Autobiographical note 62 страница

With the aim of making a small contribution to our knowledge of the determinants of forgetting I make it my practice to submit to a psychological analysis those cases in which I myself forget something. I am as a rule only concerned with a certain group of these cases, namely those in which the forgetting surprises me because I should have expected to know the thing in question. I may add that I am not in general inclined to forget things (things I have experienced, that is, not things I have learned!), and that for a short period of my youth some unusual feats of memory were not beyond me. When I was a schoolboy I took it as a matter of course that I could repeat by heart the page I had been reading; and shortly before I entered the University I could write down almost verbatim popular Iectures on scientific subjects directly after hearing them. In the period of tension before my final medical examination I must have made use once more of what remained of this faculty, for in some subjects I gave the examiners, as though it were automatically, answers which faithfully followed the words of the textbook that I had skimmed through only once in the greatest haste.

Since then the command that I have over my store of memories has steadily deteriorated; yet right up to the most recent times I have convinced myself over and over again that with the aid of a certain device I can remember far more than I would otherwise have believed possible. When, for instance, a patient in my consulting hour claims that I have seen him before and I can recall neither the fact nor the time, I help myself by guessing: that is to say, I quickly think of a number of years, counting back from the present. In cases where records or more definite information from the patient enable me to check what has come to my mind, they show that I have rarely been more than half a year out in ten.¹ I have a similar experience when I meet a distant acquaintance and out of politeness enquire after his small children. If he describes their progress I try to think at random of the child’s present age. I afterwards check my estimate by what the father tells me; and at the most I am wrong by a month, or with older children by three months, although I am unable to say on what my estimate was based. I have latterly grown so bold that I always produce my estimate spontaneously without running any risk of offending the father by exposing my ignorance about his offspring. In this way I extend my conscious memory by invoking my unconscious memory, which is in any case far more extensive.

¹ In the course of the subsequent consultation the details of the previous visit usually emerge into my consciousness.0

I shall accordingly cite some striking examples of forgetting: most of which I observed in myself. I distinguish the forgetting of impressions and experiences - ie., of knowledge - from the forgetting of intentions - i.e., from omission to do things. I can state in advance the invariable result of the entire series of observations: in every case the forgetting turned out to be based on a motive of unpleasure.

(A) THE FORGETTING OF IMPRESSIONS AND KNOWLEDGE

(1) One summer holiday my wife made me greatly annoyed though the cause was innocent enough. We were sitting at table d’hôte opposite a gentleman from Vienna whom I knew and who no doubt remembered me too. However, I had reasons of my own for not renewing the acquaintance. My wife, who had heard no more than his distinguished name, revealed too plainly that she was listening to his conversation with his neighbours, for from time to time she turned to me with questions that took up the thread of their discussion. I became impatient and finally irritated. Some weeks later I was complaining to a relative about this behaviour on my wife’s part but was unable to recall a single word of the gentleman’s conversation. As I am normally rather apt to harbour grievances and can forget no detail of an incident that has annoyed me, my amnesia in the present case was probably motivated by consideration for my wife. A short time ago I had a similar experience. I wished to have a good laugh with an intimate friend over a remark made by my wife only a few hours before, but was prevented from doing so by the singular fact that I had utterly forgotten what she had said. I had first to ask my wife to remind me what it was. It is easy to understand my forgetfulness here as being analogous to the typical disturbance of judgement to which we are subject where those nearest to us are concerned.

(2) I had undertaken to get a lady who was a stranger to Vienna a small strong-box for her documents and money. When I offered my services I had in my mind’s eye an unusually vivid picture of a shop-window in the Inner Town in which I was sure I had seen boxes of the kind. I could not, it was true, recall the name of the street, but I felt sure that I would find the shop if I walked through the town, since my memory told me I had passed it on countless occasions. To my chagrin I had no success in finding the shop-window with the strong-boxes, though I walked all over the Inner Town in every direction. I decided that the only course left was to look up the firms of safe-manufacturers in a trades directory, so as to be able to identify the shop on a second walk round the town. Such extreme measures, however, did not prove necessary; among the addresses given in the directory was one which I immediately recognized as the one I had forgotten. It was true that I had passed the shop-window innumerable times - every time, in fact, that I had visited the M. family, who have lived for many years in the same building. Our intimate friendship later gave place to a total estrangement; after that, I fell into the habit - the reasons for which I never considered - of also avoiding the neighbourhood and the house. On my walk through the town in search of the shop-window with the strong-boxes I had passed through every street in the district but this one, which I had avoided as if it were forbidden territory. The motive of unpleasure responsible in the present case for my failure to find my way is easy to recognize. The mechanism of forgetting, however, is not so simple here as in the preceding example. My aversion naturally applied not to the safe-manufacturer but to another person, whom I did not want to think about; and from this latter person it was then transferred to this occasion where it produced the forgetting. The case of ‘Burckhard’ was very similar; my grudge against one person of this name induced me to make a slip in writing the same name when it referred to someone else. The part there played by identity of name in establishing a connection between two essentially different groups of thoughts was able to be replaced in the example of the shop-window by spatial contiguity, inseparable proximity. This latter case was, incidentally, more firmly knit; there was a second connection there, one involving its subject-matter, for money played a part among the reasons for my estrangement from the family living in the building.

