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Autobiographical note 68 страница




 

Girls who are proud of having beautiful hair are able to manage their combs and hairpins in such a way that their hair comes down in the middle of a conversation.

Some men scatter small change out of their trouser pockets while they are lying down during treatment and in that way pay whatever fee they think appropriate for the session.

People who forget to take away articles they have brought to the physician’s house, such as pince-nez, gloves and purses, are showing by this that they cannot tear themselves away and would like to come back soon. Ernest Jones says: ‘One can almost measure the success with which a physician is practising psychotherapy, for instance, by the size of the collection of umbrellas, handkerchiefs, purses, and so on, that he could make in a month.’

 

The slightest actions of a habitual nature which are performed with a minimum of attention, such as winding up one’s watch before going to sleep, switching off the light before leaving a room, etc., are subject from time to time to disturbances that unmistakably demonstrate the influence of unconscious complexes upon what would seem to be the most fixed habits. Maeder, writing in the periodical Coenobium, tells of a house-physician who decided to go into town one evening for an important engagement, although he was on duty and was not supposed to leave the hospital. When he returned he was surprised to find the light on in his room. He had forgotten to turn it off when he went out, which was something that he had never failed to do before. But he soon grasped the motive for his forgetfulness. The chief resident medical officer in the hospital would naturally have concluded from the light in the house-physician’s room that he was at home.

 

A man overburdened with worries and subject to occasional depressions assured me that he regularly found in the morning that his watch had run down whenever the evening before life had seemed to be altogether too harsh and unfriendly. By omitting to wind up his watch he was giving symbolic expression to his indifference about living till the next day.

Another man, whom I do not know personally, writes: ‘After fate had dealt me a hard blow, life seemed so harsh and unfriendly that I imagined I had not sufficient strength to live through the next day. I then noticed that almost every day I forgot to wind up my watch. Previously I had never failed to do so; it was something I did regularly before going to bed, as an almost mechanical and unconscious act. But now I only very rarely remembered to do it, and that was when I had something important or specially interesting ahead of me. Should this too be considered a symptomatic act? I could not explain it to myself at all.’

 

If anyone takes the trouble, as Jung (1907) and Maeder (1909) have done, to note the tunes that he finds himself humming, unintentionally and often without noticing he is doing so, he will pretty regularly be able to discover the connection between the words of the song and a subject that is occupying his mind.1

 

The subtler determinants, too, of the expression of one’s thoughts in speaking or writing deserve careful attention. We believe that in general we are free to choose what words we shall use for clothing our thoughts or what images for disguising them. Closer observation shows that other considerations determine this choice, and that behind the form in which the thought is expressed a glimpse may be had of a deeper meaning - often one that is not intended. The images and turns of phrase to which a person is particularly given are rarely without significance when one is forming a judgement of him; and others often turn out to be allusions to a theme which is being kept in the background at the time, but which has powerfully affected the speaker. In the course of some theoretical discussions I heard someone at a particular time repeatedly using the expression: ‘If something suddenly shoots through one’s head’. I happened to know that he had recently received news that a Russian bullet had passed right through the cap hat his son was wearing on his head.’

 

CHAPTER X ERRORS

 

Errors of memory are distinguished from forgetting accompanied by paramnesia by the single feature that in the former the error (the paramnesia) is not recognized as such but finds credence. The use of the term ‘error’, however, seems to depend on yet another condition. we have remembered it wrongly We speak of ‘being in error’ rather than of ‘remembering wrongly’ where we wish to emphasize the characteristic of objective reality in the psychical material which we are trying to reproduce - that is to say, where what we are trying to remember is something different from a fact of our own psychical life: something, rather, that is open to confirmation or refutation by the memory of other people. The antithesis to an error of memory in this sense is ignorance.

 

In my Interpretation of Dreams (1900a) I was responsible for a number of falsifications which I was astonished to discover after the book was published. They concerned historical points and, in general, points of fact. After closer examination I found that they did not owe their origin to my ignorance, but are traceable to errors of memory which analysis is able to explain.

(1) On page 979 I refer to the town of Marburg - a name also found in Styria - as Schiller’s birthplace. The error occurs in the analysis of a dream which I had during a journey by night and from which I was woken by the guard calling out the name of Marburg station. In the content of the dream someone asked a question about a book by Schiller. In fact Schiller was not born at the university town of Marburg [in Hesse] but at Marbach in Swabia. Moreover I can assert that I have always known this.

