Autobiographical note 70 страница

(3) Since this first example in which an apparently arbitrarily chosen number was explained I have often repeated the same experiment, and with the same result; but the content of the majority of cases is so intimate that they cannot be reported.

For that very reason, however, I will take the opportunity of adding here a very interesting analysis of a ‘numerical association’, which Dr. Adler (1905) of Vienna obtained from a ‘perfectly healthy’ informant. ‘Yesterday evening’, this informant reports, ‘I got down to The Psychopathology of Everyday Life, and would have read the whole of the book straight away if I had not been prevented by a remarkable incident. For what happened was that, when I read that every number which we summon seemingly arbitrarily into consciousness has a definite meaning, I decided to make an experiment. There came to my mind the number 1734. The following ideas then rapidly occurred to me: 1734÷17=102; 102÷17=6. I then divided the number into 17 and 34. I am 34 years old. I believe, as I think I once told you, that 34 is the last year of youth, and for that reason I felt very miserable on my last birthday. The end of my 17th year saw the beginning of a very pleasant and interesting period in my development. I divide my life into portions of 17 years. What do the divisions mean? In thinking of the number 102 it occurred to me that No. 102 in the Reclam Universal Library is Kotzebue’s play Menschenhass und Reue.

‘My present psychical state is one of misanthropy and remorse. No. 6 in the U.L. (I know a whole quantity of its numbers by heart) is Müllner’s Die Schuld [Guilt]. The thought plagues me constantly that the guilt is mine for my failure to become what I could have been with my abilities. It further occurred to me that No. 34 in the U.L. contains a tale by the same Müllner entitled Der Kaliber [The Calibre]. I divided the word into "Ka" and "Liber"; it further occurred to me that it contains the words "Ali" and "Kali" ["potassium"]. This reminded me of my once making up rhymes with my (six-year old) son Ali. I asked him to find a rhyme to Ali. He could not think of any, and as he wanted me to give him one I said: "Ali reinigt den Mund mit hypermangansaurem Kali." ["Ali cleans his mouth with potassium permanganate."] We laughed a lot and Ali was very lieb [sweet]. During the last few days I have been obliged to notice with regret that he is "ka (kein) lieber Ali" ["not the sweet Ali" ("ka lieber" pronounced as "Kaliber")].

‘I then asked myself: what is No. 17 in the U.L.? but I could not bring it to mind. But I quite certainly knew it earlier, so I assumed I wanted to forget that number. All reflection was in vain. I wanted to go on reading, but I only read mechanically, without understanding a word, as the 17 was tormenting me. I put out the light and continued my search. Finally I came to the conclusion that No. 17 must be a play of Shakespeare’s. But which one? I thought of Hero and Leander - clearly a stupid attempt on the part of my will to lead me astray. Finally I got up and looked in the catalogue of the U.L.- No. 17 is Macbeth. To my bewilderment I was forced to realize that I knew almost nothing at all of the play, although I had given it as much attention as other plays of Shakespeare’s. I only thought of: murderer, Lady Macbeth, witches, "fair is foul" and that at one time I had found Schiller’s version of Macbeth very fine. There is no doubt then that I wished to forget the play. The further thought occurred to me that 17 and 34 divided by 17 gives the result 1 and 2. Numbers 1 and 2 in the U.L. are Goethe’s Faust. Formerly I found very much of Faust in myself.’

We must regret that the physician’s discretion did not allow us any insight into the significance of this series of associations. Adler observes that the man did not succeed in synthesizing his remarks. They would seem to us scarcely worth reporting if something had not emerged during their continuation which gave us the key to understanding the number 1734 and the whole series of associations.