(3) I was requested by the firm of B. and R. to pay a professional visit to one of their staff. On my way there I was possessed by the thought that I must repeatedly have been in the building where their firm had its premises. It was as if I had noticed their plate on a lower storey while I was paying a professional visit on a higher one. I could however recall neither what house it was nor whom I had visited there. Although the whole matter was of no importance or consequence, I nevertheless turned my mind to it and finally discovered in my usual roundabout way, by collecting the thoughts that occurred to me in connection with it, that the premises of the firm of B. and R. were on the floor below the Pension Fischer, where I have frequently visited patients. At the same time I also recalled the building that housed the offices and the pension. It was still a puzzle to me what motive was at work in this forgetting. I found nothing offensive to my memory in the firm itself or in the Pension Fischer or the patients who lived there. Moreover, I suspected that nothing very distressing could be involved; otherwise I would hardly have succeeded in recovering in a roundabout way what I had forgotten, without resorting to external assistance as I had in the previous example. It finally occurred to me that while I was actually on my way to this new patient, a gentleman whom I had difficulty in recognizing had greeted me in the street. I had seen this man some months before in an apparently grave condition and had passed sentence on him with a diagnosis of progressive paralysis; but later I heard he had recovered, so that my judgement must have been wrong. Unless, that is, there had been a remission of the type that is also found in dementia paralytica - in which case my diagnosis would be justified after all! The influence that made me forget where the offices of B. and R. were came from my meeting with this person, and my interest in solving the problem of what I had forgotten was transferred to it from this case of disputed diagnosis. But the associative link (for there was only a slender internal connection - the man who recovered contrary to expectation was also an official in a large firm which used to recommend patients to me) was provided by an identity of names. The physician with whom I had seen the supposed case of paralysis was also called Fischer, like the pension which was in the building and which I had forgotten.

(4) Mislaying something is really the same as forgetting where it has been put. Like most people who are occupied with writing and books I know my way about on my writing-table and can lay my hands straight away on what I want. What appears to other people as disorder is for me order with a history behind it. Why, then, did I recently mislay a book-catalogue, which had been sent to me, so that it was impossible to find it? I had in fact intended to order a book, Über die Sprache, which was advertised in it, since it was by an author whose witty and lively style I like and whose insight in psychology and knowledge of the history of civilization I have learnt to value. I believe that this is precisely why I mislaid the catalogue. For it is my habit to lend books by this author to my acquaintances for their enlightenment, and a few days previously one of them had remarked as he returned a copy: ‘His style reminds me very much of your own, and his way of thinking, too, is the same as yours.’ The speaker did not know what he was touching on by that remark. Years before, when I was younger and in greater need of outside contacts, an elder colleague to whom I had praised the writings of a well-known medical author had made almost the same comment: ‘It’s just your style and your manner.’ Prompted by this remark I had written a letter to the author seeking closer relations with him, but had been put in my place by a chilly answer. Perhaps still earlier discouraging experiences as well lie concealed behind this one, for I never found the mislaid catalogue and was in fact deterred by this omen from ordering the advertised book, although the disappearance of the catalogue formed no real hindrance since I could remember the names of both book and author.

(5) Another case of mislaying merits our interest on account of the conditions under which the mislaid object was rediscovered. A youngish man told me the following story: ‘Some years ago there were misunderstandings between me and my wife. I found her too cold, and although I willingly recognized her excellent qualities we lived together without any tender feelings. One day, returning from a walk, she gave me a book which she had bought because she thought it would interest me. I thanked her for this mark of ‘attention’, promised to read the book and put it on one side. After that I could never find it again. Months passed by, in which time I occasionally remembered the lost book and made vain attempts to find it. About six months later my dear mother, who was not living with us, fell ill. My wife left home to nurse her mother-in-law. The patient’s condition became serious and gave my wife an opportunity of showing the best side of herself. One evening I returned home full of enthusiasm and gratitude for what my wife had accomplished. I walked up to my desk, and without any definite intention but with a kind of somnambulistic certainty opened one of the drawers. On the very top I found the long lost book I had mislaid.’

