Autobiographical note 54 страница

(3) On another occasion, as I was on the point of booking a ticket at Reichenhall railway station, the name of the next main station would not come into my mind. It was perfectly familiar to me, and I had passed through it very frequently. I had actually to look it up in the time-table. It was ‘Rosenheim’. But I then knew at once owing to what association I had lost it. An hour before, I had paid a visit to my sister at her home close to Reichenhall; as my sister’s name is Rosa this was also a ‘Rosenheim’. The ‘family complex’ had robbed me of this name.

(4) I have a whole quantity of examples to illustrate further the positively predatory activities of the ‘family complex’.

There came to my consulting-room one day a young man who was the younger brother of a woman patient. I had seen him countless times and used to refer to him by his first name. When I wanted to speak about his visit I found I had forgotten his first name (which was, I knew, not at all an unusual one), and nothing could help me to recover it. I thereupon went out into the street to read the names over the shops, and recognized his name the first time I ran across it. The analysis of the episode showed me that I had drawn a parallel between the visitor and my own brother, a parallel which was trying to come to a head in the repressed question: ‘Would my brother in the same circumstances have behaved in a similar way, or would he have done the opposite?’ The external link between the thoughts concerned with my own and with the other family was made possible by the chance fact that in both cases the mothers had the same first name of Amalia. Later in retrospect I also understood the substitute names, Daniel and Franz, which had forced themselves on me without making me any wiser. These, like Amalia too, are names from Schiller’s Die Räuber which were the subject of a jest made by Daniel Spitzer, the ‘Vienna walker’.

(5) Another time I was unable to recall a patient’s name; it belonged to associations from my youth. My analysis followed a very devious path before it provided me with the name I was looking for. The patient had expressed a fear of losing his sight; this awoke the memory of a young man who had been blinded by a gunshot; and this in turn was connected with the figure of yet another youth, who had injured himself by shooting. This last person had the same name as the first patient, though he was not related to him. However, I did not find the name until I had become conscious that an anxious expectation was being transferred by me from these two young men who had been injured to a member of my own family.

There thus runs though my thoughts a continuous current of ‘personal reference’, of which I generally have no inkling, but which betrays itself by such instances of my forgetting names. It is as if I were obliged to compare everything I hear about other people with myself; as if my personal complexes were put on the alert whenever another person is brought to my notice. This cannot possibly be an individual peculiarity of my own: it must rather contain an indication of the way in which we understand ‘something other than ourself’ in general. I have reasons for supposing that other people are in this respect very similar to me.

The neatest instance of this sort was reported to me by a Herr Lederer, who had experienced it himself. While he was on his honeymoon in Venice he came across a gentleman with whom he was superficially acquainted and whom he had to introduce to his young wife. Since however he had forgotten the stranger’s name, he helped himself out the first time by means of an unintelligible mumble. On meeting the gentleman a second time, as he was bound to do in Venice, he drew him aside and asked him to save him from embarrassment by telling him his name, which he had unfortunately forgotten. The stranger’s reply gave evidence of an unusual knowledge of human nature. ‘I can readily imagine your failing to remember my name. I have the same name as you - Lederer!’ - One cannot help having a slightly disagreeable feeling when one comes across one’s own name in a stranger. Recently I was very sharply aware of it when a Herr S. Freud presented himself to me in my consulting hour. (However, I must record the assurance of one of my critics that in this respect his feelings are the opposite of mine.)

(6) The effects that can be produced by personal reference can also be seen in the following example, reported by Jung (1907, 52):

‘A Herr Y. fell in love with a lady; but he met with no success, and shortly afterwards she married a Herr S. There after, Herr Y., in spite of having known Herr X. for a long time and even having business dealings with him, forgot his name over and over again, so that several times he had to enquire what it was from other people when he wanted to correspond with Herr X’.

