into connection with another name which has that effect. Thus names can have their reproduction interfered with on their own account, or because of their closer or remoter associative relations.

A survey of these general propositions shows us why the temporary forgetting of names is the most frequently to be observed of all our parapraxes.

(19) We are however far from having outlined all the characteristics of this phenomenon. There is a further point I wish to make. The forgetting of names is highly contagious. In a conversation between two people it is often sufficient for one of them merely to mention that he has forgotten such and such a name, and the result will be that it slips the other’s mind as well. In cases like these, however, where the forgetting is induced, the forgotten name returns more readily. - This ‘collective’ forgetting, strictly speaking a phenomenon of group psychology, his not yet been made the subject of psycho-analytic study. In a single instance (but an especially, neat one) Reik (1920) has been able to offer a good explanation of this curious phenomenon.

‘In a small gathering of university people, which included two women students of philosophy, there was a discussion on the numerous questions raised in the fields of religious studies and the history of civilization by the origin of Christianity. One of the young ladies who took part in the conversation recalled that in an English novel she had read recently she had found an interesting picture of the many religious currents by which that age had been stirred. She added that the novel portrayed the whole of Christ’s life from his birth up to his death; but the name of the work refused to come to her mind. (The visual memory she had of the cover of the book and the appearance of the lettering in the title was excessively clear.) Three of the men who were present also said that they knew the novel, and they remarked that - strange to relate - they too were unable to produce the name.’

The young lady was the only one to subject herself to analysis in order to discover why this name was forgotten. The title of the book was Ben Hur, by Lewis Wallace. The ideas that had occurred to her as substitutes for it had been: ‘Ecce homo’ - ‘Homo sum’ - ‘Quo vadis?’ The girl herself realized that she had forgotten the name ‘because it contains an expression that I (like any other girl) do not care to use - especially in the company of young men’.¹ In the light of the very interesting analysis, this explanation took on a profounder significance. In the context already alluded to, the translation of ‘homo’ (man) also has a disreputable meaning. Reik’s conclusion is as follows: ‘The young lady treated the word as though by uttering the questionable title in front of young men she would have been acknowledging the wishes which she had rejected as out of keeping with her character and distressing to her. More briefly: saying the words "Ben Hur"² was unconsciously equated by her with a sexual offer, and her forgetting accordingly, corresponded to the fending-off of an unconscious temptation of that kind. We have reason for supposing that similarly unconscious processes had determined the young men’s forgetting. Their unconscious understood the real significance of the girl’s forgetting and, so to speak, interpreted it. The men’s forgetting shows respect for this modest behaviour.... It is as if the girl who was talking with them had by her sudden lapse of memory given a clear sign which the men had unconsciously understood well enough.’

¹ [‘Hure’ is the German for ‘whore’.]

² [The German words ‘bin Hure’ (‘I am a whore’) sound not unlike ‘Ben Hur’.]6 A type of continued forgetting of names occurs also, in which whole chains of names are withdrawn from the memory. If in the attempt to recover a lost name other names closely connected with it are pursued, it frequently happens that these new names, which were to serve as stepping stones to the other one, disappear in just the same way. The forgetting thus jumps from one name to another, as if to prove the existence of an obstacle which cannot easily be surmounted.7

CHAPTER IV CHILDHOOD MEMORIES AND SCREEN MEMORIES

In a second paper, which was published in the Monatsschrift für Psychiatrie und Neurologie (1899a), I was in a position to demonstrate at an unexpected point the tendentious nature of the workings of our memory. I started from the striking fact that a person’s earliest childhood memories seem frequently to have preserved what is indifferent and unimportant, whereas (frequently, though certainly not universally) no trace is found in an adult’s memory of impressions dating from that time which are important, impressive and rich in affect. It might be assumed from this - since it is known that the memory makes a selection from among the impressions offered to it - that in childhood the selection is conducted on entirely different principles from those which apply at the time of intellectual maturity. Careful investigation nevertheless shows that such an assumption is unnecessary. The indifferent memories of childhood owe their existence to a process of displacement: they are substitutes, in reproduction, for other impressions which are really significant. The memory of these significant impressions can be developed out of the indifferent ones by means of psychical analysis, but a resistance prevents them from being directly reproduced. As the indifferent memories owe their preservation not to their own content but to an associative relation between their content and another which is repressed, they have some claim to be called ‘screen memories’, the name by which I have described them.

