Autobiographical note 64 страница

There is a proverb which reveals the popular knowledge that the forgetting of intentions is not accidental: ‘If one forgets to do a thing once, one will forget to do it many times more.’

Indeed, sometimes we cannot avoid an impression that everything that can be said about forgetting and about parapraxes is already familiar and self-evident to everyone. It is sufficiently surprising that it is nevertheless necessary to present to consciousness things that are so well-known. How often have I heard people say: ‘Don’t ask me to do that, I’m certain to forget it!’ There is surely nothing mystical, then, if this prophecy is subsequently fulfilled. A person who talks in this way senses an intention not to carry out the request, and is merely refusing to admit it to himself.

Much light is thrown, moreover, on the forgetting of intentions by what may be called ‘the forming of spurious intentions’. I once promised a young author that I would write a review of his short work; but because of internal resistances, which I knew about, I put off doing so, till one day I yielded to pressure from him and promised it would be done that same evening. I really had seriously meant to do it then, but I had forgotten that I had set the evening aside for preparing a specialist report that could not be deferred. After this had shown me that my intention had been spurious, I gave up the struggle against my resistances and refused the author’s request.

CHAPTER VIII BUNGLED ACTIONS

I will quote another passage from the work by Meringer and Mayer (1895, 98) which I have already mentioned:

‘Slips of the tongue are not without their parallels. They correspond to the slips which often occur in other human activities and which are known by the somewhat foolish name of "oversights".’

Thus I am by no means the first to surmise that there is sense and purpose behind the minor functional disturbances in the daily life of healthy people.¹

If slips in speaking - which is clearly a motor function - can be thought of in this way, it is a short step to extend the same expectation to mistakes in our other motor activities. I have here formed two groups of cases. I use the term ‘bungled actions’ [‘Vergreifen’] to describe all the cases in which a wrong result - i.e. a deviation from what was intended - seems to be the essential element. The others, in which it is rather the whole action which seems to be inappropriate, I call ‘symptomatic and chance actions’. But no sharp line can be drawn between them, and we are indeed forced to conclude that all the divisions made in this study have no significance other than a descriptive one and run counter to the inner unity in this field of phenomena. It is clear that the psychological understanding of ‘bungled actions’ will not be conspicuously helped if we class them under the heading of ‘ataxia’ or, in particular, of ‘cortical ataxia’. Let us rather try to trace the individual examples back to their particular determinants. For this purpose I shall once more make use of self-observations, though in my case the occasions for these are not particularly frequent.

¹ [Footnote added 1910:] A second publication by Meringer has later shown me how great an injustice I did to that author when I credited him with any such understanding.3 (a) In former years I visited patients in their homes more frequently than I do at present; and on numerous occasions when I was at the front door, instead of knocking or ringing the bell, I pulled my own latch key out of my pocket, only to thrust it back again in some confusion. When I consider the patients at whose houses this happened, I am forced to think that the parapraxis - taking out my key instead of ringing the bell - was in the nature of a tribute to the house where I made the mistake. It was equivalent to the thought ‘Here I feel I am at home’, for it only occurred at places where I had taken a liking to the patient. (Of course I never ring my own door bell.)

Thus the parapraxis was a symbolic representation of a thought which was not after all really intended to be accepted seriously and consciously; for a nerve specialist is in fact well aware that his patients remain attached to him only so long as they expect to be benefited by him, and that he in turn allows himself to feel an excessively warm interest in them only with a view to giving them psychical help.

Numerous self-observations made by other people show that handling a key in this significantly incorrect way is certainly not a peculiarity of mine.

Maeder (1906) describes what is an almost identical repetition of my experiences: ‘II est arrivé à chacun de sortir son trousseau, en arrivant à la porte d’un ami particulièrement cher, de se surprendre pour ainsi dire, en train d’ouvrir avec sa clé comme chez soi. C’est un retard, puisqu’il faut sonner malgré tout, mais c’est une preuve qu’on se sent - ou qu’on voudrait se sentir - comme chez soi, auprès de cet ami.’¹

¹ [‘Everyone has had the experience of taking out his bunch of keys on reaching the door of a particularly dear friend, of catching himself, as it were, in the act of opening it with his key just as if he was at home. This causes a delay, as he has to ring the bell in the long run, but it is a sign that he feels - or would like to feel - at home with this friend.’]

Jones (1911b, 509): ‘The use of keys is a fertile source of occurrences of this kind, of which two examples may be given. If I am disturbed in the midst of some engrossing work at home by having to go to the hospital to carry out some routine work, I am very apt to find myself trying to open the door of my laboratory there with the key of my desk at home, although the two keys are quite unlike each other. The mistake unconsciously demonstrates where I would rather be at the moment.

