Autobiographical note 66 страница

If a furious raging against one’s own integrity and one’s own life can be hidden in this way behind apparently accidental clumsiness and motor inefficiency, it is not a very large step to find it possible to transfer the same view to mistakes that seriously endanger the lives and health of other people. What evidence I have to show that this view is a valid one is drawn from my experience with neurotics, and thus does not wholly meet the demands of the situation. I will give an account of a case in which something that was not strictly a faulty action but that rather deserves the name of a symptomatic or chance action gave me the clue which subsequently made it possible to resolve the patient’s conflict. I once undertook the task of bringing an improvement to the marriage of a very intelligent man, whose disagreements with his fondly attached young wife could undoubtedly be shown to have a real basis, but could not, as he himself admitted, be completely accounted for in that way. He was continually occupied with the thought of a divorce, which he then dismissed once more because of his warm love for his two small children. In spite of this he constantly returned to his intention and made no attempt to find a way of making the situation tolerable to himself. Such inability to deal with a conflict is taken by me as proof that unconscious and repressed motives have lent a hand in strengthening the conscious ones which are struggling against each other, and I undertake in such cases to end the conflict by psychical analysis. One day the man told me of a small incident which had frightened him extremely. He was romping with his elder child, who was by far his favourite; he was swinging him high in the air and down again, and once he swung him so high while he was standing at a particular spot that the top of the child’s head almost struck the heavy gas chandelier that was hanging there. Almost, but not quite - or perhaps just! No harm came to the child, but it was made giddy with fright. The father stood horrified with the child in his arms, and the mother had a hysterical attack. The peculiar adroitness of this imprudent movement and the violence of the parents’ reaction prompted me to look for a symptomatic act in this accident - one which aimed at expressing an evil intention directed against the beloved child. I was able to remove the contradiction between this and the father’s contemporary affection for his child by shifting the impulse to injure it back to the time when this child had been the only one and had been so small that its father had not yet had any reason to take an affectionate interest in it. It was then easy for me to suppose that, as he was getting little satisfaction from his wife, he may at that time have had a thought or formed a decision of this kind: ‘If this little creature that means nothing at all to me dies, I shall be free and able to get a divorce.’ A wish for the death of the creature that he now loved so dearly must therefore have persisted unconsciously. From this point it was easy to find the path by which this wish had become unconsciously fixated. A powerful determinant was in fact provided by a memory from the patient’s childhood: namely that the death of a small brother, for which his mother blamed his father’s negligence, had led to violent quarrels between the parents and threats of a divorce. The subsequent course of my patient’s marriage, as well as my therapeutic success, confirmed my conjecture.

Stärcke (1916) has given an example of the way in which creative writers do not hesitate to put a bungled action in the place of an intentional action and to make it in this way the source of the gravest consequences:

‘In one of Heijermans’ (1914) sketches there occurs an example of a bungled action, or, more precisely, of a faulty action which the author uses as a dramatic motif.

‘The sketch is called "Tom and Teddie". They are a pair of divers who appear in a variety theatre; their act is given in an iron tank with glass walls, in which they stay under water for a considerable time and perform tricks. Recently the wife has started an affair with another man, an animal-trainer. Her diver-husband has caught them together in the dressing-room just before the performance. Dead silence, menacing looks, with the diver saying: "Afterwards!" - The act begins. The diver is about to perform his hardest trick: he will remain "two and a half minutes under water in a hermetically sealed trunk". - This is a trick they had performed often enough; the trunk was locked and "Teddie used to show the key to the audience, who checked the time by their watches". She also used purposely to drop the key once or twice into the tank and then dive hurriedly after it, so as not to be too late when the time came for the trunk to be opened.

‘"This particular evening, January 31st, saw Tom locked up as usual by the neat fingers of his brisk and nimble wife. He smiled behind the peep-hole - she played with the key and waited for his warning sign. The trainer stood in the wings, in his impeccable evening dress, with his white tie and his horse-whip. Here was the ‘other man’. To catch her attention he gave a very short whistle. She looked at him, laughed, and with the clumsy gesture of someone whose attention is distracted she threw the key so wildly in the air that at exactly two minutes and twenty seconds, by an accurate reckoning, it fell by the side of the tank in the middle of the bunting covering the pedestal. No one had seen it. No one could see it. Viewed from the house the optical illusion was such that everyone saw the key fall into the water - and none of the stage hands heard it since the bunting muffled the sound.

