Autobiographical note 60 страница

¹ The Interpretation of Dreams (1900a), p. 725-6.4

(2) How did I come to read in a newspaper one day: ‘Im Fass across Europe’, instead of ‘Zu Fuss '? Solving this problem caused me prolonged difficulties. The first associations, it is true, indicated that it must have been the tub of Diogenes that I had in mind; and I had recently been reading about the art of the age of Alexander in a history of art. From there it was easy to recall Alexander’s celebrated remark: ‘If I were not Alexander I should like to be Diogenes.’ I also had some dim recollection of a certain Hermann Zeitung¹ who had set out on his travels packed in a trunk. But the train of associations declined to run on further, and I did not succeed in rediscovering the page in the history of art on which the remark had caught my eye. It was not till months later that the problem, which I had meanwhile set aside, suddenly sprang to my mind once more; and this time it brought its solution with it. I recalled the comment of a newspaper article on the strange means of transport that people were then choosing in order to go to Paris for the International Exhibition; and the passage, I believe, went on with a joking account of now one gentleman intended to get himself rolled in a tub to Paris by another gentleman. Needless to say the only motive of these people would be to draw attention to themselves by such folly. Hermann Zeitung was in fact the name of the man who had provided the first instance of such extraordinary methods of transport. It then struck me that I once treated a patient whose pathological anxiety about reading newspapers was to be explained as a reaction against his pathological ambition to see himself in print and to read of his fame in the newspapers. Alexander of Macedon was undoubtedly one of the most ambitious men that ever lived. He even complained that he would find no Homer to sing of his exploits. But how could I possibly have failed to recall that there is another Alexander who is closer to me, that Alexander is the name of my younger brother? I now immediately found the objectionable thought about this other Alexander that had had to be repressed, and what it was that had given rise to it at the present time. My brother is an authority on matters connected with tariffs and transport, and at a certain date he was due to receive the title of professor for his work in teaching at a commercial college. Several years ago my own name had been suggested at the University for the same promotion, without my having obtained it. At the time, our mother expressed her surprise that her younger son was to become a professor before her elder. This had been the situation when I was unable to solve my mistake in reading. Subsequently my brother too met with difficulties; his prospects of becoming professor sank even lower than my own. But at that point the meaning of the misreading suddenly became clear to me; it was as though the fading of my brother’s prospects had removed an obstacle. I had behaved as if I was reading of my brother’s appointment in the newspaper and was saying to myself: ‘How curious that a person can appear in the newspaper (i.e. can be appointed professor) on account of such stupidities (which is what his profession amounts to)!’ Afterwards I had no difficulty in finding the passage about Hellenistic art in the age of Alexander, and to my astonishment convinced myself that in my previous search I had repeatedly read parts of the same page and had each time passed over the relevant sentence as if I was under the dominance of a negative hallucination. However, this sentence did not contain anything at all to enlighten me - anything that would have deserved to be forgotten. I suspect that the symptom consisting of my failure to find the passage in the book was only formed with the purpose of leading me astray. I was intended to search for a continuation of the train of thought in the place where my enquiries encountered an obstacle - that is, in some idea connected with Alexander of Macedon; in this way I was to be more effectively diverted from my brother of the same name. In fact the device was entirely successful; all my efforts were directed towards rediscovering the lost passage in the history of art.

In this case the ambiguity of the word ‘Beförderung’ forms the associative bridge between the two complexes, the unimportant one which was aroused by the newspaper article, and the more interesting but objectionable one which asserted itself here in the form of a disturbance of what was to be read. It can be seen from this example that it is not always easy to explain occurrences such as this mistake in reading. At times one is even forced to postpone solving the problem to a more favourable time. But the harder the work of solving it proves to be, the more certainly can one anticipate that the disturbing thought which is finally disclosed will be judged by our conscious thinking as something alien and opposed to it.

