Autobiographical note 63 страница

The view developed here, that distressing memories succumb especially easily to motivated forgetting, deserves to find application in many spheres where no attention, or too little, has so far been paid to it. Thus it seems to me that it has still not yet been sufficiently strongly emphasized in assessing testimony in courts of law,¹ where the process of putting a witness on oath is clearly expected to have much too great a purifying influence on the play of his psychical forces. It is universally acknowledged that where the origin of a people’s traditions and legendary history are concerned, a motive of this kind, whose aim is to wipe from memory whatever is distressing to national feeling, must be taken into consideration. Closer investigation would perhaps reveal a complete analogy between the ways in which the traditions of a people and the childhood memories of the individual come to be formed. - The great Darwin laid down a ‘golden rule’ for the scientific worker based on his insight into the part played by unpleasure as a motive for forgetting.²

In a very similar way to the forgetting of names, the forgetting of impressions can be accompanied by faulty recollection; and this, where it finds credence, is described as paramnesia. Paramnesia in pathological cases - in paranoia it actually plays the part of a constituent factor in the formation of the delusion - has brought forth an extensive literature in which I have entirely failed to find any hint whatever as to its motivation. As this is also a subject which belongs to the psychology of the neuroses it is inappropriate to consider it in the present context. Instead, I shall describe a singular paramnesia of my own, in which the motivation provided by unconscious, repressed material and the manner and nature of the connection with this material can be recognized clearly enough.

¹ Cf. Gross (1898).

² [Footnote added 1912] Ernest Jones has drawn attention to the following passage in Darwin’s autobiography, which convincingly reflects his scientific honesty and his psychological acumen:

‘I had, during many years, followed a golden rule, namely, that whenever a published fact, a new observation or thought came across me, which was opposed to my general results, to make a memorandum of it without fail and at once; for I had found by experience that such facts and thoughts were far more apt to escape from the memory than favourable ones.’

While I was writing the later chapters of my book on dream-interpretation, I happened to be at a summer resort without access to libraries and works of reference, and I was forced to incorporate in my manuscript from memory all sorts of references and quotations, subject to later correction. In writing the passage on day-dreams I thought of the excellent example of the poor book-keeper in Alphonse Daudet’s Le Nabab, in whose person the writer was probably portraying his own reveries. I imagined I had a distinct memory of one of the phantasies which this man - I called him Monsieur Jocelyn - hatched out on his walks through the streets of Paris; and I began to reproduce it from memory. It was a phantasy of how Monsieur Jocelyn boldly threw himself at the head of a runaway horse in the street, and brought it to a stop; how the carriage door opened and a great personage stepped out, pressed Monsieur Jocelyn’s hand and said: ‘You are my saviour. I owe my life to you. What can I do for you?’

Any inaccuracies in my own account of this phantasy could, I assured myself, easily be corrected at home when I had the book in front of me. But when I finally looked through Le Nabab to check this passage in my manuscript, which was ready to go to press, I found, to my very great shame and consternation, no mention of any such reverie on the part of Monsieur Jocelyn; in fact the poor book-keeper did not have this name at all but was called Monsieur Joyeuse. This second error quickly gave me the key to the solution of the first one - the paramnesia. ‘Joyeux’, of which ‘Joyeuse’ is the feminine form, is the only possible way in which I could translate my own name, Freud, into French. Where then could the phantasy, which I had remembered wrongly and ascribed to Daudet, have come from? It could only be a product of my own, a day-dream which I had formed myself and which had not become conscious or which had once been conscious and had since been totally forgotten. Perhaps I invented it myself in Paris where I frequently walked about the streets, lonely and full of longings, greatly in need of a helper and protector, until the great Charcot took me into his circle. Later I more than once met the author of Le Nabab in Charcot’s house.¹