‘"Laughing, Teddie clambered without delay, over the edge of the tank. Laughing - Tom was holding out well - she came down the ladder. Laughing, she disappeared under the pedestal to look there and, when she did not find the key at once, she bowed in front of the bunting with a priceless gesture, and an expression on her face as if to say ‘Gracious me! what a nuisance this is!’.

‘"Meanwhile Tom was grimacing in his droll way behind the peep-hole, as if he too was becoming agitated. The audience saw the white of his false teeth, the champing of his lips under the flaxen moustache, the comical bubble-blowing that they had seen earlier, when he was eating the apple. They saw his pale knuckles as he grappled and clawed, and they laughed as they had laughed so often already that evening.

‘"Two minutes and fifty-eight seconds...

‘"Three minutes and seven seconds... twelve seconds...

‘"Bravo! Bravo! Bravo!

‘"Then consternation broke out in the house and there was a shuffling of feet, when the stage hands and the trainer began to search too and the curtain came down before the lid had been raised.

‘"Six English dancing-girls came on - then the man with the ponies, dogs and monkeys. And so on.

‘"It was not till the next morning that the public knew there had been an accident, that Teddie had been left a widow...."

‘It is clear from this quotation what an excellent understanding the author must himself have had of the nature of a symptomatic act, seeing that he demonstrates to us so strikingly the deeper cause of the fatal clumsiness.’9

CHAPTER IX SYMPTOMATIC AND CHANCE ACTIONS

The actions described so far, in which we recognized the carrying out of an unconscious intention, made their appearance in the form of disturbances of other intended actions and concealed themselves behind the pretext of clumsiness. The ‘chance’ actions which are now to be discussed differ from ‘bungled’ actions merely in the fact that they scorn the support of a conscious intention and are therefore in no need of a pretext. They appear on their own account, and are permitted because they are not suspected of having any aim or intention. We perform them ‘without thinking there is anything in them’, ‘quite accidentally’, ‘just to have something to do’; and such information, it is expected, will put an end to any enquiry into the significance of the action. In order to be able to enjoy this privileged position, these actions, which no longer put forward the excuse of clumsiness, have to fulfil certain conditions: they must be unobtrusive and their effects must be slight.

I have collected a large number of such chance actions from myself and from others, and after closely examining the different examples I have come to the conclusion that the name of symptomatic acts is a better one for them. They give expression to something which the agent himself does not suspect in them, and which he does not as a rule intend to impart to other people but to keep to himself. Thus, exactly like all the other phenomena which we have so far considered, they play the part of symptoms.

The richest supply of such chance or symptomatic acts is in fact to be obtained during the psycho-analytic treatment of neurotics. I cannot resist quoting two examples from this source which show how extensively and in what detail these insignificant occurrences are determined by unconscious thoughts. The borderline between symptomatic acts and bungled actions is so ill-defined that I might equally well have included these examples in the last chapter.0

(1) During a session a young married woman mentioned by way of association that she had been cutting her nails the day before and ‘had cut into the flesh while she was trying to remove the soft cuticle at the bottom of the nail’. This is of so little interest that we ask ourselves in surprise why it was recalled and mentioned at all, and we begin to suspect that what we are dealing with is a symptomatic act. And in fact it turned out that the finger which was the victim of her small act of clumsiness was the ring-finger, the one on which a wedding ring is worn. What is more, it was her wedding anniversary; and in the light of this the injury to the soft cuticle takes on a very definite meaning, which can easily be guessed. At the same time, too, she related a dream which alluded to her husband’s clumsiness and her anaesthesia as a wife. But why was it the ring-finger on her left hand which she injured, whereas a wedding ring is worn on the right hand? Her husband is a lawyer, a ‘doctor of law’, and as a girl her affections belonged in secret to a physician (jokingly called ‘

Doktor der Linke’). A ‘left-handed marriage’, too, has a definite meaning.

(2) A young unmarried lady said to me: ‘Yesterday I quite unintentionally tore a hundred florin note in two and gave half to a lady who was visiting me. Am I to take this as a symptomatic act as well?’ Closer investigation disclosed the following particulars. The hundred florin note: - She devoted part of her time and means to charitable work. Together with another lady she was providing for the bringing up of an orphan. The hundred florins were the contribution sent to her by the other lady. She had put them in an envelope and placed it on her writing table for the time being.

The visitor was a lady of good standing whom she was assisting in another charitable cause. This lady wished to make a note of the names of a number of people whose support could be enlisted. There was no paper at hand, so my patient reached for the envelope on her desk, and without thinking of what it contained tore it in two; one piece she kept herself, so as to have a duplicate set of names, and the other she handed to her visitor. It should be observed that her act, though certainly inappropriate, was perfectly harmless. If a hundred florin note is torn up, it does not, as is well known, lose any of its value so long as it can be put together again completely from the fragments. The importance of the names on the piece of paper was a guarantee that the lady would not throw it away, and it was equally certain that she would restore the valuable contents as soon as she noticed them.