‘Some years ago I was acting in a subordinate position at a certain institution, the front door of which was kept locked, so that it was necessary to ring for admission. On several occasions I found myself making serious attempts to open the door with my house key. Each one of the permanent visiting staff, to which I aspired to be a member, was provided with a key, to avoid the trouble of having to wait at the door. My mistakes thus expressed my desire to be on a similar footing, and to be quite "at home" there.’

Dr. Hanns Sachs reports a similar experience: ‘I always have two keys on me, one for the door of my office and one for my flat. They are not at all easily confused with each other, for the office key is at least three times as big as the flat key. Moreover, I carry the former in my trouser pocket and the latter in my waistcoat pocket. Nevertheless it often happened that I noticed as I stood at the door that I had got out the wrong key on the stairs. I determined to make a statistical experiment. Since I stood in front of both the doors every day in more or less the same emotional state, the confusion between the two keys was bound to show a regular tendency, if, indeed, it was true that it had some psychical determinant. My observation of later instances then showed that I quite regularly took out my flat key at the door of the office, whereas the opposite happened only once. I came home tired, knowing that a guest would be waiting for me there. When I reached the door I made an attempt to unlock it with the office key - which was of course much too large.’

5 (b) There is a house where twice every day for six years, at regular hours, I used to wait to be let in outside a door on the second floor. During this long period it has happened to me on two occasions, with a short interval between them, that I have gone a floor too high - i.e. I have ‘climbed too high’.¹ On the first occasion I was enjoying an ambitious day-dream in which I was ‘climbing ever higher and higher’. On this occasion I even failed to hear that the door in question had opened as I put my foot on the first step of the third flight. On the other occasion, I again went too far while I was deep in thought; when I realized it, I turned back and tried to catch hold of the phantasy in which I had been absorbed. I found that I was irritated by a (phantasied) criticism of my writings in which I was reproached with always ‘going too far’. This I had now replaced by the not very respectful expression ‘climbing too high’.

(c) For many years a reflex hammer and a tuning fork have been lying side by side on my writing table. One day I left in a hurry at the end of my consulting hour as I wanted to catch a particular suburban train; and in broad daylight I put the tuning fork in my coat pocket instead of the hammer. The weight of the object pulling down my pocket drew my attention to my mistake. Anyone who is not in the habit of giving consideration to such minor occurrences will doubtless explain and excuse the mistake by pointing to the haste of the moment. Nevertheless I preferred to ask myself the question why it actually was that I took the tuning fork instead of the hammer. My haste could just as well have been a motive for picking up the right object so as not to have to waste time in correcting my mistake.

‘Who was the last person to take hold of the tuning fork?’ was the question that sprang to my mind at that point. It was an imbecile child, whom I had been testing some days before for his attention to sensory impressions; and he had been so fascinated by the tuning fork that I had had some difficulty in tearing it away from him. Could the meaning be, then, that I was an imbecile? It certainly seemed so, for my first association to ‘hammer’ was ‘Chamer’ (Hebrew for ‘ass’).

¹ [The German ‘versteigen’ would, on the analogy of ‘verlesen’, ‘verschreiben’, etc., mean ‘to mis-climb’; but its normal meaning is ‘to climb too high’ or, figuratively, ‘to over-reach oneself’.]6

But why this abusive language? At this point we must look into the situation. I was hurrying to a consultation at a place on the Western railway line, to visit a patient who, according to the anamnesis I had received by letter, had fallen from a balcony some months earlier and had since then been unable to walk. The doctor who called me in wrote that he was nevertheless uncertain whether it was a case of spinal injury or of a traumatic neurosis - hysteria. That was what I was now to decide. It would therefore be advisable for me to be particularly wary in the delicate task of making a differential diagnosis. As it is, my colleagues are of the opinion that I make a diagnosis of hysteria far too carelessly where graver things are in question. But so far this did not justify the abusive language. Why, of course! it now occurred to me that the little railway station was at the same place at which some years before I had seen a young man who had not been able to walk properly after an emotional experience. At the time I made a diagnosis of hysteria and I subsequently took the patient on for psychical treatment. It then turned out that though my diagnosis had not, it is true, been incorrect, it had not been correct either. A whole number of the patient’s symptoms had been hysterical, and they rapidly disappeared in the course of treatment. But behind these a remnant now became visible which was inaccessible to my therapy; this remnant could only be accounted for by multiple sclerosis. It was easy for those who saw the patient after me to recognize the organic affection. I could hardly have behaved otherwise or formed a different judgement, yet the impression left was that a grave error had been made; the promise of a cure which I had given him could naturally not be kept.