¹ [Footnote added 1924:] Some time ago one of my readers sent me a small volume from Franz Hoffmann’s Jugendbibliothek in which a rescue scene like the one in my phantasy in Paris is recounted in detail. The agreement between the two extends even to certain not quite ordinary expressions that occur in both. It is not easy to avoid suspecting that I had in fact read this children’s book while I was myself a boy. The library at my secondary school contained Hoffmann’s series and was always ready to offer these books to pupils in place of any other mental pabulum. The phantasy which, at the age of 43, I thought I remembered as having been produced by someone else, and which I was subsequently forced to recognize as a creation of my own at the age of 28, may therefore easily have been an exact reproduction of an impression which I had received somewhere between the ages of 11 and 13. After all, the rescue phantasy which I attributed to the unemployed book-keeper in Le Nabab was merely meant to prepare the way for the phantasy of my own rescue, to make my longing for a patron and protector tolerable to my pride. This being so, it will not surprise anyone with an understanding of the mind to hear that in my conscious life I myself was highly resistant to the idea of being dependent on a protector’s favour, and that I found it hard to tolerate the few real situations in which something of that nature occurred. Abraham (1922b) has brought to light the deeper meaning of phantasies with such a content and has provided an almost exhaustive explanation of their special features.

Another paramnesia, which it was possible to explain satisfactorily, is reminiscent fausse reconnaissance, a subject that will be discussed later. I had told one of my patients, an ambitious and capable man, that a young student had recently gained admittance to the circle of my followers on the strength of an interesting work, ‘Der Künstler, Versuch einer Sexualpsychologie’. When this work appeared in print a year and a quarter later, my patient maintained that he could remember with certainty having read an announcement of this book somewhere (perhaps in a bookseller’s prospectus) even before - a month or six months before - I had first mentioned it to him. This announcement, he said, had come into his mind at the time; and he further remarked that the author had changed the title: it no longer read ‘Versuch’ but ‘Ansätze zu einer Sexualpsychologie. Careful enquiry of the author and a comparison of all the dates nevertheless showed that my patient was claiming to recall something impossible. No announcement of this work had appeared anywhere before publication, and certainly none a year and a quarter before it went to press. When I omitted to interpret this paramnesia, my patient produced a repetition of it of the same kind. He believed he had recently seen a work on agoraphobia in a bookshop window and was now looking through all the publishers’ catalogues in order to get a copy. I was then able to explain to him why his efforts were bound to be fruitless. The work on agoraphobia existed only in his phantasy, as an unconscious intention: he meant to write it himself. His ambition to emulate the young man and become one of my followers on the strength of a similar scientific work was responsible for the first paramnesia and then for its repetition. Whereupon he recalled that the bookseller’s announcement which had led him to make this false recognition dealt with a work entitled ‘Genesis, das Gesetz der Zeugung’. However, it was I who was responsible for the change in the title mentioned by him, for I could remember having myself been guilty of that inaccuracy - ‘Versuch’ instead of ‘Ansätze’ - in repeating the title.

(B) THE FORGETTING OF INTENTIONS

No group of phenomena is better qualified than the forgetting of intentions for demonstrating the thesis that, in itself, lack of attention does not suffice to explain parapraxes. An intention is an impulse to perform an action: an impulse which has already found approval but whose execution is postponed to a suitable occasion. Now it can happen that during the interval thus created a change of such a kind occurs in the motives involved that the intention is not carried out; but in that case it is not forgotten: it is re-examined and cancelled. The forgetting of intentions, to which we are subject every day and in every possible situation, is not a thing that we are in the habit of explaining in terms of such a revision in the balance of motives. In general we leave it unexplained; or we try to find a psychological explanation by supposing that at the time when the intention was due to be carried out the attention necessary for the action was no longer at hand - attention which was, after all, an indispensable precondition for the coming into being of the intention and had therefore been available for the action at that time. Observation of our normal behaviour in regard to intentions leads us to reject this attempt at an explanation as being arbitrary. If I form an intention in the morning which is to be carried out in the evening, I may be reminded of it two or three times in the course of the day. It need not however become conscious at all throughout the day. When the time for its execution draws near, it suddenly springs to my mind and causes me to make the necessary preparations for the proposed action. If I am going for a walk and take a letter with me which has to be posted, it is certainly not necessary for me, as a normal individual, free from neurosis, to walk all the way with it in my hand and to be continually on the look-out for a letter-box in which to post it; on the contrary I am in the habit of putting it in my pocket, of walking along and letting my thoughts range freely, and I confidently expect that one of the first letter-boxes will catch my attention and cause me to put my hand in my pocket and take out the letter. Normal behaviour after an intention has been formed coincides fully with the experimentally-produced behaviour of people to whom what is described as a ‘post-hypnotic suggestion at long range’ has been given under hypnosis.¹ This phenomenon is usually described in the following way. The suggested intention slumbers on in the person concerned until the time for its execution approaches. Then it awakes and impels him to perform the action.