(6)) A case of mislaying which shares the last characteristic of the above example - namely, the remarkable sureness shown in finding the object again once the motive for its being mislaid had expired - is reported by Stärcke (1916):

‘A girl had spoilt a piece of material in cutting it out to make a collar; so the dressmaker had to come and do her best to put it right. When she had arrived and the girl wanted to fetch the badly-cut collar, she went to the drawer where she thought she had put it; but she could not find it. She turned the contents upside down without discovering it. Sitting down in exasperation she asked herself why it had suddenly disappeared and whether there was not some reason why she did not want to find it. She came to the conclusion that of course she felt ashamed in front of the dressmaker for having bungled something so simple as a collar. After this reflection she stood up, went to another cupboard and was able to lay her hands straight away on the badly-cut collar.’

(7) The following example of ‘mislaying’ is of a type that has become familiar to every psycho-analyst. I may remark that the patient responsible for it found the solution himself:

‘A patient, whose psycho-analytic treatment was interrupted by the summer holidays at a time when he was in a state of resistance and felt unwell, put his bunch of keys in its usual place - or so he thought - when he undressed for the night. Then he remembered that there were a few more things that he needed for his journey next day - the last day of treatment and the date on which his fee was due - and he went to get them out of the writing-desk, in which he had also put his money. But the keys had disappeared. He began to make a systematic but increasingly agitated search of his small flat - with no success. Since he recognized the "mislaying" of the keys as a symptomatic act - that is, as something he had done intentionally - he woke his servant in order to continue the search with the aid of an "unprejudiced" person. After another hour he gave it up and was afraid he had lost the keys. Next morning he ordered new keys from the makers of the desk, and they were hastily made for him. Two friends, who had come home with him in the same cab, thought they remembered hearing something fall with a clink on the ground as he stepped out of the cab. He was convinced that his keys had fallen from his pocket. That evening the servant triumphantly presented him with the keys. They had been found lying between a thick book and a thin pamphlet (a work by one of my pupils) which he wanted to take away to read on his holiday. They were so cleverly placed that no one would have suspected they were there. He found himself afterwards unable to replace them so that they were equally invisible. The unconscious dexterity with which an object is mislaid on account of hidden but powerful motives is very reminiscent of "somnambulistic certainty". The motive, as one would expect, was ill-temper at the treatment being interrupted and secret rage at having to pay a high fee when he was feeling so unwell.’

(8) ‘A man’, Brill relates, ‘was urged by his wife to attend a social function in which he really took no interest... Yielding to his wife’s entreaties, he began to take his dress-suit from the trunk when he suddenly thought of shaving. After accomplishing this he returned to the trunk and found it locked. Despite a long, earnest search the key could not be discovered. No locksmith was available on Sunday evening, so that the couple had to send their regrets. When he had the trunk opened the next morning the lost key was found within. The husband had absent-mindedly dropped the key into the trunk and sprung the lock. He assured me that this was wholly unintentional and unconscious, but we know that he did not wish to go to this social affair. The mislaying of the key therefore lacked no motive.’

Ernest Jones observed in himself that he was in the habit of mislaying his pipe whenever he had smoked too much and felt unwell in consequence. The pipe then turned up in all sorts of places where it did not belong and where it was not normally put away.

(9) An innocent case, in which the motivation was admitted, is reported by Dora Müller (1915):

‘Fräulein Erna A. told me two days before Christmas: "Can you imagine? Yesterday evening I took a piece of my ginger-bread from the packet and ate it; at the same time I thought I would have to offer some to Fräulein S." (her mother’s companion) "when she came to say goodnight to me. I didn’t particularly want to, but I made up my mind to do so all the same. Later on when she came I reached out to get the packet from my table; but it was not there. I had a look for it and found it inside my cupboard. I had put the packet away there without realizing." No analysis was necessary; the narrator herself understood the sequence of events. The impulse of wanting to keep the cake all to herself, which had just been repressed, had nevertheless achieved its end in the automatic act, though in this case it was cancelled out once more by the subsequent conscious act.’