In the paper which I have mentioned I only touched on and in no way exhausted the multiplicity of the relations and meanings of screen memories. In the example quoted there, of which I gave a detailed analysis, I laid special stress on the peculiarity of the chronological relation between the screen memory and the content which is screened off by it. In that example the content of the screen memory belonged to one of the earliest years of childhood, while the mental experiences which were replaced by it in the memory and which had remained almost unconscious occurred in the subject’s later life, I described this sort of displacement as a retroactive or retrogressive one. The opposite relation is found perhaps still more frequently: an indifferent impression of recent date establishes itself in the memory as a screen memory, although it owes that privilege merely to its connection with an earlier experience which resistances prevent from being reproduced directly. These would be screen memories that have pushed ahead or been displaced forward. Here the essential thing with which the memory is occupied precedes the screen memory in time. Finally, we find yet a third possibility, in which the screen memory is connected with the impression that it screens not only by its content but also by contiguity in time: these are contemporary or contiguous screen memories.

How large a part of our store of memory falls into the category of screen memories, and what role they play in various neurotic thought-processes, are problems whose significance I neither discussed in my earlier paper nor shall enter into here. My only concern is to emphasize the similarity between the forgetting of proper names accompanied by paramnesia, and the formation of screen memories.9

At first sight the differences between the two phenomena are much more striking than any analogies that may be found. The former phenomenon relates to proper names; the latter to whole impressions, things experienced either in reality or in thought. In the former we have a manifest failure of the function of memory; in the latter, an act of memory that strikes us as strange. In the former it is a case of momentary disturbance - for the name that has just been forgotten may have been produced correctly a hundred times before, and from tomorrow may be produced once again; in the latter it is a case of a permanent and constant memory, since the indifferent childhood memories seem to have the power of staying with us through a large part of our life. The problem in these two cases appears to be quite differently focused. In the former it is the forgetting, in the latter the retention which arouses our scientific curiosity. Closer study reveals that in spite of the dissimilarity between the two phenomena in regard to their psychical material and their duration, the points at which they agree far outbalance it. Both have to do with mistakes in remembering: what the memory reproduces is not what it should correctly have reproduced, but something else as a substitute. In the case of the forgetting of names the act of memory occurs, though in the form of substitute names; the case of the formation of screen memories has as its basis a forgetting of other more important impressions. In both instances an intellectual feeling gives us information of interference by some disturbing factor; but it takes two different forms. With the forgetting of names we know that the substitute names are false: with screen memories we are surprised that we possess them at all. If, now, psychological analysis establishes that the substitutive formation has come about in the same way in both cases, by means of displacement along a superficial association, it is precisely the dissimilarities between the two phenomena, in regard to their material, their duration and their focal point, which serve to heighten our expectation that we have discovered something of importance and of general validity. This general principle would assert that when the reproducing function fails or goes astray, the occurrence points, far more frequently than we suspect, to interference by a tendentious factor - that is, by a purpose which favours one memory while striving to work against another.

0 The subject of childhood memories seems to me to be of such significance and interest that I should like to devote to it a few additional observations which go beyond the views that I have so far expressed.

How far back into childhood do our memories extend? I am familiar with a few investigations into this question, such as those by V. and C. Henri (1897) and by Potwin (1901). They show that great individual differences exist among the persons examined: a few assign their earliest memories to the sixth month of life, while others remember nothing of their lives up to the end of their sixth or even eighth year. But with what are these differences in retaining childhood memories connected, and what significance attaches to them? Clearly it is not sufficient to assemble the material for answering these points by means of a questionnaire; what is required in addition is that it should be worked over - a process in which the person supplying the information must participate.

In my opinion we take the fact of infantile amnesia - the loss, that is, of the memories of the first years of our life - much too easily; and we fail to look upon it as a strange riddle. We forget how high are the intellectual achievements and how complicated the emotional impulses of which a child of some four years is capable, and we ought to be positively astonished that the memory of later years has as a rule preserved so little of these mental processes, especially as we have every reason to suppose that these same forgotten childhood achievements have not, as might be thought, slipped away without leaving their mark on the subject’s development, but have exercised a determining influence for the whole of his later life. And in spite of this unique efficacy they have been forgotten! This suggests that there are conditions for remembering (in the sense of conscious reproducing) of a quite special kind, which have evaded recognition by us up to now. It may very well be that the forgetting of childhood can supply us with the key to the understanding of those amnesias which lie, according to our more recent discoveries, at the basis of the formation of all neurotic symptoms.