¹ Cf. Bernheim (1891).4

There are two situations in life in which even the layman is aware that forgetting - as far as intentions are concerned - cannot in any way claim to be considered as an elementary phenomenon not further reducible, but entitles him to conclude that there are such things as unavowed motives. What I have in mind are love-relationships and military discipline. A lover who has failed to keep a rendezvous will find it useless to make excuses for himself by telling the lady that unfortunately he completely forgot about it. She will not fail to reply: ‘A year ago you wouldn’t have forgotten. You evidently don’t care for me any longer.’ Even if he should seize on the psychological explanation mentioned above and try to excuse his forgetfulness by pleading pressure of business, the only outcome would be that the lady, who will have become as sharp-sighted as a doctor is in psycho-analysis, would reply: ‘How curious that business distractions like these never turned up in the past!’ The lady is not of course wanting to deny the possibility of forgetting; it is only that she believes, not without reason, that practically the same inference - of there being some reluctance present - can be drawn from unintentional forgetting as from conscious evasion.

Similarly, under conditions of military service, the difference between a failure to carry out orders which is due to forgetting and one which is deliberate is neglected on principle - and justifiably so. A soldier must not forget what military service orders him to do. If he does forget in spite of knowing the order, that is because the motives that drive him to carry out the military order are opposed by other, counter-motives. A one year volunteer who at inspection tries to offer the excuse that he has forgotten to polish his buttons is sure to be punished. But this punishment is trifling in comparison to the one to which he would expose himself if he admitted to himself and his superiors that the motive for his failure to carry out orders was that ‘I’m heartily sick of this wretched spit-and-polish’. For the sake of this saving of punishment - for reasons of economy, so to speak - he makes use of forgetting as an excuse, or it comes about as a compromise.

Both the service of women and military service demand that everything connected with them should be immune to forgetting. In this way they suggest the notion that, whereas in unimportant matters forgetting is permissible, in important matters it is a sign that one wishes to treat them as unimportant, i.e. to deny their importance.¹ This view, which takes psychical considerations into account, cannot in fact be rejected here. No one forgets to carry out actions that seem to himself important, without incurring suspicion of being mentally disordered. Our investigation can therefore only extend to the forgetting of intentions of a more or less minor character; we cannot consider any intention as being wholly indifferent, for otherwise it would certainly never have been formed.

As with the functional disturbances described on earlier pages, I have made a collection of the cases of omitting to do something as a result of forgetting which I have observed in myself, and I have endeavoured to explain them. I have invariably found that they could be traced to interference by unknown and unavowed motives - or, as one may say, to a counter-will. In a number of these cases I found myself in a position which was similar to being under conditions of service; I was under a constraint, against which I had not entirely given up struggling, so that I made a demonstration against it by forgetting. This accounts for the fact that I am especially prone to forget to send congratulations on occasions such as birthdays, anniversaries, wedding celebrations and promotions. I keep on making new resolutions on the subject and become more and more convinced that I shall not succeed. I am now on the point of giving the effort up and of yielding consciously to the motives that oppose it. While I was in a transitional stage, a friend asked me to send a congratulatory telegram on a certain day on his behalf along with my own, but I warned him that I should forget both; and it was not surprising that the prophecy came true. It is due to painful experiences in the course of my life that I am unable to manifest sympathy on occasions where the expression of sympathy must necessarily he exaggerated, as an expression corresponding to the slight amount of my feeling would not be allowable. Since I have come to recognize that I have often mistaken other people’s ostensible sympathy for their real feelings, I have been in revolt against these conventional expressions of sympathy, though on the other hand I recognize their social usefulness. Condolences in the case of death are excepted from this divided treatment: once I have decided to send them I do not fail to do so. Where my emotional activity no longer has anything to do with social duty, its expression is never inhibited by forgetting.