¹ [‘Zeitung’, here a proper name, is also the German for ‘newspaper’.]5

(3) One day I received a letter from the neighbourhood of Vienna which brought me a piece of news that shocked me. I immediately called my wife and broke the news to her that ‘die arme¹ Wilhelm M.’ had fallen very seriously ill and been given up by the doctors. There must, however, have been a false ring about the words I chose to express my sorrow, for my wife grew suspicious, asked to see the letter, and declared she was certain it could not read as I had said it did, since no one called a wife by her husband’s first name, and in any case the lady who wrote the letter knew the wife’s first name perfectly well. I obstinately defended my assertion and referred to the very common use of visiting cards on which a woman styles herself by her husband’s first name. I was finally compelled to pick up the letter, and what we in fact read in it was ‘der² arme W. M.’, or rather something even plainer: ‘der arme Dr. W. M.’, which I had entirely overlooked. My mistake in reading therefore amounted to a kind of convulsive attempt to shift the sad news from the husband to the wife. The title that stood between the article, adjective and name did not fit in well with my requirement that the wife should be the one referred to. For this reason it was simply done away with in the process of reading. My motive for falsifying the message was not, however, that my feelings for the wife were less warm than those I had for her husband, but that the poor man’s fate had excited my fears for another person in close contact with me. This person shared with him what I knew to be one of the determinants of the illness.

¹ [The use of ‘die’, the feminine form of the definite article, implied that the person concerned was a woman.]

² [The masculine form of the definite article.]6

(4) There is one misreading which I find irritating and laughable and to which I am prone whenever I walk through the streets of a strange town on my holidays. On these occasions I read every shop sign that resembles the word in any way as ‘Antiquities’. This betrays the questing spirit of the collector.

(5) Bleuler relates in his important book, Affektivität, Suggestibilität, Paranoia (1906, 121): ‘Once while I was reading I had an intellectual feeling that I saw my name two lines further down. To my astonishment I only found the word "Blutkörperchen ". I have analysed many thousands of misreadings in the peripheral as well as the central visual field; but this is the grossest instance. Whenever I imagined I saw my name, the word that gave rise to the notion usually resembled my name much more, and in most cases every single letter of my name had to be found close together before I could make such an error. In this case, however, the delusion of reference and the illusion could be explained very easily: what I had just read was the end of a comment on a type of bad style found in scientific works, from which I did not feel free.’

(6) Hanns Sachs reports having read: ‘The things that strike other people are passed over by him in his "Steifleinenheit ".’ ‘This last word’, Sachs proceeds, ‘surprised me, and on looking more closely I discovered that it was "Stilfeinheit ". The passage occurred in the course of some remarks by an author whom I admired, which were in extravagant praise of a historian whom I do not find sympathetic because he exhibits the "German professorial manner" in too marked a degree.’

(7) Dr. Marcell Eibenschütz (1911) describes an instance of misreading in the course of his philological studies. ‘I was engaged in studying the literary tradition of the Book of Martyrs, a Middle High German legendary which I had undertaken to edit in the series of "German Mediaeval Texts" published by the Prussian Akademie der Wissenschaften. Very little was known about the work, which had never seen print. There was a single essay on it in existence, by Joseph Haupt (1872, 101 ff.). Haupt based his work not on an old manuscript but on a copy of the principal source, Manuscript C (Klosterneuburg). This copy had been made at a comparatively recent date (in the nineteenth century). It is preserved in the Hofbibliothek. At the end of the copy the following subscription¹ is to be found:

‘"Anno Domini MDCCCL in vigilia exaltacionis sancte crucis ceptus est iste liber et in vigilia pasce anni subsequentis finitus cum adiutorio omnipotentis per me Hartmanum de Krasna tunc temporis ecclesie niwenburgensis custodem."²

‘Now in his essay Haupt quotes this subscription in the belief that it comes from the writer of C himself, and supposes C to have been written in 1350 - a view involving a consistent misreading of the date 1850 in Roman numerals - in spite of his having copied the subscription perfectly correctly and in spite of its having been printed perfectly correctly (i.e. as MDCCCL) in the essay, in the passage referred to.

¹ [I.e. signature or explanatory paragraph at the end of a document.]