The error of picking up the tuning fork instead of the hammer could thus be translated into words as follows; ‘You idiot! you ass! Pull yourself together this time, and see that you don’t diagnose hysteria again where there’s an incurable illness, as you did years ago with the poor man from that same place!’ And fortunately for this little analysis, if not fortunately for my mood, the same man, suffering from severe spastic paralysis, had visited me during my consulting hour a few days before, and a day after the imbecile child.

It will be observed that this time it was the voice of self-criticism which was making itself heard in the bungled action. A bungled action is quite specially suitable for use in this way as a self-reproach: the present mistake seeks to represent the mistake that has been committed elsewhere.7 (d) Bungled actions can, of course, also serve a whole number of other obscure purposes. Here is a first example. It is very rare for me to break anything. I am not particularly dextrous but a result of the anatomical integrity of my nerve-muscle apparatus is that there are clearly no grounds for my making clumsy movements of this kind, with their unwelcome consequences. I cannot therefore recall any object in my house that I have ever broken. Shortage of space in my study has often forced me to handle a number of pottery and stone antiquities (of which I have a small collection) in the most uncomfortable positions, so that onlookers have expressed anxiety that I should knock something down and break it. That however has never happened. Why then did I once dash the marble cover of my plain inkpot to the ground so that it broke?

My inkstand is made out of a flat piece of Untersberg marble which is hollowed out to receive the glass inkpot; and the inkpot has a cover with a knob made of the same stone. Behind this inkstand there is a ring of bronze statuettes and terra cotta figures. I sat down at the desk to write, and then moved the hand that was holding the pen-holder forward in a remarkably clumsy way, sweeping on to the floor the inkpot cover which was lying on the desk at the time.

The explanation was not hard to find. Some hours before, my sister had been in the room to inspect some new acquisitions. She admired them very much, and then remarked: ‘Your writing table looks really attractive now; only the inkstand doesn’t match. You must get a nicer one.’ I went out with my sister and did not return for some hours. But when I did I carried out, so it seems, the execution of the condemned inkstand. Did I perhaps conclude from my sister’s remark that she intended to make me a present of a nicer inkstand on the next festive occasion, and did I smash the unlovely old one so as to force her to carry out the intention she had hinted at? If that is so, my sweeping movement was only apparently clumsy; in reality it was exceedingly adroit and well-directed, and understood how to avoid damaging any of the more precious objects that stood around.

It is in fact my belief that we must accept this judgement for a whole series of seemingly accidental clumsy movements. It is true that they make a show of something violent and sweeping, like a spastic-atactic movement, but they prove to be governed by an intention and achieve their aim with a certainty which cannot in general be credited to our conscious voluntary movements. Moreover they have both features - their violence and their unerring aim - in common with the motor manifestations of the hysterical neurosis, and partly, too, with the motor performances of somnambulism. This fact indicates that both in these cases and in the movements under consideration the same unknown modification of the innervatory process is present.

Another self-observation, reported by Frau Lou Andreas-Salomé, may give a convincing demonstration of how obstinate persistence in an act of ‘clumsiness’ serves unavowed purposes in a far from clumsy way:

‘Just at the time when milk had become scarce and expensive I found that I let it boil over time and time again, to my constant horror and vexation. My efforts to get the better of this were unsuccessful, though I cannot by any means say that on other occasions I have proved absent minded or inattentive. I should have had more reason to be so after the death of my dear white terrier (who deserved his name of "Druzhok" - the Russian for "Friend" - as much as any human being ever did). But - lo and behold! - never since his death has even a drop of milk boiled over. My first thought about this ran: "That’s lucky, for the milk spilt over on to the hearth or floor wouldn’t even be of any use!" And in the same moment I saw my "Friend" before my eyes, sitting eagerly watching the cooking, his head cocked a little to one side, his tail wagging expectantly, waiting in trustful confidence for the splendid mishap that was about to occur. And now everything was clear to me, and I realized too that I had been even more fond of him than I myself was aware.’