¹ [Footnote added 1912:] In Bernard Shaw’s play Caesar and Cleopatra, Caesar, as he is leaving Egypt, is worried for a time by the idea that there is something he has meant to do but has forgotten. Finally he remembers: he has forgotten to say goodbye to Cleopatra! This small detail is meant to illustrate - incidentally in complete contrast to the historical truth - how little Caesar cared for the young Egyptian princess. (From Jones, 1911b, 488 n.)

Writing from a prisoner-of-war camp, Lieutenant T. reports an instance of a forgetting of this kind, in which an intention that had in the first place been suppressed broke through in the form of ‘counter-will’ and led to an unpleasant situation:

‘The most senior officer in a prisoner-of-war camp for officers was insulted by one of his fellow prisoners. To avoid further complications he wished to use the only authoritative measure at his disposal and have the officer removed and transferred to another camp. It was only on the advice of several friends that he decided - contrary to his secret wish - to abandon his plan and seek to satisfy his honour immediately, although this was bound to have a variety of disagreeable results. The same morning, as senior officer, he had to call the roll of the officers, under the supervision of the camp-guard. He had known his fellow officers for quite a long time and had never before made any mistakes over this. This time he passed over the name of the man who had insulted him, with the result that when all the others had been dismissed this man alone was obliged to remain behind till the error was cleared up. The name that had been overlooked was perfectly plainly written in the middle of a sheet. The incident was regarded by one party as a deliberate insult, and by the other as an unfortunate accident that was likely to be misinterpreted. Later on, however, after making the acquaintance of Freud’s Psychopathology of Everyday Life, the chief actor in the episode was able to form a correct picture of what had occurred.’

The conflict between a conventional duty and the unavowed view which we privately take of it similarly provides an explanation for those cases in which we forget to carry out actions that we promised to do as a favour to someone. Here the regular result is that it is only the would-be benefactor who believes that forgetting has the power to act as an excuse; the person who asked the favour gives what is unquestionably the right answer: ‘He is not interested in the matter, otherwise he would not have forgotten.’ There are some people who are known as being forgetful in general, and who are for that reason excused their lapses in the same kind of way as short-sighted people who fail to greet us in the street.¹ These people forget all their small promises, and they fail to carry out any of the commissions they receive. In this way they show themselves unreliable in little things, and they demand that we should not take these minor offences amiss - that is, that we should not attribute them to their character but refer them to an organic idiosyncracy.² I am not one of these people myself, and have had no opportunity of analysing the actions of a person of this kind, so that, by examining the choice of occasions for forgetting, I might discover its motivation. I cannot however help suspecting on the basis of analogy that in these cases the motive is an unusually large amount of unavowed contempt for other people which exploits the constitutional factor for its own ends.³

¹ Women, with their subtler understanding of unconscious mental processes, are as a rule more apt to take offence when someone does not recognize them in the street and therefore fails to greet them, than to think of the most obvious explanations - namely that the offender is short-sighted, or was so engrossed in his thoughts that he did not notice them. They conclude that he would have seen them if he had ‘set any store by them’.