² [‘This book was begun on the Eve of Holy Cross Day in the Year of Our Lord 1850, and was finished on Easter Saturday in the following year; it was made, with the aid of the Almighty, by me, Hartman of Krasna, at that time sacrist of Klosterneuburg.’]8

‘Haupt’s information proved the source of much embarrassment to me. In the first place, being an entire novice in the world of scholarship, I was completely dominated by Haupt’s authority, and for a long time I read the date given in the subscription lying in front of me - which was perfectly clearly and correctly printed - as 1350 instead of 1850, just as Haupt had done. I did this even though no trace of any subscription could be found in the original Manuscript C, which I used, and though it further transpired that no monk by the name of Hartman had lived at Klosterneuburg at any time in the fourteenth century. And when at last the veil fell from before my eyes I guessed what had happened; and further investigation confirmed my suspicion. The subscription so often referred to is in fact to be found only in the copy used by Haupt, and is the work of its copyist, P. Hartman Zeibig, who was born at Krasna in Moravia, was Master of the Augustinian choir at Klosterneuburg, and who as sacrist of the monastery made a copy of Manuscript C and appended his name in the ancient fashion at the end of his copy. The mediaeval phraseology and the old orthography of the subscription doubtless played their part in inducing Haupt always to read 1350 instead of 1850, alongside his wish to be able to tell his readers as much as possible about the work he was discussing, and therefore also to date Manuscript C. (This was the motive for the parapraxis.)'

(8) In Lichtenberg’s Witzige und Satirische Einfälle a remark occurs which is no doubt derived from a piece of observation and which comprises virtually the whole theory of misreading: ‘He had read Homer so much that he always read "Agamemnon" instead of "angenommen [supposed]".’

For in a very large number of cases it is the reader’s preparedness that alters the text and reads into it something which he is expecting or with which he is occupied. The only contribution towards a misreading which the text itself need make is that of affording some sort of resemblance in the verbal image, which the reader can alter in the sense he requires. Merely glancing at the text, especially with uncorrected vision, undoubtedly increases the possibility of such an illusion, but it is certainly not a necessary precondition for it.

(9) I have an impression that no parapraxis was so greatly encouraged by war conditions - which brought us all such constant and protracted preoccupations - as this particular one of misreading. I have been able to observe a large number of instances of it, but unfortunately I have kept records of only a few of them. One day I picked up a mid-day or evening paper and saw in large print: ‘Der Friede von Görz [The Peace of Gorizia].’ But no, all it said was: ‘Der Feinde vor Görz [The Enemy before Gorizia].’ It is easy for someone who has two sons fighting at this very time in that theatre of operations to make such a mistake in reading. - Someone else found an ‘old Brotkarte [bread card]’ mentioned in a certain context; when he looked at this more attentively, he had to replace it by ‘old Brokate [brocades]’. It is perhaps worth mentioning that at a particular house, where this man is often a welcome guest, it is his habit to make himself agreeable to the mistress by handing his bread cards over to her. - An engineer, whose equipment had never stood up for long to the dampness in a tunnel that was under construction, was astonished to read a laudatory advertisement of goods made of ‘Schundleder [shoddy leather]’. But tradesmen are not usually so candid; what was being recommended was ‘Seehundleder [sealskin]’.

The reader’s profession or present situation, too, determines the outcome of his misreading. A philologist, whose most recent, and excellent, works had brought him into conflict with his professional colleagues, read ‘

Sprachstrategie [language strategy]’ in mistake for ‘Schachstrategie [chess strategy]’. - A man who was taking a walk in a strange town just when the action of his bowels was timed to occur by a course of medical treatment read the word ‘Closet-House’ on a large sign on the first storey of a tall shop-building. His satisfaction on seeing it was mixed with a certain surprise that the obliging establishment should be in such an unusual place. The next moment, however, his satisfaction vanished; a more correct reading of the word on the sign was ‘Corset-House’.