 

(2) On page 681 Hannibal’s father is called Hasrubal. This error annoyed me especially, but it furnished me with the strongest corroboration of my view of such errors. There must be few readers of my book who are better acquainted with the history of the house of Barca than its author, who penned this error and who overlooked it in three sets of proofs. The name of Hannibal’s father was Hamilcar Barca - Hasrubal was the name of Hannibal’s brother, as well as of his brother-in-law and predecessor in command.

 

(3) On pages 735 and 1043 I state that Zeus emasculated his father Kronos and dethroned him. I was, however, erroneously carrying this atrocity a generation forward; according to Greek mythology it was Kronos who committed it on his father Uranus.¹

How is it to be explained that my memory provided me at these points with what was incorrect, while otherwise - as the reader of the book can see for himself - it put at my disposal the most out-of-the-way and unusual material? And how, too, did I pass over these errors while I carefully went through three sets of proofs - as if I had been struck blind?

 

Goethe said of Lichtenberg: ‘Where he makes a jest a problem lies concealed.’ Similarly it can be said of the passages in my book that I have quoted here: where an error makes its appearance a repression lies behind it - or more correctly, an insincerity, a distortion, which is ultimately rooted in repressed material. In analysing the dreams reported there I was compelled, by the very nature of the themes to which the dream-thoughts related, on the one hand to break off the analysis at some point before it had been rounded off, and on the other hand to take the edge off some indiscreet detail by mild distortion. I could not do otherwise, and I had in fact no other choice if I wished to bring forward examples and evidence at all. My awkward position was a necessary result of the peculiar character of dreams, which consists in giving expression to repressed material - in other words, to material that is inadmissible to consciousness. (In spite of this it would seem that enough was still left to give offence to some sensitive souls.) I did not succeed, however, in carrying through the distortion or concealment of the thoughts, whose continuation was known to me, without leaving some trace of them behind. What I wanted to suppress often succeeded against my will in gaining access to what I had chosen to relate and appeared in it in the form of an error that I failed to notice. Moreover, the same theme is at the bottom of all the three examples I have given: the errors are derivatives of repressed thoughts connected with my dead father.

 

¹ This was not a complete error. The Orphic version of the myth makes Zeus repeat the process of emasculation on his father Kronos. (See Roscher’s Lexicon of Mythology.)4

 

(1) Anyone who reads through the dream-analysed on p. 744 will in part find undisguisedly, and will in part be able to guess from hints, that I have broken off at thoughts which would have contained an unfriendly criticism of my father. In the continuation of this train of thoughts and memories there in fact lies an annoying story in which books play a part, and a business friend of my father’s who bears the name of Marburg - the same name that woke me when it was called out at Marburg station on the Südbahn. In the analysis I tried to suppress this Herr Marburg from myself and from my readers; he took his revenge by intruding where he did not belong and changing the name of Schiller’s birthplace from Marbach to Marburg.

 

(2) The error of putting Hasrubal instead of Hamilcar, the brother’s name instead of the father’s, occurred precisely in a context that concerned the Hannibal-phantasies of my school years and my dissatisfaction with my father’s behaviour towards the `enemies of our people’. I could have gone on to tell how my relationship with my father was changed by a visit to England, which resulted in my getting to know my half-brother, the child of my father’s first marriage, who lived there. My brother’s eldest son is the same age as I am. Thus the relations between our ages were no hindrance to my phantasies of how different things would have been if I had been born the son not of my father but of my brother. These suppressed phantasies falsified the text of my book at the place where I broke off the analysis, by forcing me to put the brother’s name for the father’s.

 

(3) It is to the influence of the memory of this same brother that I attribute my error in advancing by a generation the mythological atrocities of the Greek pantheon. One of my brother’s admonitions lingered long in my memory. `One thing,’ he had said to me, `that you must not forget is that as far as the conduct of your life is concerned you really belong not to the second but to the third generation in relation to your father.’ Our father had married again in later life and was therefore much older than his children by his second marriage. I made the error already described at the exact point in the book at which I was discussing filial piety.

 

It has also occasionally happened that friends and patients, whose dreams I have reported, or have alluded to in the course of my dream-analyses, have drawn my attention to the fact that the details of the events experienced by us together have been inaccurately related by me. These again could be classified as historical errors. After being put right I have examined the various cases and here too I have convinced myself that my memory of the facts was incorrect only where I had purposely distorted or concealed something in the analysis. Here once again we find an unobserved error taking the place of an intentional concealment or repression.