The motivation of the forgetting is however more transparent in this case than in the preceding ones that fall within the constellation of personal reference. Here the forgetting seems a direct consequence of Herr Y’s antipathy to his more fortunate rival; he wants to know nothing about him: ‘never thought of shall he be.’1

(7) The motive for forgetting a name may also be a more refined one; it may consist in what might be called a ‘sublimated’ grudge against the bearer of it. A Fräulein I. von K. writes from Budapest as follows:

‘I have propounded a little theory of my own. I have noticed that people who have a talent for painting have no feeling for music, and vice versa. Some time ago I had a conversation with someone on this point, in which I remarked: "So far my observation has always held good, with the exception of only one person." When I wanted to recall that person’s name, I found it had been irretrievably forgotten, even though I knew that the owner of it was one of my closest friends. When I heard the name mentioned quite by chance a few days later, I knew at once, of course, that it was the destroyer of my theory who was being spoken of. The grudge I unconsciously bore against him was expressed by my forgetting his name, which, apart from that, I knew so well.’

(8) The following case, reported by Ferenczi, shows a somewhat different way in which the personal reference led to a name being forgotten. Its analysis is particularly instructive because of the explanation it gives of the substitute associations (like Botticelli and Boltraffio as substitutes for Signorelli).

‘A lady, who had heard something about psycho-analysis, could not recall the name of the psychiatrist Jung.¹

‘The following names came to her mind instead: Kl--- (a name), Wilde, Nietzsche, Hauptmann.

‘I did not tell her the name and invited her to give free associations to each name in turn.

‘Starting from Kl--- she immediately thought of Frau Kl---, and of how she was a prim and affected person, but looked very well for her age. "She’s not ageing." As a common characterization of Wilde and Nietzsche she named "insanity". Then she said chaffingly: "You Freudians will go on looking for the causes of insanity till you’re insane yourselves." Then: "I can’t bear Wilde and Nietzsche. I don’t understand them. I hear they were both homosexuals; Wilde had dealings with young people." (In spite of having uttered the correct name - in Hungarian, it is true - in this sentence, she was still unable t recall it.)

‘Starting from Hauptmann, first "Halbe" and then "Jungend’ occurred to her; and it was there for the first time, after I had drawn her attention to the word "Jungend", that she realized she had been in search of the name Jung.

‘This lady had lost her husband when she was thirty-nine and had no prospect of marrying again. Thus she had certainly reason enough to avoid recalling anything that reminded her of youth or age. It is striking that the ideas screening the missing name were associated entirely with its content and that associations with its sound were absent.’

¹ [‘Jung’ is also the German for ‘young’.]2

(9) Here is an example of name-forgetting with yet another and a very subtle motivation, which the subject of it has explained himself:

‘When I was being examined in philosophy as a subsidiary subject I was questioned by the examiner about the teachings of Epicurus, and after that I was asked if I knew who had taken up his theories in later centuries. I answered with the name of Pierre Gassendi, whom I had heard described as a disciple of Epicurus while I was sitting in a café only a couple of days before. To the surprised question how I knew that, I boldly answered that I had long been interested in Gassendi. The result of this was a certificate magna cum laude, but also unfortunately a subsequent obstinate tendency to forget the name Gassendi. My guilty conscience is, I think, to blame for my inability to remember the name in spite of all my efforts; for I really ought not to have known it on that occasion either.’

In order to appreciate the intensity of our informant’s aversion to recalling this examination episode, the reader would have to know the high value he sets on his doctorate and for how many other things it has to serve as a substitute.3

(10) At this point I shall insert another example of the name of a town being forgotten. It is not perhaps as simple as the ones given above, but it will strike any one who is fairly well versed in investigations of this nature as authentic and valuable. The name of a town in Italy escaped the subject’s memory as a consequence of its great similarity in sound to a woman’s first name, with which a number of memories charged with affect were connected, which are doubtless not here reported in full. Sándor Ferenczi of Budapest, who observed this case of forgetting in himself, has treated it in the way in which one analyses a dream or a neurotic idea a - procedure which is fully justified.