‘This morning indeed I had an experience that strongly supports the correctness of the Freudian view. My wife, whom I had woken up when I got out of bed the night before, asked me why I had wanted the U.L. catalogue. I told her the story. She found it was all hair-splitting, only - a very interesting point - she accepted Macbeth, which I had resisted so forcibly. She said that nothing whatever came to her mind when she thought of a number. I answered: "Let us test it." She gave the number 117. I immediately replied: "17 is a reference to what I have told you. Moreover I said to you yesterday that when a wife is in her 82nd year and her husband in his 35th year there is gross incompatibility." For the last few days I have been teasing my wife by saying she is a little old woman of 82. 82 + 35 = 117.’

Thus the man, who was not able to find determinants for his own number, found the solution at once when his wife gave him a number purporting to be arbitrarily chosen. In reality the wife understood very well what complex her husband’s number was derived from, and chose her own number from the same complex - which was certainly common to both of them, for in his case it concerned their relative ages. It is therefore easy for us to translate the number that had occurred to the husband. It expresses, as Adler suggests, a suppressed wish of his which, fully developed, would run: ‘Only a wife of 17 is suitable for a man of 34 like me.’

In case anyone should think too lightly of such ‘trifles’, I may add that I recently learned from Dr. Adler that a year after the publication of this analysis the man was divorced from his wife.¹

Adler gives similar explanations of the origin of obsessive numbers.

¹ In explanation of Macbeth, No. 17 in the U. L., Adler informs me that in his seventeenth year this man joined a society of anarchists with regicide as its aim. This was no doubt why the content of Macbeth was forgotten. At that time, too, he had invented a code in which letters were replaced by numbers.

(4) Moreover the choice of what have been called ‘favourite numbers’ is not unrelated to the life of the person concerned and is not without a certain psychological interest. A man who admitted having a special preference for the numbers 17 and 19 was able to specify after a little reflection that at the age of 17 he had gone to the university and so attained the academic freedom he had long desired, and that at 19 he had taken his first long journey and soon after had made his first scientific discovery. But the fixation of this preference occurred a decade later, when the same numbers took on a significance in his erotic life. - Indeed, even those numbers which a person uses especially often in a particular connection, in an apparently arbitrary way, can be traced by analysis to an unexpected meaning. Thus it struck a patient of mine one day that when annoyed he was especially fond of saying: ‘I’ve told you that already from 17 to 36 times’, and he asked himself whether there was any motive for it. It at once occurred to him that he was born on the 27th day of the month whereas his younger brother was born on the 26th, and that he had reason to complain that fate so often robbed him of the good things in life in order to bestow them on this younger brother. He therefore represented this partiality on the part of fate by deducting ten from the date of his own birthday and adding it to his brother’s. ‘I am the elder and yet I am cut short like this.’

(5) I shall dwell longer on analyses of numerical associations, since I know of no other separate observations that would prove so forcefully the existence of highly composite thought-processes which are yet quite unknown to consciousness. At the same time I know of no better example of analyses in which the part contributed by the physician (suggestion) - so often held responsible - is so definitely ruled out. I shall therefore give a report here (with his consent) of the analysis of a number which occurred to a patient of mine. I need only add that he is the youngest child in a large family and at an early age lost his greatly admired father. While he was in a particularly cheerful mood the number 426718 came to his mind, and he asked himself: ‘What ideas occur to me in that connection? First of all, a joke I have heard: "When a doctor treats a cold it lasts for 42 days; when it is not treated, it lasts 6 weeks."' This corresponds to the first figures in the number (42 = 6 x 7). In the stoppage that followed this first solution I drew his attention to the fact that the six-figure number he had chosen contained all the first digits except for 3 and 5. He then immediately found the continuation of the interpretation. ‘There are 7 of us brothers and sisters, and I am the youngest. In the order of our age, 3 corresponds to my sister A., and 5 to my brother L.; they were my two enemies. As a child I used to pray to God every night for him to remove these two tormenting spirits from life. It seems to me now that in this choice of numbers I was myself fulfilling this wish; 3 and 5, the wicked brother and the hated sister, are passed over.’ - If the number represents the order of your brothers and sisters, what does the 18 at the end mean? There were only 7 of you after all, - ‘I have often thought that if my father had lived longer I should not have remained the youngest child. If there had been 1 more we should have been 8 and I should have had a younger child after me to whom I should have played the elder brother.’