0 (10) In a second group of cases the part which the text contributes to the misreading is a much larger one. It contains something which rouses the reader’s defences - some information or imputation distressing to him - and which is therefore corrected by being misread so as to fit in with a repudiation or with the fulfilment of a wish. In such cases we are of course obliged to assume that the text was first correctly understood and judged by the reader before it underwent correction, although his consciousness learnt nothing of this first reading. Example (3) above is of this kind; and I include here a further, highly topical one given by Eitingon (1915), who was at the military hospital at Igló at the time.

‘Lieutenant X., who is in our hospital suffering from a traumatic war neurosis, was one day reading me a poem by the poet Walter Heymann, who fell in battle at so early an age. With visible emotion he read the last lines of the final stanza as follows.

Wo aber steht’s geschrieben, frag’ ich, dass von allen

Ich übrig bleiben soll, ein andrer für mich fallen?

Wer immer von euch fällt, der stirbt gewiss für mich;

Und ich soll übrig bleiben? warum denn nicht?¹

[But where is it decreed, I ask, that out of all

I should alone be left, my fellow for me fall?

Whoever of you falls, for me that man doth die;

And I - am I alone to live? Why should not I?]

‘My surprise caught his attention, and in some confusion he read the line correctly:

Und ich soll übrig bleiben? warum denn ich?

[And I - am I alone to live then? Why should I?]

‘I owe to Case X. some analytic insight into the psychical material of these "traumatic war neuroses", and in spite of the circumstances prevailing in a war hospital with a large number of patients and only a few doctors - circumstances so unfavourable to our way of working - it was then possible for me to see a little way beyond the shell explosions which were so highly esteemed as the "cause" of the illness.

‘In this case, too, were to be seen the severe tremors which give pronounced cases of these neuroses a similarity that is so striking at the first glance, as well as apprehensiveness, tearfulness, and a proneness to fits of rage, accompanied by convulsive infantile motor manifestations, and to vomiting ("at the least excitement").

‘The psychogenic nature of this last symptom in particular - above all in its contribution to the secondary gain from the illness - must have impressed everyone. The appearance in the ward of the hospital commandant who from time to time inspected the convalescent cases, or a remark made by an acquaintance in the street - "You look in really excellent form, you’re certainly fit now" - is enough to produce an immediate attack of vomiting.

‘"Fit... go back to service... why should I?"'

¹ From ‘Den Ausziehenden’ [‘To Those who have Gone Forth’] in Kriegsgedichte und Feldpostbriefe [War Poems and Letters from the Front] by Walter Heymann. 1

(11) Dr. Hanns Sachs (1917) has reported some other cases of ‘war’ misreading:

‘A close acquaintance of mine had repeatedly declared to me that when his turn came to be called up he would not make any use of his specialist qualifications, which were attested by a diploma; he would waive any claim based on them for being found suitable employment behind the lines and he would enlist for service at the front. Shortly before the call-up date in fact arrived, he told me one day in the curtest way, and without giving any further reason, that he had submitted the evidence of his specialist training to the proper authorities and as a result would shortly be assigned to a post in industry. Next day we happened to meet in a post-office. I was standing up at a desk and writing; he came in, looked over my shoulder for a while and then said: "Oh! the word at the top there’s ‘Druckbogen [printer’s proofs]’ - I’d read it as ‘

Drückeberger [shirker]’."'

(12) ‘I was sitting in a tram and reflecting on the fact that many of the friends of my youth who had always been taken as frail and weakly were now able to endure the most severe hardships - ones which would quite certainly be too much for me. While in the middle of this disagreeable train of thought, I read, only half attentively, a word in large black letters on a shop-sign that we were passing: "Iron Constitution". A moment later it struck me that this word was an inappropriate one to be found on the board of a business-firm; I turned round hastily and catching another glimpse of the sign saw that it really read: "Iron Construction".’ (Sachs, ibid.)