‘To-day I was with a family that I know, and the conversation turned to cities of North Italy. Someone observed that they still showed traces of Austrian influence. A few of these cities were mentioned, and I wanted to give the name of one too, but it escaped me, although I knew I had spent two very pleasant days there - a fact which did not agree very well with Freud’s theory of forgetting. In place of the name I was looking for, the following associations forced themselves on me: Capua, Brescia, The Lion of Brescia.

‘The picture that I had of this "Lion" took the form of a marble statue standing before my eyes like a solid object; I noticed at once, however, that it had less of a resemblance to the lion on the Monument to Freedom at Brescia (of which I have only seen illustrations) than to the other celebrated marble lion which I have seen on the monument to the dead at Lucerne - the monument to the Swiss guards who fell at Tuileries

, and of which I have a miniature replica on my bookcase. And now at last the missing name came back to me: it was Verona.

‘At the same time I knew at once who was to blame for my amnesia. It was no other than a former servant of the family whose guest I was at the time. Her name was Veronika (Verona in Hungarian), and I had a strong antipathy to her because of her repulsive looks, her shrill, raucous voice and her insufferable assertiveness, to which she believed herself entitled by her length of service. At the same time the tyrannical way in which she used to treat the children of the house was intolerable to me. I now also understood the meaning of the associations.

‘My immediate association to Capua was caput mortuum. I very often compared Veronika’s head to a death’s head. The Hungarian word "kapszi" (avaricious) doubtless provided an additional determinant for the displacement. I also, of course, found the much more direct associative paths which connect Capua and Verona as geographical idea and as Italian words that have the same rhythm.4

‘The same is true for Brescia; but here too there were winding by-paths in the linkage of ideas.

‘My antipathy was at one time so violent that I found Veronika positively nauseating, and I had more than once expressed my astonishment that all the same it was possible for her to have an erotic life and be loved by someone. "Why," I said, "to kiss her would make one feel sick!"¹ Nevertheless, she could certainly long since have been brought into connection with the idea of the fallen Swiss Guards.

‘Brescia is very often mentioned, at any rate here in Hungary, in connection not with the lion but with another wild animal. The most hated name in this country, and in the north of Italy too, is that of General Haynau, commonly known as the "Hyaena of Brescia". Thus one thread in my thoughts ran from the hated tyrant Haynau viâ Brescia to the town of Verona, while the other led, viâ the idea of the animal that haunts the graves of the dead (which helped to determine the emergence in my mind of a monument to the dead), to the death’s head and to the disagreeable voice of Veronika - the victim of such gross abuse by my unconscious - who in her time had acted almost as tyrannically in this house as had the Austrian general after the Hungarian and Italian struggles for freedom.

‘Lucerne is connected with the thought of the summer which Veronika spent with her employers in the neighbourhood of the town of Lucerne, on the lake of that name. The Swiss Guard in turn recalls that she knew how to play the tyrant not only to the children but also to the grown-up members of the family, and fancied herself in the part of a "Garde-Dame ".

‘I must expressly remark that this antipathy of mine towards Veronika is - consciously - something that has long been surmounted. Since those times both her appearance and her manner have changed, greatly to her advantage, and I can meet her, though I have in fact little occasion for doing so, with genuinely warm feelings. As usual, my unconscious clings more tenaciously to my impressions: it is "retrospective" and resentful.²

‘The Tuileries are an allusion to another person, an elderly French lady, who on many occasions actually "guarded" the women of the house; she was respected by everyone, young and old - and no doubt somewhat feared as well was feared. For a while I was her élève for French conversation. The word élève further recalls that when I was on a visit to the brother-in-law of my present host, in northern Bohemia, I was very much amused because the local country-people called the élèves at the school of forestry there by the name of "Löwen"³. This entertaining memory may also have played a part in the displacement from the hyaena to the lion.’

¹ [The first half of the German word for ‘nausea’ (‘Brechreiz’) has a sound similar to the first syllable of ‘Brescia’.]