With this the number was explained, but we had still to establish the connection between the first part of the interpretation and the second one. This followed very easily from the necessary precondition of the last figures: ‘if my father had lived longer’. ‘42 = 6 x 7' signified derision at the doctors who had not been able to help his father, and, in this form, therefore, it expressed his wish for his father to go on living. The whole number in fact corresponded to the fulfilment of his two infantile wishes about his family circle - that his bad brother and sister should die and that a baby should be born after him, or, expressed in the shortest form: ‘If only those two had died instead of my beloved father!’¹

¹ In the interests of simplicity I have omitted some of the patient’s intermediate associations which were equally to the point.0

(6) Here is a brief example from a correspondent. The manager of a telegraph office in L. writes that his eighteen and-a-half-year-old son, who wants to study medicine, is already taken up with the psychopathology of everyday life, and is trying to convince his parents of the correctness of my assertions. I reproduce one of the experiments he undertook, without expressing an opinion on the discussion attached to it.

‘My son was talking to my wife about what we call "chance" and was demonstrating to her that she could not name any song or any number that really occurred to her simply "by chance". The following conversation ensued. Son: "Give me any number you like." - Mother: "79." - Son: "What occurs to you in that connection?" - Mother: "I think of the lovely hat I was looking at yesterday." - Son: "What did it cost?" - Mother: "158 marks." - Son: "That explains it: 158 ÷ 2 = 79. The hat was too dear for you and no doubt you thought: ‘If it were half the price, I would buy it.’"

‘To these assertions of my son’s I first raised the objection that women are not in general particularly good at figures and that anyway his mother had certainly not worked out that 79 was half 158. His theory was therefore based on the sufficiently improbable fact that the subconscious is better at arithmetic than normal consciousness. "Not at all", was the answer I received; "it may well be that my mother did not work out the sum 158 ÷ 2 = 79, she may perfectly well have happened to see this equation - indeed she may have thought about the hat while dreaming and then realized what it would cost if it were only half the price."'

(7) I take another numerical analysis from Jones (1911b, 478). A gentleman of his acquaintance let the number 986 occur to him and then defied Jones to connect it with anything he thought of. ‘Using the free-association method he first recalled a memory, which had not previously been present in his mind, to the following effect: Six years ago, on the hottest day he could remember, he had seen a joke in an evening newspaper, which stated that the thermometer had stood at 986° F., evidently an exaggeration of 98. 6° F. We were at the time seated in front of a very hot fire from which he had just drawn back, and he remarked, probably quite correctly, that the heat had aroused this dormant memory. However, I was curious to know why this memory had persisted with such vividness as to be so readily brought out, for with most people it surely would have been forgotten beyond recall, unless it had become associated with some other mental experience of more significance. He told me that in reading the joke he had laughed uproariously, and that on many subsequent occasions he had recalled it with great relish. As the joke was obviously a very tenuous one, this strengthened my expectation that more lay behind. His next thought was the general reflection that the conception of heat had always greatly impressed him; that heat was the most important thing in the universe, the source of all life, and so on. This remarkable attitude of a quite prosaic young man certainly needed some explanation, so I asked him to continue his free associations. The next thought was of a factory-stack which he could see from his bedroom window. He often stood of an evening watching the flame and smoke issuing out of it, and reflecting on the deplorable waste of energy. Heat, fire, the source of life, the waste of vital energy issuing from an upright, hollow tube - it was not hard to divine from such associations that the ideas of heat and fire were unconsciously linked in his mind with the idea of love, as is so frequent in symbolic thinking, and that there was a strong masturbation complex present, a conclusion which he presently confirmed.’