But what was the unconscious thought to which this chance action, made possible by forgetfulness, was meant to give expression? The visitor stood in a very definite relation to my patient’s treatment. It was this lady who had formerly recommended me to her as a doctor, and, if I am not mistaken, my patient felt herself under an obligation to her for this advice. Was the half of the hundred florin note perhaps meant to represent a fee for her services as an intermediary? That would still be very strange.

Further material was however forthcoming. A little time before, a woman who was an intermediary of a very different kind had enquired of a relative of the patient’s whether the young lady would perhaps like to make a certain gentleman’s acquaintance; and that morning, a few hours before the lady’s visit, the suitor’s letter of proposal had arrived and had caused much amusement. So when the lady opened the conversation by enquiring after my patient’s health, the latter might well have thought: ‘You certainly found me the right doctor, but if you could help me to get the right husband’ (with the further thought: ‘and to get a child’) ‘I should be more grateful.’ This thought, which was kept repressed, formed the starting-point from which the two intermediaries became fused into one, and she handed her visitor the fee which her phantasy was ready to give the other woman. This solution becomes entirely convincing when I add that I had been telling the patient about such chance or symptomatic acts only the evening before. She thereupon took the first opportunity of producing something analogous.

These extremely frequent chance and symptomatic acts might be arranged in three groups, according to whether they occur habitually, regularly under certain conditions, or sporadically. Actions of the first group (such as playing with one’s watch-chain, fingering one’s beard and so on), which can almost be taken as characteristics of the person concerned, trench upon the multifarious movements known as tics and no doubt deserve to be dealt with in connection with them. In the second group I include playing with a stick or scribbling with a pencil that one happens to be holding, jingling coins in one’s pocket, kneading bread-crumbs and other plastic materials, fiddling with one’s clothing in all kinds of ways and so forth. During psychical treatment idle play of this sort regularly conceals a sense and meaning which are denied any other form of expression. Generally the person concerned is quite unaware that he is doing anything of the kind or that he has modified his usual play in certain ways; and he fails to see and hear the effects of these actions. He does not, for example, hear the noise made by the jingling of coins, and, if his attention is drawn to it, he behaves as though he were astonished and incredulous. All the things that a person does with his clothing, often without realizing it, are no less important and deserve the doctor’s attention. Every change in the clothing usually worn, every small sign of carelessness - such as an unfastened button - every trace of exposure, is intended to express something which the wearer of the clothes does not want to say straight out and which for the most part he is unaware of. The interpretations of these small chance actions, and the evidence for these interpretations, emerge each time with sufficient certainty from the material which accompanies them during the session, from the topic that is under discussion and from the associations that occur when attention is drawn to the apparently chance action. Because of this I shall not proceed to support my assertions with examples accompanied by analyses; but I mention these actions because I believe that they have the same meaning in the case of normal people as they have in my patients.

3 I cannot refrain from showing by at least one example how close the connection can be between a symbolic action performed through force of habit and the most intimate and important aspects of a healthy person’s life:¹

‘As Professor Freud has taught us, symbolism plays a greater role in the childhood of normal people than earlier psycho-analytical experiences had led one to expect. In this connection the following short analysis may be of some interest, especially in view of its medical subject-matter.

‘A doctor on rearranging his furniture in a new house came across an old-fashioned, straight wooden stethoscope, and, after pausing to decide where he should put it, was impelled to place it on the side of his writing-desk in such a position that it stood exactly between his chair and the one reserved for his patients. The act in itself was somewhat odd, for two reasons. In the first place he does not use a stethoscope at all often (he is in fact a neurologist) and if he needs one he uses a binaural one. In the second place all his medical apparatus and instruments were kept in drawers, with the sole exception of this one. However, he gave no further thought to the matter until one day a patient, who had never seen a straight stethoscope, asked him what it was. On being told, she asked why he kept it just there; he answered in an off-hand way that that place was as good as any other. This started him thinking, however, and he wondered whether there had been any unconscious motive in his action, and being familiar with the psycho-analytical method he decided to investigate the matter.