² [In German: ‘"nachträglich" und nachtragend.’]

³ [The dialect pronunciation of the first syllable of this word would resemble that of the second syllable of ‘élèves’.]5

(11) The next example, too, shows how a personal complex which is dominating someone at the time may cause a name to be forgotten in some very remote connection.

‘Two men, an older and a younger one, who six months before had made a trip together in Sicily, were exchanging recollections of those pleasant and memorable days. "Let’s see," said the younger, "what was the name of the place where we spent the night before making our trip to Selinunte? Wasn’t it Calatafimi?" The older one rejected it: "No, it certainly wasn’t, but I’ve forgotten the name too, though I recall most clearly all the details of our stay there. I only need to find someone else has forgotten a name, and it at once makes me forget it too. Let’s look for the name. But the only thing that occurs to me is Caltanisetta, which certainly isn’t right." "No," said the younger man, "the name begins with a ‘w’ or has a ‘w’ in it." "But there’s no ‘w’ in Italian," objected the older. "I really meant a ‘v’, and I only said ‘w’ because I’m so used to it in my own language." The older man still opposed the "v". "As a matter of fact," he declared, "I believe I’ve forgotten a lot of the Sicilian names already; this would be a good time to make some experiments. For example, what was the name of the place on a hill that was called Enna in antiquity? Oh, I know - Castrogiovanni." The next moment the younger man had recalled the lost name as well. "Castelvetrano," he exclaimed, and was pleased at being able to point to the "v" he had insisted on. For a short while the older one had no sense of recognition; but after he had accepted the name it was for him to explain why he had forgotten it. "Obviously," he said, "because the second half, ’-vetrano’, sounds like ‘veteran’. I know I don’t much like to think about growing old, and I have strange reactions when I’m reminded of it. For instance, I recently charged a very dear friend of mine in the strangest terms with having ‘left his youth far behind him’, for the reason that once before, in the middle of the most flattering remarks about me, he had added that I was ‘no longer a young man’. Another sign that my resistance was directed against the second half of the name Castelvetrano is that the initial sound recurred in the substitute name Caltanisetta." "What about the name Caltanisetta itself?" asked the younger man. "That," confessed the older one, "has always seemed to me like a pet name for a young woman."

‘Some time later he added: "Of course the name for Enna was also a substitute name. And it occurs to me now that Castrogiovanni - a name that forced its way to the front with the help of a rationalization - sounds like ‘giovane’ (young) in exactly the same way as the lost name Castelvetrano sounds like ‘veteran’ (old)."

‘The older man believed that in this way he had accounted for his forgetting the name. No investigation was made of the motive for the similar failure of the younger man’s memory.’6 Not only the motives, but also the mechanism governing the forgetting of names, deserve our interest. In a large number of cases a name is forgotten not because the name itself arouses such motives, but because - owing to similarity in sound and to assonance - it touches upon another name against which these motives do operate. If the determinants are relaxed in this way, the occurrence of the phenomenon will obviously be made very much easier, as the following examples show.

(12) Reported by Dr. Eduard Hitschmann (1913a): ‘Herr N. wanted to give someone the name of the firm of book sellers Gilhofer and Ranschburg. But however much he thought over it, only the name Ranschburg occurred to him, though he knew the firm perfectly well. He returned home feeling somewhat dissatisfied, and thought it sufficiently important to ask his brother (who was apparently already asleep) what the first half of the firm’s name was. His brother gave him the name without hesitation. Thereupon the word "Gallhof" immediately sprang to Herr N.’s mind as an association to "Gilhofer". Gallhof was the place where a few months before he had gone for a memorable walk with an attractive young lady. As a momento the lady had given him a present which was inscribed "A souvenir of the happy hours at Gallhof ". In the course of the days just before the name was forgotten, this present had been badly damaged, seemingly by accident, through N.’s shutting a drawer too hastily. He noticed this with a certain sense of guilt, for he was familiar with the meaning of symptomatic acts. At the time his feelings towards the lady were somewhat ambivalent: he certainly loved her, but he felt hesitation in the face of her desire that they should get married.’