Those who wish to get a good impression of the way in which the material of numbers is worked over in unconscious thinking may be referred to the papers by Jung (1911) and Jones (1912).2

In analyses of this kind which I conduct on myself I find two things particularly striking: firstly, the positively somnambulistic certainty with which I set off for my unknown goal and plunge into an arithmetical train of thought which arrives all at once at the desired number, and the speed with which the entire subsequent work is completed; and secondly, the fact that the numbers are so freely at the disposal of my unconscious thinking, whereas I am a bad reckoner and have the greatest difficulties in consciously noting dates, house numbers and such things. Moreover in these unconscious thought-operations with numbers I find I have a tendency to superstition, whose origin for long remained unknown to me.¹

¹ [Footnote added 1920:] Herr Rudolf Schneider (1920) of Munich has raised an interesting objection to the conclusiveness of such analyses of numbers. He experimented with numbers that were presented to him - for example, with the number that first caught his eye when he opened a history book - or he presented someone else with a number he had chosen; and he then noticed whether associations emerged to the imposed number which had the appearance of having determined it. This was in fact what did happen. In one instance which he relates that concerned himself, the associations provided determinants just as abundant and full of meaning as in our analyses of numbers that have arisen spontaneously, whereas the number in Schneider’s experiments, having been presented from outside, called for no determinant. In a second experiment carried out on someone else, he clearly made the problem too easy, for the number he set him was 2, and everybody has some material which would enable him to find a determinant for that number. - From his experiments Schneider then draws two conclusions: first, that ‘the mind possesses the same potentialities for finding associations to numbers as to concepts’; and secondly, that the emergence of determining associations to numbers that occur to the mind spontaneously does not in any way prove that these numbers originated from the thoughts discovered in the ‘analysis’ of them. The former conclusion is undoubtedly correct. It is just as easy to find an appropriate association to a number which is presented as it is to a word which is called out - indeed it is perhaps easier, since the ability of the few digits to form connections is particularly great. The situation in which one finds oneself is then simply that of what are called ‘association experiments’, which have been studied from the greatest variety of angles by the school of Bleuler and Jung. In this situation the association (reaction) is determined by the word presented (stimulus-word). This reaction could however still be of very diverse kinds, and Jung’s experiments have shown that even these further distinctions are not left to ‘chance’, but that unconscious ‘complexes’ participate in the determination if they have been touched on by the stimulus-word. - Schneider’s second conclusion goes too far. The fact that appropriate associations arise to numbers (or words) which are presented tells us nothing more about the origin of numbers (or words) which emerge spontaneously than could already be taken into consideration before that fact was known. These spontaneous ideas (words or numbers) may be undetermined, or may have been determined by the thoughts that come out in the analysis, or by other thoughts not disclosed in the analysis - in which last case the analysis will have led us astray. The important thing is to get rid of the impression that this problem is different for numbers from what it is for verbal associations. A critical examination of the problem and with it a justification of the psycho-analytic technique of association lie outside the scope of this book. In analytic practice we proceed on the presupposition that the second of the possibilities mentioned above meets the facts and that in the majority of instances use can be made of it. The investigations of an experimental psychologist (Poppelreuter [1914]) have demonstrated that it is by far the most probable one. See further in this connection the valuable findings in Section 9 of Bleuler’s book on autistic thinking (1919).

It will not surprise us to find that not only numbers but also verbal associations of another kind regularly prove on analytic investigation to be fully determined.

(8) A good example of the derivation of an obsessive word - a word that cannot be got rid of - is to be found in Jung (1906). ‘A lady told me that for some days the word "Taganrog" had been constantly on her lips without her having any idea where it came from. I asked the lady for information about the affectively stressed events and repressed wishes of the very recent past. After some hesitation she told me that she would very much like a morning gown, but her husband did not take the interest in it that she had hoped. "Morgenrock", "Tag-an-rock" - their partial similarity in sound and meaning is obvious. The Russian form was determined by the fact that at about the same time the lady had come to know someone from Taganrog.’

(9) I am indebted to Dr. E. Hitschmann for the elucidation of another case, in which in a particular locality a line of poetry repeatedly forced its way up as an association, without its origin and connections having been apparent.