In the last few years, during which I have been collecting such observations, I have had a few more experiences of smashing or breaking objects of some value, but the investigation of these cases has convinced me that they were never the result of chance or of unintentional clumsiness on my part. One morning, for example, when I was passing through a room in my dressing-gown with straw slippers on my feet, I yielded to a sudden impulse and hurled one of my slippers from my foot at the wall, causing a beautiful little marble Venus to fall down from its bracket. As it broke into pieces, I quoted quite unmoved these lines from Busch:

‘Ach! die Venus ist perdü -

Klickeradoms! - von Medici!’¹

This wild conduct and my calm acceptance of the damage are to be explained in terms of the situation at the time. One of my family was gravely ill, and secretly I had already given up hope of her recovery. That morning I had learned that there had been a great improvement, and I know I had said to myself: ‘So she’s going to live after all!’ My attack of destructive fury served therefore to express a feeling of gratitude to fate and allowed me to perform a ‘sacrificial act’ - rather as if I had made a vow to sacrifice something or other as a thank-offering if she recovered her health! The choice of the Venus of Medici for this sacrifice was clearly only a gallant act of homage towards the convalescent; but even now it is a mystery to me how I made up my mind so quickly, aimed so accurately and avoided hitting anything else among the objects so close to it.

Another case of breaking something, for which I once again made use of a pen-holder that slipped from my hand, likewise had the significance of a sacrifice; but on this occasion it took the form of a propitiatory sacrifice to avert evil. I had once seen fit to reproach a loyal and deserving friend on no other grounds than the interpretation I placed on certain indications coming from his unconscious. He was offended and wrote me a letter asking me not to treat my friends psycho-analytically. I had to admit he was in the right, and wrote him a reply to pacify him. While I was writing this letter I had in front of me my latest acquisition, a handsome glazed Egyptian figure. I broke it in the way I have described, and then immediately realized that I had caused this mischief in order to avert a greater one. Luckily it was possible to cement both of them together - the friendship as well as the figure - so that the break would not be noticed.

¹ [‘Oh! the Venus! Lost is she!

Klickeradoms! of Medici!’]0

A third breakage was connected with less serious matters; it was only the disguised ‘execution’ - to borrow an expression from Vischer’s Auch Einer - of an object which no longer enjoyed my favour. For some time I used to carry a stick with a silver handle. On one occasion the thin metal got damaged, through no fault of mine, and was badly repaired. Soon after the stick came back, I used the handle in a mischievous attempt to catch one of my children by the leg - with the natural result that it broke, and I was thus rid of it.

The equanimity with which we accept the resulting damage in all these cases can no doubt be taken as evidence that there is an unconscious purpose behind the performance of these particular actions.

In investigating the reasons for the occurrence of even so trivial a parapraxis as the breaking of an object, one is liable to come across connections which, besides relating to a person’s present situation, lead deep into his prehistory. The following analysis by Jekels (1913) may serve as an example:

‘A doctor had in his possession an earthenware flower vase which, though not valuable, was of great beauty. It was among the many presents - including objects of value - which had been sent to him in the past by a (married) woman patient. When a psychosis became manifest in her, he restored all the presents to her relatives - except for this far less expensive vase, with which he could not bear to part, ostensibly because it was so beautiful. But this embezzlement cost a man of his scrupulousness a considerable internal struggle. He was fully aware of the impropriety of his action, and only managed to overcome his pangs of conscience by telling himself that the vase was not in fact of any real value, that it was too awkward to pack, etc. - Some months later he was on the point of getting a lawyer to claim and recover the arrears (which were in dispute) of the fees for the treatment of this same patient. Once again the self-reproaches made their appearance; and he suffered some momentary anxiety in case the relatives discovered what could be called his embezzlement and brought it against him during the legal proceedings. For a while indeed the first factor (his self-reproaches) was so strong that he actually thought of renouncing all claims on a sum of perhaps a hundred times the value of the vase - a compensation, as it were, for the object he had appropriated. However, he at once got the better of the notion and set it aside as absurd.

‘While he was still in this mood he happened to be putting some fresh water in the vase; and despite the extreme infrequency with which he broke anything and the good control that he had over his muscular apparatus, he made an extraordinarily "clumsy" movement - one that was not in the least organically related to the action he was carrying out - which knocked the vase off the table, so that it broke into some five or six largish pieces. What is more, this was after he had made up his mind on the previous evening, though not without considerable hesitation, to put precisely this vase, filled with flowers, on the dining-room table before his guests. He had remembered it only just before it got broken, had noticed with anxiety that it was not in his living-room and had himself brought it in from the other room. After his first moments of dismay he picked up the pieces and by putting them together was just deciding that it would still be possible to make an almost complete repair of the vase, when the two or three larger fragments slipped from his hand; they broke into a thousand splinters, and with that vanished all hope for the vase.

‘There is no doubt that this parapraxis had the current purpose of assisting the doctor in his law-suit, by getting rid of something which he had kept back and which to some extent prevented his claiming what had been kept back from him.2

‘But apart from this direct determinant, every psycho-analyst will see in the parapraxis a further and much deeper and more important symbolic determinant; for a vase is an unmistakable symbol of a woman.