(13) ‘The evening papers carried a Reuter message, which subsequently proved to be incorrect, to the effect that Hughes had been elected President of the United States. This was followed by a short account of the supposed President’s career, in which I came across the information that Hughes had completed his studies at Bonn University. It struck me as strange that this fact had received no mention in the newspaper discussions during all the weeks before the day of the election. On taking a second look I found that all the text in fact contained was a reference to Brown University. The explanation of this gross case, in which the misreading had called for a fairly violent twist, depended - apart from my haste in reading the newspaper - chiefly upon my thinking it desirable that the new President’s sympathy for the Central European Powers, as the basis for good relations in the future, should be based on personal motives as well as political ones.’ (Sachs, ibid.)

2(B) SLIPS OF THE PEN

(1) On a sheet of paper containing short daily notes mainly of a business kind I was surprised to find, among some entries correctly dated ‘September’, the wrongly written date ‘Thursday, October 20'. It is not difficult to explain this anticipation - and to explain it as the expression of a wish. A few days before, I had returned fresh from my holiday travels, and I felt ready for plenty of professional work; but there were not yet many patients. On my arrival I had found a letter from a patient to say she was coming on October 20. When I made an entry for the same day of the month in September I may well have thought: ‘X. should have been here already; what a waste of a whole month!’, and with that thought in mind I brought the date forward a month. In this case the disturbing thought can scarcely be called an objectionable one; and for this reason I knew the solution of the slip of the pen as soon as I had noticed it. - In the autumn of the following year I made another slip of the pen which was precisely analogous and had a similar motive. - Ernest Jones has made a study of slips like these in writing dates; in most cases they could be clearly recognized as having reasons.

(2) I had received the proofs of my contribution to the Jahresbericht für Neurologie und Psychiatrie, and I had naturally to revise the names of authors with particular care, since they are of various nationalities and therefore usually cause the compositor very great difficulty. I did in fact find some foreign sounding names which were still in need of correction; but strangely enough there was one name which the compositor had corrected by departing from my manuscript. He was perfectly right to do so. What I had in fact written was ‘Buckrhard’, which the compositor guessed should be ‘Burckhard’. I had actually praised the useful treatise which an obstetrician of that name had written on the influence of birth upon the origin of children’s palsies, and I was not aware of having anything to hold against him; but he has the same name as a writer in Vienna who had annoyed me by an unintelligent review of my Interpretation of Dreams. It is just as if in writing the name Burckhard, meaning the obstetrician, I had had a hostile thought about the other Burckhard, the writer;¹ for distorting names is very often a form of insulting their owners, as I have mentioned above in discussing slips of the tongue.

¹ Compare the scene in Julius Caesar, III, 3:

CINNA Truly, my name is Cinna.

A CITIZEN Tear him to pieces; he’s a conspirator.

CINNA I am Cinna the poet...

I am not Cinna the conspirator.

ANOTHER CITIZEN. It is no matter, his name’s Cinna; pluck but

his name out of his heart, and turn him going.

(3) This assertion is very neatly confirmed by a self-observation of Storfer’s (1914), in which the author exposes with commendable frankness the motives that prompted him to recollect the name of a supposed rival wrongly and then to write it down in a distorted form:

‘In December, 1910, I saw a book by Dr. Eduard Hitschmann in the window of a bookshop in Zurich. Its subject was Freud’s theory of the neuroses and it was new at the time. Just then I was at work on the manuscript of a lecture on the basic principles of Freud’s psychology, which I was shortly to give before a University society. In the introductory part of the lecture which I had already written, I had referred to the historical development of Freud’s psychology from his researches in an applied field, to certain consequent difficulties in giving a comprehensive account of its basic principles, and also to the fact that no general account of them had yet appeared. When I saw the book (whose author was till then unknown to me) in the shop window, I did not at first think of buying it. Some days later, however, I decided to do so. The book was no longer in the window. I asked the bookseller for it and gave the author’s name as "Dr Eduard Hartmann". The bookseller corrected me: "I think you mean Hitschmann", and brought me the book.

‘The unconscious motive for the parapraxis was obvious. I had so to speak given myself the credit for having written a comprehensive account of the basic principles of psycho-analytic theory, and obviously regarded Hitschmann’s book with envy and annoyance since it took some of the credit away from me. I told myself, on the lines of The Psychopathology of Everyday Life, that the changing of the name was an act of unconscious hostility. At the time I was satisfied with this explanation.