‘E., a doctor of law, relates: Six years ago I travelled from Biarritz to San Sebastian. The railway line crosses the River Bidassoa, which at this point forms the frontier between France and Spain. From the bridge there is a fine view - on one side, of a broad valley and the Pyrenees, and on the other, of the distant sea. It was a beautiful, bright summer’s day; everything was filled with sun and light, I was on my holiday travels and was happy to be coming to Spain. At that point the following lines occurred to me:

Aber frei ist schon die Seele,

Schwebet in dem Meer von Licht.¹

‘I recall that at the time I pondered on where the lines came from and could not recollect the place. To judge by the rhythm the words must have come from a poem, which, however, had entirely escaped my memory. I believe that later, when the lines came to my mind repeatedly, I asked a number of people about them without being able to learn anything.

‘Last year, when I was returning from Spain I passed over the same stretch of railway. It was a pitch-dark night and it was raining. I looked out of the window to see whether we were already coming into the frontier station, and noticed that we were on the Bidassoa bridge. Immediately the lines given above returned to my memory, and again I could not recall their origin.

‘Several months later when I was at home, I came across a copy of Uhland’s poems. I opened the volume and my glance fell on the lines: "Aber frei ist schon die Seele, schwebet in dem Meer von Licht", which form the conclusion of a poem called "Der Waller". I read the poem and had a very dim recollection of having once known it many years ago. The scene of action is in Spain and this seemed to me to form the only connection between the quoted lines and the place on the railway line described by me. I was only half satisfied with my discovery and went on mechanically turning the pages of the book. The lines "Aber frei ist schon..." etc. are printed at the bottom of a page. On turning over the page I found a poem on the other side with the title "Bidassoa Bridge".

‘I may add that the contents of this poem seemed almost more unfamiliar than those of its predecessor, and that its first lines run:

‘Auf der Bidassoabrücke steht ein Heiliger altersgrau,

Segnet rechts die span’schen Berge, segnet links den fränk’schen Gau.’²

¹ [‘But the soul is already free, it floats in the sea of light.’]

² [‘On the Bidassoa bridge there stands a saint grey with age: on the right he blesses the Spanish mountains, on the left he blesses the Frankish land.’]

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(B) Perhaps the insight we have gained into the determining of names and numbers that are chosen with apparent arbitrariness may help to solve another problem. Many people, as is well known, contest the assumption of complete psychical determinism by appealing to a special feeling of conviction that there is a free will. This feeling of conviction exists; and it does not give way before a belief in determinism. Like every normal feeling it must have something to warrant it. But so far as I can observe, it does not manifest itself in the great and important decisions of the will: on these occasions the feeling that we have is rather one of psychical compulsion, and we are glad to invoke it on our behalf. (‘Here I stand: I can do no other.’) On the other hand, it is precisely with regard to the unimportant, indifferent decisions that we would like to claim that we could just as well have acted otherwise: that we have acted of our free - and unmotivated - will. According to our analyses it is not necessary to dispute the right to the feeling of conviction of having a free will. If the distinction between conscious and unconscious motivation is taken into account, our feeling of conviction informs us that conscious motivation does not extend to all our motor decisions. De minimus non curat lex. But what is thus left free by the one side receives its motivation from the other side, from the unconscious; and in this way determination in the psychical sphere is still carried out without any gap.¹

¹ [Footnote added 1907:] These conceptions of the strict determination of apparently arbitrary psychical acts have already borne rich fruit in psychology, and perhaps also in the juridical field. By applying them, Bleuler and Jung have made intelligible the reactions in what is known as the ‘association experiment’, in which the subject of the test, when he hears a word called out (the stimulus-word), answers it with one that comes to his mind in connection with it (the reaction), the intervening time being measured (the reaction-time). In his Studies in Word Association (1906), Jung has shown what a subtle reagent for psychical states we possess in the association experiment as thus interpreted. Wertheimer and Klein, both pupils of Hans Gross, the Professor of Criminal Law in Prague, have developed out of these experiments a technique for the establishment of the facts in criminal proceedings which is at present being examined by psychologists and jurists.