Of the childhood memories that have been retained a few strike us as perfectly understandable, while others seem odd or unintelligible. It is not difficult to correct certain errors regarding both sorts. If the memories that a person has retained are subjected to an analytic enquiry, it is easy to establish that there is no guarantee of their accuracy. Some of the mnemic images are certainly falsified, incomplete or displaced in time and place. Any such statement by the subjects of the enquiry as that their first recollection comes from about their second year is clearly not to be trusted. Moreover, motives can soon be discovered which make the distortion and displacement of the experience intelligible, but which show at the same time that these mistakes in recollection cannot be caused simply by a treacherous memory. Strong forces from later life have been at work on the capacity of childhood experiences for being remembered - probably the same forces which are responsible for our having become so far removed in general from understanding our years of childhood.

Remembering in adults, as is well known, makes use of a variety of psychical material. Some people remember in visual images; their memories have a visual character. Other people can scarcely reproduce in their memory even the scantiest outlines of what they have experienced. Following Charcot’s proposal, such people are called auditifs and moteurs in contrast to the visuels. In dreams these distinctions disappear: we all dream predominantly in visual images. But this development is similarly reversed in the case of childhood memories: they are plastically visual even in people whose later function of memory has to do without any visual element. Visual memory accordingly preserves the type of infantile memory. In my own case the earliest childhood memories are the only ones of a visual character: they are regular scenes worked out in plastic form, comparable only to representations on the stage. In these scenes of childhood, whether in fact they prove to be true or falsified, what one sees invariably includes oneself as a child, with a child’s shape and clothes. This circumstance must cause surprise: in their recollections of later experiences adult visuels no longer see themselves.¹ Furthermore it contradicts all that we have learnt to suppose that in his experiences a child’s attention is directed to himself instead of exclusively to impressions from outside. One is thus forced by various considerations to suspect that in the so-called earliest childhood memories we possess not the genuine memory-trace but a later revision of it, a revision which may have been subjected to the influences of a variety of later psychical forces. Thus the ‘childhood memories’ of individuals come in general to acquire the significance of ‘screen memories’ and in doing so offer a remarkable analogy with the childhood memories that a nation preserves in its store of legends and myths.

¹ This statement is based on a number of enquiries I have made.2

Anyone who has investigated a number of people psychologically by the method of psycho-analysis will in the course of his work have collected numerous examples of every kind of screen memory. However, the reporting of these examples is made extraordinarily difficult owing to the nature of the relations, which I have just discussed, between childhood memories and later life. In order to show that a childhood memory is to be regarded as a screen memory, it would often be necessary to present the complete life history of the person in question. Only rarely is it possible to lift a single screen memory out of its context in order to give an account of it, as in the following good example.

A man of twenty-four has preserved the following picture from his fifth year. He is sitting in the garden of a summer villa, on a small chair beside his aunt, who is trying to teach him the letters of the alphabet. He is in difficulties over the difference between m and n and he asks his aunt to tell him how to know one from the other. His aunt points out to him that the m has a whole piece more than the n - the third stroke. There appeared to be no reason for challenging the trustworthiness of this childhood memory; it had, however, only acquired its meaning at a later date, when it showed itself suited to represent symbolically another of the boy’s curiosities. For just as at that time he wanted to know the difference between m and n, so later he was anxious to find out the difference between boys and girls, and would have been very willing for this particular aunt to be the one to teach him. He also discovered then that the difference was a similar one - that a boy, too, has a whole piece more than a girl; and at the time when he acquired this piece of knowledge he called up the recollection of the parallel curiosity of his childhood.

Here is another example, from the later years of childhood. A man who is severely inhibited in his erotic life, and who is now over forty, is the eldest of nine children. At the time that the youngest of his brothers and sisters was born he was fifteen, yet he maintains firmly and obstinately that he had never noticed any of his mother’s pregnancies. Under pressure from my scepticism a memory presented itself to him: once at the age of eleven or twelve he had seen his mother hurriedly unfasten her skirt in front of the mirror. He now added of his own accord that she had come in from the street and had been overcome by unexpected labour pains. The unfastening of the skirt was a screen memory for the confinement. We shall come across the use of ‘verbal bridges’ of this kind in further cases.