 

These errors that derive from repression are to be sharply distinguished from others which are based on genuine ignorance. Thus, for example, it was ignorance which made me think during an excursion to the Wachau that I had come to the home of Fischhof, the revolutionary leader. The two places merely have the same name: Fischhof’s Emmersdorf is in Carinthia. I, however, knew no better.5

 

(4) Here is another instructive error that put me to shame, an example of what might be called temporary ignorance. One day a patient reminded me to give him the two books on Venice that I had promised him, as he needed them in preparing for a journey at Easter. ‘I have them ready,’ I replied, and went to the library to fetch them. The truth, however, was that I had forgotten to look them out, for I did not entirely approve of my patient’s journey, which I saw as an unnecessary interruption of the treatment and a material loss to the physician. I therefore took a hasty look round the library for two books I had had my eye on. One was ‘Venice, City of Art’; but besides this I thought I must own a historical work in a similar series. Quite right, there it was: ‘The Medici’. I took it and brought it to my waiting patient, only ashamedly to acknowledge the error. In reality I of course knew that the Medici have nothing to do with Venice, but for a short time it did not strike me as in any way incorrect. I now had to be fair; as I had so frequently confronted my patient with his own symptomatic acts I could only vindicate my authority in his eyes by being honest and showing him the motives (which I had kept secret) for my disapproval of his journey.

 

It may, in general, seem astonishing that the urge to tell the truth is so much stronger than is usually supposed. Perhaps, however, my being scarcely able to tell lies any more is a consequence of my occupation with psycho-analysis. As often as I try to distort something I succumb to an error or some other parapraxis that betrays my insincerity, as can be seen in this last example and in the previous ones.

Of all parapraxes errors seem to have the least rigid mechanism. That is to say, the occurrence of an error is a quite general indication that the mental activity in question has had to struggle with a disturbing influence of some sort or other; but the particular form that the error takes is not determined by the quality of the concealed disturbing idea. We may add here retrospectively that the same thing can be assumed to be true of many simple cases of slips of the tongue and pen. Every time we make a slip in talking or writing we may infer that there has been a disturbance due to mental processes lying outside our intention; but it must be admitted that slips of the tongue and of the pen often obey the laws of resemblance, of indolence or of the tendency to haste, without the disturbing element succeeding in imposing any part of its own character on the resulting mistake in speech or writing. It is the compliance of the linguistic material which alone makes the determining of the mistakes possible, and at the same time sets the limits up to which the determining can go.

 

To avoid confining myself entirely to my own errors, I shall report a few examples that might indeed have been included just as well among slips of the tongue and bungled actions; this is, however, a matter of indifference, since all these forms of parapraxis are equivalent to one another.

(5) I forbade a patient to telephone to the girl he was in love with - but with whom he himself wanted to break off relations - since each conversation served only to renew the struggle about giving her up. He was to write his final decision to her though there were difficulties about delivering letters to her. He called on me at one o’clock to tell me he had found a way of getting round these difficulties, and amongst other things asked if he might quote my authority as a physician. At two o’clock he was occupied in composing the letter that was to end the relationship, when he suddenly broke off and said to his mother who was with him: ‘Oh! I’ve forgotten to ask the professor if I may mention his name in the letter.’ He rushed to the telephone, put through his call and said into the instrument: ‘May I speak to the professor, please, if he’s finished dinner?’ In answer he got an astonished: ‘Adolf, have you gone mad?’ It was the same voice which by my orders he should not have heard again. He had simply ‘made an error’, and instead of the physician’s number he had given the girl’s.

 

(6) A young lady was to pay a visit in the Habsburgergasse to a friend, a lady who had recently been married. She spoke about it while the family were at table, but said in error that she had to go to the Babenbergergasse. Some of those at the table laughingly drew her attention to her error - or slip of the tongue (according to choice) - which she had not noticed. In fact two days before this the republic had been proclaimed in Vienna; the black and yellow had vanished and been replaced by the colours of the old Ostmark - red, white and red - and the Hapsburgs had been deposed. Our speaker introduced the change of dynasty into her friend’s address. In Vienna there is indeed a very well known Babenbergerstrasse, but no Viennese would speak of it as a ‘Gasse’.¹

 

¹ [In Vienna two terms are used for ‘street’: ‘Strasse’ for the more important streets and ‘Gasse’ for the minor ones.]7

 

(7) The local school-teacher at a summer resort, a quite poor but handsome young man, persisted in his courtship of the daughter of the proprietor of a villa, who came from the capital, until the girl fell passionately in love with him and even persuaded her family to give their approval to the marriage in spite of the differences in their social position and race. One day the teacher wrote a letter to his brother in which he said: ‘The girl is certainly no beauty; but she is very sweet, and it would be all right as far as that goes. But whether I shall be able to make up my mind to marry a Jewess I cannot yet tell you.’ This letter was received by his fiancée and it put an end to the engagement, while at the same time his brother was wondering at the protestations of love addressed to him. My informant assured me that this was an error and not a cunning device. I know of another case in which a lady who was dissatisfied with her old doctor but unwilling openly to get rid of him achieved her purpose by mixing up two letters. Here at least I can guarantee that it was error and not conscious cunning that made use of this motif which is such a familiar one in comedy.