(13) Reported by Dr. Hanns Sachs: ‘In a conversation about Genoa and its immediate surroundings, a young man wanted to mention the place called Pegli, but could only recall the name with an effort after racking his brains. On the way home he thought of the distressing manner in which so familiar a name had slipped away, and in doing so was led to a word sounding very similar: Peli. He knew that there was a South Sea island of that name, whose inhabitants still retained a few remarkable customs. He had read about them recently in an ethnological work and had at the time made up his mind to use the information in support of a hypothesis of his own. It then occurred to him that Peli was also the setting of a novel which he had read with interest and enjoyment - namely Van Zanten’s glücklichste Zeit by Laurids Bruun. The thoughts that had occupied his mind almost incessantly during the day centred round a letter he had received that same morning from a lady he was very fond of. This letter gave him reason to fear that he would have to forgo a meeting that had been arranged. After being in a very bad mood all day, he had gone out in the evening resolved not to plague himself any longer with the tiresome thought but to enjoy the social occasion in front of him, on which he in fact set an extremely high value, in as serene a mood as possible. It is clear that his resolution could have been gravely imperilled by the word Pegli, as its connection in sound with Peli was so close; and Peli in turn, having acquired a personal connection with himself by its ethnological interest, embodied not only Van Zanten’s but also his own "happiest time", and therefore the fears and anxieties as well which he had nursed all day long. It is characteristic that this simple explanation only became clear after a second letter from his friend had transformed his doubt into the happy certainty of seeing her again soon.’

This example may recall what might be described as its geographical neighbour, in which the name of the town of Nervi could not be remembered (Example 1). Thus we see how a pair of words that are similar in sound can have the same effect as a single word that has two meanings.

(14) When war broke out with Italy in 1915 I was able to make the observation upon myself that a whole quantity of Italian place-names which at ordinary times were readily available to me had suddenly been withdrawn from my memory. Like so many other Germans I had made it my habit to spend a part of my holidays on Italian soil, and I could not doubt that this large-scale forgetting of names was the expression of an understandable hostility to Italy which had now replaced my former partiality. In addition to this directly motivated forgetting of names, however, an indirect amnesia could also be detected, which it was possible to trace back to the same influence. I showed a tendency to forget non-Italian place-names as well; and on investigating the incidents I found that these names were in some way connected by means of remote similarities of sound with the proscribed enemy names. Thus I tormented myself one day in trying to recall the name of the Moravian town of Bisenz. When it finally came to my mind I at once recognized that this act of forgetting was to be laid to the charge of the Palazzo Bisenzi at Orvieto. The Hotel Belle Arti, where I had stayed on all my visits to Orvieto, is located in this palazzo. The most precious memories had naturally been the most severely damaged by the change in my emotional attitude.

Some examples may also help to remind us of the variety of purposes that can be served by the parapraxis of name-forgetting.

(15) Reported by A. J. Storfer (1914): ‘One morning a lady who lived in Basle received news that a friend of her youth, Selma X. of Berlin, who was just then on her honeymoon, was passing through Basle, but staying only one day. The Basle lady hurried straight away to her hotel. When the friends separated, they made an arrangement to meet again in the afternoon and to be with each other up to the time of the Berlin lady’s departure.

‘In the afternoon the Basle lady forgot about the rendezvous. I do not know what determined her forgetting it, yet in this particular situation (a meeting with a school-friend who has just married) various typical constellations are possible which could determine an inhibition against the repetition of the meeting. The point of interest in this case lies in a further parapraxis, which represents an unconscious safeguarding of the first one. At the time when she was to have met her friend from Berlin the Basle lady happened to be in company at another place. The recent marriage of the Viennese opera singer Kurz came up in conversation; the Basle lady gave vent to some critical remarks (!) about this marriage, but when she wanted to mention the singer by name, she found to her very great embarrassment that she could not think of her first name. (There is, as is well known, a particular tendency to give the first name also, precisely in cases where the surname is a monosyllable.) The Basle lady was all the more put out by her lapse of memory since she had often heard Kurz sing and ordinarily knew her (whole) name perfectly well. Before anyone had mentioned the missing first name the conversation took another direction.