² [Footnote added 1910:] Ferenczi reports that he himself was once an ‘absent-minded person’ [ein ‘Zerstreuter’] and that he was noted by acquaintances for the frequency and strangeness of his parapraxes. But, he says, the signs of this absent-mindedness have almost completely disappeared since he began treating patients by psycho-analysis and found himself obliged to turn his attention to the analysis of his own self as well. He thinks that one gives up these parapraxes in proportion as one learns to enlarge one’s own responsibility. He therefore justly maintains that absent-mindedness is a condition which is dependent on unconscious complexes and which can be cured by psycho-analysis. One day, however, he was blaming himself for having committed a technical error in a patient’s psycho-analysis. That day all his former absent-minded habits reappeared. He stumbled several times as he walked along the street (a representation of his faux pas [false step - blunder] in the treatment), left his pocket book at home, tried to pay a kreutzer too little for his tram-fare, found his clothes were not properly buttoned, and so on.

³ [Footnote added 1912:] In this connection Ernest Jones observes: ‘Often the resistance is of a general order. Thus a busy man forgets to post letters entrusted to him - to his slight annoyance - by his wife, just as he may "forget" to carry out her shopping orders.’8

In other cases the motives for forgetting are less easy to discover, and when found arouse greater surprise. Thus, for instance, in former years I noticed that, out of a fairly large number of visits to patients, I only forgot those to non-paying patients or to colleagues. My shame at this discovery led me to adopt the habit of making a note beforehand in the morning of the visits I intended to make during the day. I do not know if other doctors have arrived at the same practice by the same road. But in this way we get some idea of what causes the so called neurasthenic patient to jot down, in his notorious ‘notes’, the various things he wants to tell the doctor. The ostensible reason is that he has no confidence in the reproductive capacity of his memory. That is perfectly correct, but the scene usually proceeds as follows. The patient has recounted his various complaints and enquiries in a very long-winded manner. After he has finished he pauses for a moment, then pulls out the jottings and adds apologetically: ‘I’ve made some notes, as I can’t remember things.’ As a rule he finds that they contain nothing new. He repeats each point and answers it himself: ‘Yes, I’ve asked about that already.’ With the notes he is probably only demonstrating one of his symptoms: the frequency with which his intentions are disturbed through the interference of obscure motives.

I pass on to ailments that afflict the greater number of my healthy acquaintances as well as myself. I confess that - especially in former years - I was very apt to forget to return borrowed books, which I kept for long periods, and that it came about especially easily that I put off paying bills by forgetting them. One morning not long ago I left the tobacconist’s where I had made my daily purchase of cigars without having paid for them. It was a most harmless omission, as I am well known there and could therefore expect to be reminded of my debt next day. But my trivial act of negligence, my attempt to contract a debt, was certainly not unconnected with budgetary thoughts which had occupied my mind during the preceding day. Among the majority even of what are called ‘respectable’ people traces of divided behaviour can easily be observed where money and property are concerned. It may perhaps be generally true that the primitive greed of the suckling, who wants to take possession of every object (in order to put it into his mouth), has only been incompletely overcome by civilization and upbringing.¹

¹ For the sake of preserving the unity of the subject I may perhaps interrupt the general arrangement I have adopted, and, in addition to what I have said above, point out that people’s memories show a particular partiality in money matters. Paramnesias of having already paid for something can often be very obstinate, as I know from my own experience. When free play is given to avaricious aims apart from the serious interests of life - for fun, in fact -, as in card-playing, the most honourable men show an inclination to make errors and mistakes in memory and counting, and, without quite knowing how, they even find themselves involved in petty cheating. The psychically refreshing nature of these games is partly due to liberties of this kind. We must admit the truth of the saying that in play we can get to know a person’s character - that is, if we are not thinking of his manifest character. - If waiters still make unintentional mistakes in the bill, the same explanation obviously applies to them. - In commercial circles a certain delay can frequently be observed in paying out sums of money (for settling accounts and so on) which in point of fact brings the owner no profit and can only be understood in psychological terms - as an expression of a counter-will against paying out money. - [The next sentence was added in 1912:] Brill puts the matter with epigrammatic brevity: ‘We are more apt to mislay letters containing bills than cheques.’ - The fact that women in particular evince a special amount of unpleasure at paying their doctor is connected with the most intimate impulses, which are very far from having been elucidated. Women patients have usually forgotten their purse and so cannot pay at the time of consultation; they then regularly forget to send the fee after they reach home, and thus arrange things so that one has treated them for nothing - ‘for the sake of their beaux yeux’. They pay one, as it were, by the sight of their countenance.