 

(8) Brill tells of a lady who asked him for news of a common acquaintance and in doing so called her in error by her maiden name. When her attention was drawn to the mistake she was forced to admit that she disliked the lady’s husband and had been very unhappy about her marriage.

(9) Here is an error which can also be described as a slip of the tongue. A young father presented himself before the registrar of births to give notice of the birth of his second daughter. When asked what the child’s name was to be he answered: ‘Hanna’, and had to be told by the official that he already had a child of that name. We may conclude that the second daughter was not quite so welcome as the first had been.

 

(10) I will add some other observations of confusion between names; they might of course have been equally well included in other chapters of this book.

A lady is the mother of three daughters two of whom have long been married; the youngest is still awaiting her destiny. At both weddings a lady who is a friend of the family gave the same present, an expensive silver tea-service. Every time the conversation turns to this tea-service the mother makes the error of saying that the third daughter owns it. It is clear that this error expresses the mother’s wish to see her last daughter married too - on the assumption that she would be given the same wedding present.

 

The frequent cases in which a mother confuses the names of her daughters, sons or sons-in-law are just as easy to interpret.

(11) Here is a good example of an obstinate interchange of names; I borrow it from a Herr J. G. who made the observation on himself during a stay in a sanatorium:

‘At dinner one day (at the sanatorium) I was having a conversation, which did not interest me much and was entirely conventional in tone, with the lady who was next to me at table, when in the course of it I used a phrase of special affability. The somewhat elderly spinster could not help commenting that it was not usually my habit to behave to her with such affability and gallantry - a rejoinder which contained not only a certain regret but also an obvious dig at a young lady we both knew to whom I was in the way of being somewhat attentive. Naturally I understood at once. In the course of our further conversation I had to have it repeatedly pointed out to me by my neighbour, to my great embarrassment, that I had addressed her by the name of the young lady whom she regarded with some justice as her more fortunate rival.’

 

(12) I will also report as an ‘error’ an incident with a serious background, which was told me by a witness who was closely involved. A lady spent an evening out of doors with her husband and two strangers. One of these two ‘strangers’ was an intimate friend of hers; but the others knew nothing of this and were meant to know nothing. The friends accompanied the married couple to the door of their house and while they were waiting for the door to be opened they took their leave of one another. The lady bowed to the stranger, gave him her hand and said a few polite words. Then she took the arm of her secret lover, turned to her husband and began to bid him good-bye in the same way. Her husband entered into the situation, raised his hat and said with exaggerated politeness: ‘Good-bye, dear lady!’ The horrified wife dropped her lover’s arm and before the concierge appeared had time to exclaim: ‘Goodness! What a stupid thing to happen!’ The husband was one of those married men who want to put an act of infidelity on their wife’s part beyond the bounds of possibility. He had repeatedly sworn that in such a case more than one life would be in jeopardy. He therefore had inner impediments of the strongest kind to prevent his noticing the challenge contained in this error.

 

(13) Here is an error of one of my patients: the fact that it was repeated in order to express a contrary meaning makes it particularly instructive. After protracted internal struggles this over-cautious young man brought himself to the point of proposing marriage to the girl who had long been in love with him, as he was with her. He escorted his fiancée home, said good-bye to her, and, in a mood of the greatest happiness, got on to a tram and asked the conductress for two tickets. About six months later he had got married but could not yet adjust himself to his conjugal bliss. He wondered whether he had done the right thing in marrying, missed his former relations with his friends, and had every sort of fault to find with his parents-in-law. One evening he fetched his young wife from her parents’ house, got on to a tram with her and contented himself with asking for one ticket only.

 

(14) How a wish that has been reluctantly suppressed can be satisfied by means of an ‘error’ is described in a good example of Maeder’s (1908). A colleague who had a day free from duties wanted to enjoy it without any interruptions; but he was due to pay a visit in Lucerne to which he did not look forward. After long deliberation he decided to go there all the same. He passed the time on the journey from Zurich to Arth-Goldau in reading the daily papers. At the latter station he changed trains and continued reading. He travelled on till the ticket-inspector informed him that he was in the wrong train - the one travelling back from Goldau to Zurich, though he had a ticket for Lucerne.