5 (C) Although the motivation of the parapraxes described in the preceding chapters is something of which from the very nature of the case conscious thought must lack knowledge, it would nevertheless be desirable to discover a psychological proof of the existence of that motivation; indeed, for reasons which a closer knowledge of the unconscious reveals, it is probable that such proofs are somewhere discoverable. There are in fact two spheres in which it is possible to demonstrate phenomena that appear to correspond to an unconscious, and therefore displaced, knowledge of that motivation.

(a) A striking and generally observed feature of the behaviour of paranoics is that they attach the greatest significance to the minor details of other people’s behaviour which we ordinarily neglect, interpret them and make them the basis of far-reaching conclusions. For example, the last paranoic seen by me concluded that there was a general understanding in his environment, because when his train was moving out of the station the people had made a particular movement with one hand. Another noted the way people walked in the street, how they flourished their walking sticks, and so on.¹

The category of what is accidental and requires no motivation, in which the normal person includes a part of his own psychical performances and parapraxes, is thus rejected by the paranoic as far as the psychical manifestations of other people are concerned. Everything he observes in other people is full of significance, everything can be interpreted. How does he reach this position? Probably here as in so many similar cases he projects on to the mental life of other people what is unconsciously present in his own. In paranoia many sorts of things force their way through to consciousness whose presence in the unconscious of normal and neurotic people we can demonstrate only through psycho-analysis.² In a certain sense, therefore, the paranoic is justified in this, for he recognizes something that escapes the normal person: he sees more clearly than someone of normal intellectual capacity, but the displacement on to other people of the state of affairs which he recognizes renders his knowledge worthless. I hope I shall not now be expected to justify the various paranoic interpretations. But the partial justification which we concede to paranoia in respect of this view taken by it of chance actions will help us towards a psychological understanding of the sense of conviction that the paranoic attaches to all these interpretations. There is in fact some truth in them; those, too, of our errors of judgement which are not to be counted as pathological acquire their sense of conviction in just the same way. This feeling is justified for a certain part of the erroneous train of thought, or for its source of origin; and it is then extended by us to the rest of the context.

¹ From other points of view this interpretation of immaterial and accidental indications given by other people has been classed as a ‘delusion of reference’.

² For example, the phantasies of hysterics concerning sexual and cruel maltreatment correspond, at times even down to details, with the complaints of persecuted paranoics. It is curious, but not unintelligible, that we meet the identical content in the form of reality in the contrivances of perverts for the satisfaction of their desires.

(b) Another indication that we possess unconscious and displaced knowledge of the motivation in chance actions and parapraxes is to be found in the phenomenon of superstition. I will make my meaning clear by a discussion of the small experience that started me on these reflections.

On my return from my holidays my thoughts immediately turned to the patients who were to claim my attention in the year’s work that was just beginning. My first visit was to a very old lady for whom I had for many years performed the same professional services twice every day (p. 1245). Owing to the uniformity of the circumstances, unconscious thoughts have very often managed to find expression while I was on my way to the patient and while I was treating her. She is over ninety years old; it is therefore natural to ask oneself at the beginning of each year’s treatment how much longer she is likely to live. On the day I am speaking about I was in a hurry and called a cab to take me to her house. Every cabman on the rank in front of my house knew the old lady’s address, as they had all often taken me there. But on this day it happened that the cabman did not draw up in front of her house but in front of a house with the same number in a nearby street which ran parallel and was in fact of a similar appearance. I noticed the error and reproached the cabman with it, and he apologized. Now is it of any significance that I was driven to a house where the old lady was not to be found? Certainly not to me, but if I were superstitious I should see an omen in the incident, the finger of fate announcing that this year would be the old lady’s last. Very many omens recorded by history have been based on a symbolism no better than this. I of course explain the occurrence as an accident without any further meaning.

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