(10) Sachs describes how, by a similar act of mislaying, he once avoided the duty of working: ‘Last Sunday afternoon I hesitated for some time over whether I should work or take a walk and pay a visit at the end of it; but after a bit of a struggle I decided in favour of the former. After about an hour I noticed that my supply of paper was exhausted. I knew that somewhere in a drawer there was a stack of paper that I had had for years, but I looked in vain for it in my writing desk and in other places where I thought I might find it, although I went to a lot of trouble and rummaged round in every possible place - old books, pamphlets, letters and so on. Thus I finally found myself compelled to break off my work and go out after all. When I returned home in the evening, I sat down on the sofa, and, sunk in thought and half absent-mindedly, gazed at the book-case in front of me. A box caught my eye and I remembered that I had not examined its contents for a long time. So I went over and opened it. At the very top was a leather portfolio containing unused paper. But it was only when I had taken it out and was on the point of putting it in the drawer of my desk that it occurred to me that this was the very same paper I had been unsuccessfully looking for in the afternoon. I must add here that although I am not ordinarily thrifty I am very careful with paper and keep any scraps that can be used. It was obviously this practice of mine, which is nourished by an instinct, that enabled my forgetfulness to be corrected as soon as the immediate motive for it had disappeared.’

If a survey is made of cases of mislaying, it in fact becomes hard to believe that anything is ever mislaid except as a result of an unconscious intention.8

(11) One day in the summer of 1901 I remarked to a friend with whom I used at that time to have a lively exchange of scientific ideas: ‘These problems of the neuroses are only to be solved if we base ourselves wholly and completely on the assumption of the original bisexuality of the individual.’ To which he replied: ‘That’s what I told you two and a half years ago at Br. when we went for that evening walk. But you wouldn’t hear of it then.’ It is painful to be requested in this way to surrender one’s originality. I could not recall any such conversation or this pronouncement of my friend’s. One of us must have been mistaken and on the ‘cui prodest?’ principle¹ it must have been myself. Indeed, in the course of the next week I remembered the whole incident, which was just as my friend had tried to recall it to me; I even recollected the answer I had given him at the time: ‘I’ve not accepted that yet; I’m not inclined to go into the question.’ But since then I have grown a little more tolerant when, in reading medical literature, I come across one of the few ideas with which my name can be associated, and find that my name has not been mentioned.

Finding fault with one’s wife, a friendship which has turned into its opposite, a doctor’s error in diagnosis, a rebuff by some one with similar interests, borrowing someone else’s ideas - it can hardly be accidental that a collection of instances of forgetting, gathered at random, should require me to enter into such distressing subjects in explaining them. On the contrary, I suspect that everyone who is willing to enquire into the motives behind his lapses of memory will be able to record a similar sample list of objectionable subjects. The tendency to forget what is disagreeable seems to me to be a quite universal one; the capacity to do so is doubtless developed with different degrees of strength in different people. It is probable that many instances of disowning which we encounter in our medical work are to be traced to forgetting.¹ It is true that our view of such forgetting limits the distinction between the two forms of behaviour to purely psychological factors and allows us to see in both modes of reaction the expression of the same motive. Of all the numerous examples of the disavowal of unpleasant memories which I have observed on the part of relatives of patients, one remains in my recollection as especially singular. A mother was giving me information about the childhood of her neurotic son, now in his puberty, in the course of which she said that, like his brothers and sisters, he had been a bed-wetter till late on - a fact which is certainly of some significance in the case history of a neurotic patient. A few weeks later, when she was wanting to find out about the progress of the treatment, I had occasion to draw her attention to the signs of a constitutional disposition to illness on the young man’s part, and in doing so I referred to the bed-wetting which she had brought out in the anamnesis. To my astonishment she contested this fact in regard both to him and to the other children, and asked me how I could know it. Finally I told her that she herself had informed me a short time before. She must therefore have forgotten it.²