I am afraid all the examples I have given up to now will seem merely commonplace. But after all it can only suit my aim if I come upon things that are familiar to everyone and that everyone understands in the same way, for my whole purpose is to collect everyday material and turn it to scientific use. I fail to see why the wisdom which is the precipitate of men’s common experience of life should be refused inclusion among the acquisitions of science. The essential character of scientific work derives not from the special nature of its objects of study but from its stricter method of establishing the facts and its search for far-reaching correlations.

Where intentions of some importance are concerned, we have found in general that they are forgotten when obscure motives rise against them. In the case of rather less important intentions we can recognize a second mechanism of forgetting: a counter-will is transferred to the intention from some other topic, after an external association has been formed between the other topic and the content of the intention. Here is an example. I set store by high-quality blotting paper and I decided one day to buy a fresh supply that afternoon in the course of my walk to the Inner Town. But I forgot for four days running, till I asked myself what reason I had for the omission. It was easy to find after I had recalled that though I normally write ‘Löschpapier’ I usually say ‘Fliesspapier’. ‘Fliess’ is the name of a friend in Berlin who had on the days in question given me occasion for a worrying and anxious thought. I could not rid myself of this thought, but the defensive tendency (cf. above, p. 1230) manifested itself by transferring itself, by means of the verbal similarity, to the indifferent intention which on account of its indifference offered little resistance.

Direct counter-will and more remote motivation are found together in the following example of dilatoriness. I had written a short pamphlet On Dreams (1901a), summarizing the subject-matter of my Interpretation of Dreams, for the series Grenzfragen des Nerven- und Seelenlebens. Bergmann of Wiesbaden had sent me the proofs, and had asked for them back by return of post, as the book was to be issued before Christmas. I corrected the proofs the same night and placed them on my desk so as to take them with me next morning. In the morning I forgot about them, and only remembered them in the afternoon when I saw the wrapper on my desk. In the same way I forgot the proofs that afternoon, that evening and the following morning, till I pulled myself together and took them to a letter-box on the afternoon of the second day, wondering what could be the reason for my procrastination. It was obvious that I did not want to send them off, but I could not discover why. However, in the course of the same walk I called in at my publisher’s in Vienna - the firm that had published my Interpretation of Dreams, I placed an order for something and then said, as if impelled by a sudden thought: ‘I suppose you know I’ve written the dream-book over again?’ - ‘Oh, you can’t mean that!’ he said. ‘Don’t be alarmed’, I replied; ‘it’s only a short essay for the Löwenfeld-Kurella series.’ But he was still not satisfied; he was worried that the essay would interfere with the sales of the book. I disagreed with him and finally asked: ‘If I’d come to you before, would you have forbidden my publishing it?’ - ‘No, I certainly wouldn’t.’ Personally I believe I acted quite within my rights and did nothing contrary to common practice; nevertheless it seems certain that a misgiving similar to that expressed by the publisher was the motive for my delay in sending back the proofs. This misgiving goes back to an earlier occasion, on which a different publisher raised difficulties when it seemed unavoidable for me to introduce unaltered a few pages from are earlier work of mine on children’s palsies published by another firm, into my monograph on the same subject in Nothnagel’s Handbuch. But in this case, as well, the reproach was not justified; this time, too, I had loyally informed my first publisher (the same one who published The Interpretation of Dreams) of my intention. However, if this chain of memories is followed back still further, it brings to light an even earlier occasion involving a translation from the French, in which I really did infringe the rights of property that apply to publications. I added notes to the text which I translated, without asking the author’s permission, and some years later had reason to suspect that the author was displeased with my arbitrary action.

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