‘The first memory that occurred to him was the fact that when a medical student he had been struck by the habit his hospital interne had of always carrying in his hand a straight stethoscope on his ward visits, although he never used it. He greatly admired this interne, and was much attached to him. Later on, when he himself became an interne, he contracted the same habit, and would feel very uncomfortable if by mistake he left his room without having the instrument to swing in his hand. The aimlessness of the habit was however shown, not only by the fact that the only stethoscope he ever used was a binaural one, which he carried in his pocket, but also in that it was continued when he was a surgical interne and never needed any stethoscope at all. The significance of these observations immediately becomes clear if we refer to the phallic nature of this symbolic action.

¹ Ernest Jones (1910a).4

‘He next recalled the fact that in his early childhood he had been struck by the family doctor’s habit of carrying a straight stethoscope inside his hat; he found it interesting that the doctor should always have his chief instrument handy when he went to see patients and only had to take off his hat (i. e. a part of his clothing) and "pull it out". As a small child he had been strongly attached to this doctor; and a brief self-analysis enabled him to discover that at the age of three and a half he had had a double phantasy concerning the birth of a younger sister - namely that she was the child, firstly, of himself and his mother, and secondly, of the doctor and himself. Thus in this phantasy he played both a masculine and a feminine part. He further recalled having been examined by the same doctor when he was six, and distinctly recollected the voluptuous sensation of feeling the doctor’s head near him pressing the stethoscope into his chest, and the rhythmic to-and-fro respiratory movement. At the age of three he had had a chronic chest affection which necessitated repeated examination, although he could not in fact still remember it.

‘At the age of eight he was impressed by being told by an older boy that it was the doctor’s custom to get into bed with his women patients. There certainly was some real basis for this rumour; at all events the women of the neighbourhood, including the subject’s own mother, were very attached to the young and handsome doctor. The subject had himself on several occasions experienced sexual temptations in regard to his women patients; he had twice fallen in love with one and finally had married one. It can hardly be doubted that his unconscious identification with the doctor was the chief motive for his adoption of the medical profession. Other analyses lead us to suppose that this is undoubtedly the commonest motive (though it is hard to determine just how common). In the present case it was doubly determined: firstly by the superiority of the doctor on several occasions over the father, of whom the son was very jealous, and secondly by the doctor’s knowledge of forbidden topics and his opportunities for sexual satisfaction.

‘Then came a dream which I have already published elsewhere (Jones 1910b); it was plainly of a homosexual-masochistic nature. In this dream a man who was a substitutive figure for the doctor attacked the subject with a "sword". The sword reminded him of a passage in the Völsung Nibelungen Saga, where Sigurd places a naked sword between himself and the sleeping Brünhilde. The same episode occurs in the Arthurian legend which our subject also knows well.

‘The meaning of the symptomatic act now becomes clear. Our doctor placed his straight stethoscope between himself and his women patients exactly as Sigurd placed his sword between himself and the woman he was not to touch. The act was a compromise-formation: it satisfied two impulses. It served to satisfy in his imagination the suppressed wish to enter into sexual relations with any attractive woman patient, but at the same time it served to remind him that this wish could not become a reality. It was, so to speak, a charm against yielding to temptation.

‘I might add that the following lines from Lord Lytton’s Richeleau made a great impression on the boy:

Beneath the rule of men entirely great

The pen is mightier than the sword....¹

and that he has become a prolific writer and uses an exceptionally large fountain pen. When I asked him why he needed it he gave the characteristic response: "I have so much to express."

‘This analysis again reminds us what profound insight is afforded into mental life by "innocent" and "meaningless" acts, and how early in life the tendency to symbolization develops.’

¹ Compare Oldham’s: ‘I wear my pen as others do their sword.’6 I can quote a further instance from my psychotherapeutic experience in which eloquent testimony was borne by a hand playing with a lump of bread-crumb. My patient was a boy of not yet thirteen; for almost two years he had been severely hysterical and I finally took him for psycho-analytic treatment after a lengthy stay in a hydropathic institution had brought no success. I was going on the assumption that he must have had sexual experiences and be tormented by sexual questions, which was likely enough at his age; but I refrained from helping him with explanations as I wished to put my hypotheses once again to the test. I was therefore naturally curious as to the way in which he would bring out what I was looking for. One day it struck me that he was rolling something between the fingers of his right hand; he would thrust it in his pocket and continue playing with it there, and then take it out again, and so on. I did not ask what he had in his hand; but he suddenly opened his hand and showed me. It was bread-crumb kneaded into a lump. At the next session he again brought along a similar lump and this time, while we were talking, he modelled figures out of it which excited my interest; he did this with incredible rapidity, with his eyes closed. They were undoubtedly little men, with a head, two arms and two legs, like the crudest prehistoric idols, and with an appendage between the legs which he drew out into a long point. He had hardly completed this when he kneaded the figure together again; later he allowed it to remain, but drew out a similar appendage from the surface of the back and other parts of the body in order to disguise the meaning of the first one. I wanted to show him I had understood him, but at the same time I wanted to prevent him from pretending that he had not thought of anything while he was engaged in making these figures. With this in mind I suddenly asked him if he remembered the story of the Roman king who gave his son’s envoy an answer in dumb-show in his garden. The boy failed to recall it, although he must have learnt it so much more recently than I. He asked whether it was the story of the slave and the answer that was written on his shaven head. No, I answered, that is from Greek history, and I told him the story. King Tarquinius Superbus had made his son Sextus find his way secretly into a hostile Latin city. The son, who had meanwhile collected a following in the city, sent a messenger to the king asking what steps he should take next. The king did not answer, but went into his garden, had the question repeated to him there, and then silently struck off the heads of the tallest and finest poppies. All that the messenger could do was to report this to Sextus, who understood his father and arranged for the most distinguished citizens in the city to be removed by assassination.