¹ [Footnote added 1907:] If we ask someone whether he suffered from a luetic infection(ten or fifteen years ago, we are too apt to overlook the fact that, from a psychical point of view, he will have regarded this illness quite differently from, let us say, an acute attack of rheumatism. - In the anamneses which parents give about their daughters’ neurotic illnesses, it is hardly possible to distinguish with certainty between what has been forgotten and what is being concealed, since everything standing in the way of a girl’s future marriage is systematically set aside, i.e. repressed, by the parents. - [Added 1910:] A man who had recently lost his dearly-loved wife from an affection of the lungs reported the following instance to me in which misleading answers given to the doctor’s enquiries could only be ascribed to forgetting of this kind. ‘As my poor wife’s pleuritis had still not improved after many weeks, Dr. P. was called into consultation. In taking the anamnesis he asked the usual questions, including whether there were any cases of lung illness in my wife’s family. My wife said there were none and I could not recall any either. As Dr. P. was leaving, the conversation turned, as though accidentally, to the subject of excursions and my wife said: "Yes, it’s a long journey, too, to Langersdorf, where my poor brother’s buried." This brother died about fifteen years ago after suffering for years from tuberculosis. My wife was very fond of him and often spoken to me about him. In fact it now occurred to me that at the time that her pleuritis was diagnosed she was very worried and remarked gloomily: "My brother died of a lung complaint too." But now, the memory was so strongly repressed that even after her remark about the excursion to Langersdorf she was not led to correct the information she had given about illnesses in her family. I myself became aware of the lapse of memory at the very moment she spoke of Langersdorf.’ - [Added 1912:] A completely analogous experience is related by Jones in the work to which I have referred several times already. A physician, whose wife suffered from an abdominal complaint the diagnosis of which was uncertain, remarked by way of comforting her: ‘It is fortunate at any rate that there has been no tuberculosis in your family.’ ‘Have you forgotten’, answered his wife in the greatest astonishment, ‘that my mother died of tuberculosis and that my sister recovered from it only after having been given up by the doctors?’

² In the days while I was engaged in writing these pages the following almost incredible instance of forgetting happened to me. On the first of January I was going through my medical engagement book so that I could send out my accounts. Under the month of June I came across the name ‘M---l’ but could not recall who it belonged to. My bewilderment grew when I turned the pages and discovered that I treated the case in a sanatorium and made daily visits over a period of weeks. A patient treated under such conditions cannot be forgotten by a doctor after scarcely six months. Could it have been a man, I asked myself, a case of general paralysis, an uninteresting case? Finally the record of the fees I had received brought back to me all the facts that had striven to escape my memory. M---l was a fourteen-year-old girl, the most remarkable case I had had in recent years, one which taught me a lesson I am not likely ever to forget and whose outcome cost me moments of the greatest distress. The child fell ill of an unmistakable hysteria, which did in fact clear up quickly and radically under my care. After this improvement the child was taken away from me by her parents. She still complained of abdominal pains which had played the chief part in the clinical picture of her hysteria. Two months later she died of sarcoma of the abdominal glands. The hysteria, to which she was at the same time predisposed, used the tumour as a provoking cause, and I, with my attention held by the noisy but harmless manifestations of the hysteria, had perhaps overlooked the first signs of the insidious and incurable disease.

There are thus abundant signs to be found in healthy, non-neurotic people that the recollection of distressing impressions and the occurrence of distressing thoughts are opposed by a resistance.¹ But the full significance of this fact can be estimated only when the psychology of neurotic people is investigated. We are forced to regard as one of the main pillars of the mechanism supporting hysterical symptoms an elementary endeavour of this kind to fend off ideas that can arouse feelings of unpleasure - an endeavour which can only be compared with the flight-reflex in the presence of painful stimuli. The assumption that a defensive trend of this kind exists cannot be objected to on the ground that one often enough finds it impossible, on the contrary, to get rid of distressing memories that pursue one, and to banish distressing affective impulses like remorse and the pangs of conscience. For we are not asserting that this defensive trend is able to put itself into effect in every case, that in the interplay of psychical forces it may not come up against factors which, for other purposes, aim at the opposite effect and bring it about in spite of the defensive trend. It may be surmised that the architectonic principle of the mental apparatus lies in a stratification - a building up of superimposed agencies; and it is quite possible that this defensive endeavour belongs to a lower psychical agency and is inhibited by higher agencies. At all events, if we can trace back processes such as those found in our examples of forgetting to this defensive trend, that fact speaks in favour of its existence and power.(As we have seen, a number of things are forgotten on their own account; where this is not possible, the defensive trend shifts its target and causes something else related to the target at least to be forgotten, something less important which has come into associative connection with the thing that is really objectionable.

¹ [Footnote added 1910:] A. Pick (1905) has recently brought together a number of quotations from authors who appreciate the influence of affective factors on the memory and who - more or less clearly - recognize the contribution towards forgetting made by the endeavour to fend off unpleasure. But none of us has been able to portray the phenomenon and its psychological basis so exhaustively and at the same time so impressively as Nietzsche in one of his aphorisms (Jenseits von Gut und Böse, IV, 68): ‘"I did this", says my Memory. "I cannot have done this", says my Pride and remains inexorable. In the end - Memory yields.’0

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