I should like now to give a single example of the way in which a childhood memory, which previously appeared to have no meaning, can acquire one as a result of being worked over by analysis. When I began in my forty-third year to direct my interest to what was left of my memory of my own childhood there came to my mind a scene which had for a long while back (from the remotest past, as it seemed to me) come into consciousness from time to time, and which I had good evidence for assigning to a date before the end of my third year. I saw myself standing in front of a cupboard demanding something and screaming, while my half-brother, my senior by twenty years, held it open. Then suddenly my mother, looking beautiful and slim, walked into the room, as if she had come in from the street. These were the words in which I described the scene, of which I had a plastic picture, but I did not know what more I could make of it. Whether my brother wanted to open or shut the cupboard - in my first translation of the picture I called it a ‘wardrobe’ - why I was crying, and what the arrival of my mother had to do with it all this was obscure to me. The explanation I was tempted to give myself was that what was in question was a memory of being teased by my elder brother and of my mother putting a stop to it. Such misunderstandings of a childhood scene which is preserved in the memory are by no means rare: a situation is recalled, but it is not clear what its central point is, and one does not know on which of its elements the psychical accent is to be placed. Analytic effort led me to take a quite unexpected view of the picture. I had missed my mother, and had come to suspect that she was shut up in this wardrobe or cupboard; and it was for that reason that I was demanding that my brother should open the cupboard. When he did what I asked and I had made certain that my mother was not in the cupboard, I began to scream. This is the moment that my memory has held fast; and it was followed at once by the appearance of my mother, which allayed my anxiety or longing. But how did the child get the idea of looking for his absent mother in the cupboard? Dreams which I had at the same time contained obscure allusions to a nurse of whom I had other recollections, such as, for example, that she used to insist on my dutifully handing over to her the small coins I received as presents - a detail which can itself claim to have the value of a screen memory for later experiences. I accordingly resolved that this time I would make the problem of interpretation easier for myself and would ask my mother, who was by then grown old, about the nurse. I learned a variety of details, among them that this clever but dishonest person had carried out considerable thefts in the house during my mother’s confinement and had been taken to court on a charge preferred by my half-brother. This information threw a flood of light on the childhood scene, and so enabled me to understand it. The sudden disappearance of the nurse had not been a matter of indifference to me: the reason why I had turned in particular to this brother, and had asked him where she was, was probably because I had noticed that he played a part in her disappearance; and he had answered in the elusive and punning fashion that was characteristic of him: ‘She’s "boxed up".’ At the time, I understood this answer in a child’s way, but I stopped asking any more questions as there was nothing more to learn. When my mother left me a short while later, I suspected that my naughty brother had done the same thing to her that he had done to the nurse and I forced him to open the cupboard for me. I now understand, too, why in the translation of this visual childhood scene my mother’s slimness was emphasized: it must have struck me as having just been restored to her. I am two and a half years older than the sister who was born at that time, and when I was three years old my half-brother and I ceased living in the same place.¹

¹ [Footnote added 1924:] Anyone who is interested in the mental life of these years of childhood will find it easy to guess the deeper determinant of the demand made on the big brother. The child of not yet three had understood that the little sister who had recently arrived had grown inside his mother. He was very far from approving of this addition to the family, and was full of mistrust and anxiety that his mother’s inside might conceal still more children. The wardrobe or cupboard was a symbol for him of his mother’s inside. So he insisted on looking into this cupboard, and turned for this to his big brother, who (as is clear from other material) had taken his father’s place as the child’s rival. Besides the well-founded suspicion that this brother had had the lost nurse ‘boxed up’, there was a further suspicion against him - namely that he had in some way introduced the recently born baby into his mother’s inside. The affect of disappointment when the cupboard was found to be empty derived, therefore, from the superficial motivation for the child’s demand. As regards the deeper trend of thought, the affect was in the wrong place. On the other hand, his great satisfaction over his mother’s slimness on her return can only be fully understood in the light of this deeper layer.

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