‘The hero of this little story had lost his young, beautiful and dearly-loved wife in a tragic manner. He fell ill of a neurosis whose main theme was that he was to blame for the misfortune ("he had broken a lovely vase"). Moreover, he had no further relations with women and took a dislike to marriage and lasting love-relationships, which unconsciously he thought of as being unfaithful to his dead wife but which he consciously rationalized in the idea that he brought misfortune to women, that a woman might kill herself on his account, etc. (Hence his natural reluctance to keep the vase permanently!)

‘In view of the strength of his libido it is therefore not surprising that the most adequate relationships appeared to him to be those - transient from their very nature - with married women (hence his keeping back of another person’s vase).

‘This symbolism is neatly confirmed by the two following factors. Because of his neurosis he entered psycho-analytic treatment. In the course of the session in which he gave an account of breaking the "earthenware" vase, he happened much later to be talking once more about his relations with women and said he thought he was quite unreasonably hard to please; thus for example he required women to have "unearthly beauty". This is surely a very clear indication that he was still dependent on his (dead, i. e., unearthly) wife and wanted to have nothing to do with "earthly beauty"; hence the breaking of the earthenware ("earthly") vase.

‘And at the exact time when in the transference he formed a phantasy of marrying his physician’s daughter, he made him a present of a vase, as though to drop a hint of the sort of return present he would like to have.

‘Probably the symbolic meaning of the parapraxis admits of a number of further variations - for example, his not wanting to fill the vase, etc. What strikes me, however, as more interesting is the consideration that the presence of several, at the least of two, motives (which probably operated separately out of the preconscious and the unconscious) is reflected in the doubling of the parapraxis - his knocking over the vase and then letting it fall from his hands.’

3 (e) Dropping, knocking over and breaking objects are acts which seem to be used very often to express unconscious trains of thought, as analysis can occasionally demonstrate, but as may more frequently be guessed from the superstitious or facetious interpretations popularly connected with them. The interpretations attached to salt being spilt, a wine-glass being knocked over, a dropped knife sticking in the ground, etc., are well known. I shall not discuss till later the question of what claims such superstitious interpretations have to being taken seriously. Here I need only remark that individual clumsy actions do not by any means always have the same meaning, but serve as a method of representing one purpose or another according to circumstances.

Recently we passed through a period in my house during which an unusually large amount of glass and china crockery was broken; I myself was responsible for some of the damage. But the little psychical epidemic could easily be explained: these were the days before my eldest daughter’s wedding. On such festive occasions it used to be the custom deliberately to break some utensil and at the same time utter a phrase to bring good luck. This custom may have the significance of a sacrifice and it may have another symbolic meaning as well.

When servants drop fragile articles and so destroy them, our first thought is certainly not of a psychological explanation, yet it is not unlikely that here, too, obscure motives play their part. Nothing is more foreign to uneducated people than an appreciation of art and works of art. Our servants are dominated by a mute hostility towards the manifestations of art, especially when the objects (whose value they do not understand) become a source of work for them. On the other hand people of the same education and origin often show great dexterity and reliability in handling delicate objects in scientific institutions, once they have begun to identify themselves with their chief and to consider themselves an essential part of the staff.

I insert here a communication from a young technician which gives us some insight into the mechanism of a case of material damage:

‘Some time ago I worked with several fellow-students in the laboratory of the technical college on a series of complicated experiments in elasticity, a piece of work which we had undertaken voluntarily but which was beginning to take up more time than we had expected. One day as I returned to the laboratory with my friend F., he remarked how annoying it was to him to lose so much time on that particular day as he had so much else to do at home. I could not help agreeing with him and added half jokingly, referring to an incident the week before: "Let us hope that the machine will go wrong again so that we can stop work and go home early." - In arranging the work it happened that F. was given the regulation of the valve of the press; that is to say, he was, by cautiously opening the valve, to let the fluid under pressure flow slowly out of the accumulator into the cylinder of the hydraulic press. The man conducting the experiment stood by the manometer and when the right pressure was reached called out a loud "stop!". At the word of command F. seized the valve and turned it with all his might - to the left! (All valves without exception are closed by being turned to the right.) This caused the full pressure of the accumulator to come suddenly on to the press, a strain for which the connecting-pipes are not designed, so that one of them immediately burst - quite a harmless accident to the machine, but enough to oblige us to suspend work for the day and go home. - It is characteristic, by the way, that when we were discussing the affair some time later my friend F. had no recollection whatever of my remark, which I recalled with certainty.’

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