While I was speaking, the boy stopped kneading and, as I was on the point of describing what the king did in his garden and had reached the words ‘silently struck’, he made a lightning movement and tore the head off his little man. He had therefore understood me and had seen that he had been understood by me. I could now question him directly, I gave him the information he needed, and in a short time we had brought the neurosis to an end.

The symptomatic acts that can be observed in almost inexhaustible abundance in healthy people no less than in sick ones have more than one claim to our interest. To the doctor they often serve as valuable clues which enable him to get his bearings in new or unfamiliar situations; to the observer of human nature they often betray everything - and at times even more than he cares to know. A person who is familiar with their significance may at times feel like King Solomon who, according to oriental legend, understood the language of animals. One day I was to examine a young man, whom I did not know, at his mother’s house. As he came towards me I was struck by a large stain on his trousers - made by albumen, as I could tell from its peculiar stiff edges. After a moment’s embarrassment the young man apologized and said that he had felt hoarse and so had swallowed a raw egg; some of the slippery white of egg had probably fallen on his clothes. He was able to confirm this by pointing to the egg-shell, which was still visible in the room on a small plate. In this way the suspicious stain was given an innocent explanation; but when his mother had left us alone I thanked him for making my diagnosis so very much easier, and without more ado took as the basis of our discussion his confession that he was suffering from the troubles arising from masturbation. Another time I was paying a visit to a lady who was as rich as she was miserly and foolish, and who was in the habit of giving the doctor the task of working through a host of complaints before the simple cause of her condition could he reached. When I entered she was sitting at a small table and was busy arranging silver florins in little piles. On rising she knocked some of the coins on to the floor. I helped her to pick them up, and soon cut short her account of her sufferings by asking: ‘Has your noble son-in-law robbed you of so much money then?’ She denied this angrily, only to go on very soon afterwards to tell the sad story of the agitation which her son-in-law’s extravagance had caused her. She has not however sent for me since. I cannot claim that one always makes friends of those to whom one shows the meaning of their symptomatic acts.

Dr. J. E. G. van Emden (The Hague) reports another case of ‘confession through a parapraxis’. ‘In making out my bill, the waiter in a small restaurant in Berlin announced that the price of a particular dish had been increased by ten pfennigs, owing to the war. When I asked why this was not shown on the menu he replied that that must just be an oversight - the price had certainly gone up. He pocketed the money clumsily and dropped a ten pfennig coin on the table right in front of me.

‘"Now I know for certain that you’ve charged me too much. Would you like me to enquire at the cash desk?"

‘"Excuse me... one moment, please," and he had gone.

‘Needless to say, I allowed him his retreat, and, after he had apologized a couple of minutes later for having for some unknown reason confused my dish with another one, I let him keep the ten pfennigs as a reward for his contribution to the psychopathology of everyday life.’

Anyone who cares to observe his fellow men while they are at table will be able to observe the neatest and most instructive symptomatic acts.

Thus Dr. Hanns Sachs relates: ‘I happened to be present when an elderly couple, relatives of mine, took their evening meal. The lady suffered from a gastric complaint and had to observe a very strict diet. A piece of roast meat had just been set before the husband, and he asked his wife, who was not allowed to join in this course, to pass him the mustard. His wife opened the cupboard, reached inside, and put her little bottle of stomach drops on the table in front of her husband. There was of course no resemblance between the barrel-shaped mustard pot and the little bottle of drops which might have accounted for her picking up the wrong one; yet the wife did not notice her confusion of the two until her husband laughingly called her attention to it. The meaning of the symptomatic act needs no explanation.’

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