‘In the evening of the same day our Basle lady was among a number of people, some of whom were the same as those she had been with in the afternoon. By a coincidence the conversation again turned to the marriage of the Viennese singer; and without any difficulty the lady produced the name "Selma Kurz". "Oh dear!" she at once exclaimed, "it’s just struck me - I’ve completely forgotten I had an appointment with my friend Selma this afternoon." A glance at the clock showed that her friend must have left already.’

We are perhaps not ready yet to appreciate all the aspects of this pretty example. The following is a simpler specimen, though here it was not a name but a foreign word that was forgotten, from a motive arising out of the situation. (We can already see that we are dealing with the same processes, whether they apply to proper names, first names, foreign words or sets of words.) Here it was a case of a young man forgetting the English word for ‘Gold’ - which is identical with the German word - so as to find an opportunity for carrying out an action he desired.

(16) Reported by Dr. Hanns Sachs: ‘A young man became acquainted in a pension with an English lady, whom he took a liking to. On the first evening of their acquaintance he was having a conversation with her in her native language, which he knew fairly well; and in the course of it he wanted to use the English word for "Gold". In spite of strenuous efforts the word would not come to him. Instead, the French or, the Latin aurum and the Greek chrysos obstinately forced themselves on him as substitutes, so that it needed quite an effort to reject them, though he knew for certain that they were not related at all to the word he was looking for. In the end the only way he could find of making himself understood was by touching a gold ring on the lady’s hand; and he was very much abashed on learning from her that the long-lost word for gold was exactly the same as the German one, namely "gold". The great value of this touching, for which the forgetting gave an opportunity, did not lie merely in the unobjectionable satisfaction of the instinct for laying hold or touching - for there are other opportunities for this which are eagerly exploited by lovers. It lay much more in the way in which it assisted in clarifying the prospects of the courtship. The lady’s unconscious would divine the erotic aim of the forgetting, hidden by its mask of innocence, especially if her unconscious was sympathetically drawn to the man she was talking with. The manner in which she treated his touching of her and accepted its motivation could in this way become a means - unconscious for both of them, yet full of significance - of reaching an understanding on the chances of the flirtation just begun.’0

(17) From J. Stärcke (1916) I report another interesting observation that concerns the forgetting and subsequent recovery of a proper name. This case is distinguished by the fact that the forgetting of the name was connected with the misquoting of a set of words from a poem, as in the example of the ‘Bride of Corinth’.

‘Z., an old jurist and philologist, was describing in company how in his student days in Germany he had known a quite exceptionally stupid student, and had some anecdotes to tell of his stupidity. He could not, however, recall the student’s name; he believed it began with a "W", but later took back the idea. He recalled that the stupid student later became a wine merchant. He then told another anecdote about the student’s stupidity, and once again expressed surprise that his name did not come back to him. "He was such an ass," he then remarked, "that I still don’t understand how I succeeded in drumming Latin into his head." A moment later he remembered that the name he was looking for ended in "... man". At this point we asked him if any other name ending in "man" occurred to him, and he gave "Erdmann ". "Who is that?" "That was another student of those days." His daughter, however, observed that there was also a Professor Erdmann. Some closer questioning revealed that this Professor Erdmann, who was the editor of a periodical, had recently refused to accept a piece of work submitted by Z., with which he partly disagreed, except in a shortened form; and Z. had been considerably put out. (In addition, I later discovered that years before, Z. had very probably expected to become professor in the same department in which Professor Erdmann now lectured. This, then, may have been another reason why the name touched on a sensitive spot.)

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