 

(15) An analogous, though not entirely successful, attempt to help a suppressed wish to find expression by means of the same mechanism of an error is described by Dr. V. Tausk (1917) under the title of ‘Travelling in the Wrong Direction’:

‘I had come to Vienna on leave from the front. An old patient had heard I was in town and invited me to visit him as he was ill in bed. I complied with his request and spent two hours with him. When I was leaving, the sick man asked how much he owed me. "I am here on leave and am not practising now," I replied. "Please regard my visit as a friendly turn." The patient hesitated, as he no doubt felt he had no right to claim my professional services in the form of an unremunerated act of friendship. But he finally accepted my answer by expressing the respectful opinion, which was dictated by his pleasure at saving money, that as a psycho-analyst I would no doubt do the right thing. A few moments later I myself had misgivings about the sincerity of my generosity, and with my mind full of doubts - which could hardly be explained in more than one way - I got on a tram of route X. After a short journey I had to change on to route Y. While waiting at the point where I was to change I forgot the business of the fee and was occupied with the symptoms of my patient’s illness. Meanwhile the tram I was waiting for came and I got on it. But at the next stop I had to get off again. I had in fact inadvertently and without noticing got on to an X tram instead of a Y tram, and had travelled back again in the direction I had just come from - in the direction of my patient from whom I did not wish to accept any fee. But my unconscious wanted to collect it.’

 

(16) A trick very similar to the one in Example 14 was once brought off by me myself. I had promised my strict eldest brother that that summer I would make my long due visit to him at an English seaside resort, and had undertaken, as time was limited, to travel by the shortest route, without breaking my journey anywhere. I asked if I might stop for a day in Holland, but he thought I might postpone that till my journey back. So I travelled from Munich viâ Cologne to Rotterdam and the Hook of Holland from where the boat starts at midnight for Harwich. I had to change at Cologne; I left my train to change into the Rotterdam express, but it was nowhere to be found. I asked various railway officials, was sent from one platform to another, fell into a mood of exaggerated despair and soon realized that during this fruitless search I must have missed my connection. After this was confirmed I considered whether I should spend the night in Cologne. Among other considerations in favour of that plan was one of filial piety, since according to an old family tradition my ancestors had once fled from that city during a persecution of the Jews. However I decided against it, travelled by a later train to Rotterdam, which I reached late in the night, and was then obliged to spend a day in Holland. That day brought me the fulfilment of a long cherished wish; I was able to see Rembrandt’s magnificent paintings at the Hague and in the Rijksmuseum at Amsterdam. It was only the next morning, when I was travelling in the train across England and could collect my impressions, that a clear memory emerged of my having seen a large notice in the station at Cologne - a few steps from the place where I had got off the train and on the same platform - which read ‘Rotterdam-Hook of Holland’. There, waiting for me, had been the train in which I ought to have continued my journey. My action in hurrying away in spite of this clear direction, and my search for the train in another place, would have to be described as an incomprehensible ‘blindness’ unless one is prepared to assume that - contrary to my brother’s instructions - I had really resolved to admire the Rembrandts on the journey out. Everything else - my well-acted perplexity, the emergence of the ‘pious’ intention to spend the night in Cologne - was merely a contrivance to keep my resolution hidden from myself till it had been completely carried out.

 

(17) From his own personal experience J. Stärcke (1916) tells of a similar device produced by ‘forgetfulness’ for the purpose of fulfilling an ostensibly renounced wish.

‘I once had to give a lecture with lantern slides at a village; but the lecture was postponed for a week. I had answered the letter about the postponement and had entered the new date in my notebook. I should have been glad to go to this village in the afternoon, for then I should have had time to pay a visit to a writer I knew who lived there. To my regret, however, I had at the time no afternoon that I could keep free. Somewhat reluctantly, I gave up the idea of the visit.

 

‘When the evening of the lecture arrived I set out for the station in the greatest hurry with a case of lantern slides. I had to take a taxi to catch the train. (It happens frequently with me that I put things off so long that I have to take a taxi if I am to catch my train.) When I reached my destination I was a little surprised that there was no one at the station to meet me (as is the usual practice with lectures in smallish places). It suddenly occurred to me that the lecture had been postponed for a week and that I had made a fruitless journey on the date that had originally been fixed. After I had roundly cursed my forgetfulness, I debated whether I should return home by the next train. However, upon closer consideration I reflected that I now had a fine opportunity of paying the visit I had wanted to, and I thereupon did so. It was only when I was on my way that it struck me that my unfulfilled wish to have sufficient time for this visit had neatly hatched the plot. Being weighed down by the heavy case of lantern slides and hurrying to catch the train could serve excellently to hide the unconscious intention all the more effectively.’




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