‘Some weeks later I noted down this parapraxis. On this occasion I raised the further question of why Eduard Hitschmann had been altered precisely to Eduard Hartmann. Could I have been brought to the name of the well-known philosopher merely because it was similar to the other one? My first association was the memory of a pronouncement which I once heard from Professor Hugo von Meltzl, an enthusiastic admirer of Schopenhauer, and which ran roughly as follows: "Eduard von Hartmann is a botched Schopenhauer, a Schopenhauer turned inside out." The affective trend by which the substitutive-formation for the forgotten name was determined was therefore: "No, there will probably not be much in this Hitschmann and his comprehensive account; he probably stands to Freud as Hartmann does to Schopenhauer."

‘I had, as I say, noted down this case of determined forgetting with the forgotten word replaced by a substitute.

‘Six months later I came upon the sheet of paper on which I had made the note. I then observed that instead of Hitschmann I had throughout written Hintschmann.’¹

¹ [‘Hintsch’ is a dialect word for ‘asthma’ or, more generally, ‘pest’.]4

(4) Here is what seems to be a more serious slip of the pen: I might perhaps equally well have included it among ‘bungled actions’:

I intended to draw the sum of 300 kronen from the Post Office Savings Bank, which I wanted to send to an absent relative for purposes of medical treatment. At the same time I noticed that my account stood at 4, 380 kronen and decided to bring it down on this occasion to the round sum of 4,000 kronen which was not to be touched in the near future. After I had duly written out the cheque and cut off the figures corresponding to the sum, I suddenly noticed that I had not asked for 380 kronen as I intended, but for exactly 438 kronen and I took alarm at the unreliability of my conduct. I soon realized that my alarm was not called for; I was not now any poorer than I had been before. But it took me a good deal of reflection to discover what influence had disturbed my first intention, without making itself known to my consciousness. To begin with I started on the wrong line; I tried subtracting 380 from 438, but I had no idea afterwards what to do with the difference. Finally a thought suddenly struck me which showed me the true connection. Why, 438 was ten per cent of the total account, 4, 380 kronen! Now a ten per cent discount is given by booksellers. I recalled that a few days earlier I had picked out a number of medical books in which I was no longer interested in order to offer them to a bookseller for precisely 300 kronen. He thought the price I was asking was too high, and promised to give me a definite answer within the next few days. If he accepted my offer he would replace the exact sum which I was to spend on the invalid. There is no doubt that I regretted this expenditure. My affect on perceiving my error can be understood better as a fear of growing poor as a result of such expenditures. But both these feelings, my regret at the expenditure and my anxiety over becoming poor that was connected with it, were entirely foreign to my consciousness; I did not have a feeling of regret when I promised the sum of money, and would have found the reason for it laughable. I should probably not have believed myself in any way capable of such an impulse had I not become fairly familiar, through my psycho-analytic practice with patients, with the part played by the repressed in mental life, and had I not had a dream a few days before which called for the same solution.¹

¹ This is the one which I took as the specimen dream in my short work On Dreams (1901a). 5

(5) I quote the following case from Wilhelm Stekel, and can also vouch for its authenticity:

‘A simply incredible example of a slip of the pen and misreading occurred in the editing of a widely-read weekly periodical. The proprietors in question had been publicly described as "venil"; and an article in defence and vindication was clearly called for. One was in fact prepared: it was written with great warmth and feeling. The editor-in-chief read the article, while the author naturally read it several times in manuscript and then once more in galley-proof; everyone was perfectly satisfied. Suddenly the printer’s reader came forward and pointed out a small mistake which had escaped everyone’s notice. There it was, plainly enough: "Our readers will bear witness to the fact that we have always acted in the most self-seeking manner for the good of the community." It is obvious that it should have read: "in the most unself-seeking manner". But the true thoughts broke though the emotional statement with elemental force.’

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