Autobiographical note 71 страница

The case would have been quite different if I had made the journey on foot, and while ‘deep in thought’, or through ‘absent-mindedness’ had come to the house in the parallel street instead of the right one. This I should not explain as an accident but as an action that had an unconscious aim and required interpretation. My interpretation of ‘going astray’ like thus would probably have had to be that I did not expect to see the old lady for much longer.

I am therefore different from a superstitious person in the following way:

I do not believe that an event in whose occurrence my mental life plays no part can teach me any hidden thing about the future shape of reality; but I believe that an unintentional manifestation of my own mental activity does on the other hand disclose something hidden, though again it is something that belongs only to my mental life. I believe in external (real) chance, it is true, but not in internal (psychical) accidental events. With the superstitious person it is the other way round. He knows nothing of the motivation of his chance actions and parapraxes, and believes in psychical accidental events; and, on the other hand, he has a tendency to ascribe to external chance happenings a meaning which will become manifest in real events, and to regard such chance happenings as a means of expressing something that is hidden from him in the external world. The differences between myself and the superstitious person are two: first, he projects outwards a motivation which I look for within; secondly, he interprets chance as due to an event, while I trace it back to a thought. But what is hidden from him corresponds to what is unconscious for me, and the compulsion not to let chance count as chance but to interpret it is common to both of us.¹

¹ [Footnote added 1924:] At this point I may quote a neat example which Ossipow (1922) has used for discussing the difference between the superstitious, psycho-analytic and mystical point of view. He had been married in a small Russian provincial town and immediately afterwards started for Moscow with his young wife. At a station two hours before his destination he had a wish to go to the station exit and take a look at the town. The train was due to halt there long enough, as he thought, but when he returned a few minutes later it had already left with his young wife. When he told his old nurse at home of this accident she shook her head and declared: ‘No good will come of this marriage.’ At the time Ossipow laughed at this prophecy. But when, five months later, he was separated from his wife, he could not avoid in retrospect viewing his action in leaving the train as an ‘unconscious protest’ against his marriage. Years later, the town where this parapraxis happened took on a great importance for him, as a person lived there with whom fate later linked him closely. This person, and even the fact of this person’s existence, had been completely unknown to him at the time. But the mystical explanation of his behaviour would be that he had left the Moscow train and his wife at that town because the future that was in store for him in relation to this other person was seeking to declare itself.

I assume that this conscious ignorance and unconscious knowledge of the motivation of accidental psychical events is one of the psychical roots of superstition. Because the superstitious person knows nothing of the motivation of his own chance actions, and because the fact of this motivation presses for a place in his field of recognition, he is forced to allocate it, by displacement, to the external world. If such a connection exists, it can hardly be limited to this single application. In point of fact I believe that a large part of the mythological view of the world, which extends a long way into the most modern religions, is nothing but psychology projected into the external world. The obscure recognition¹ (the endopsychic perception, as it were) of psychical factors and relations in the unconscious is mirrored - it is difficult to express it in other terms, and here the analogy with paranoia must come to our aid - in the construction of a supernatural reality, which is destined to be changed back once more by science into the psychology of the unconscious. One could venture to explain in this way the myths of paradise and the fall of man, of God, of good and evil, of immortality, and so on, and to transform metaphysics into metapsychology. The gap between the paranoic’s displacement and that of the superstitious person is less wide than it appears at first sight. When human beings began to think, they were, as is well known, forced to explain the external world anthropomorphically by means of a multitude of personalities in their own image; chance events, which they interpreted superstitiously, were thus actions and manifestations of persons. They behaved, therefore, just like paranoics, who draw conclusions from insignificant signs given them by other people, and just like all normal people, who quite rightly base their estimate of their neighbours’ characters on their chance and unintentional actions. It is only in our modern, scientific but as yet by no means perfected Weltanschauung that superstition seems so very much out of place; in the Weltanschauung of pre-scientific times and peoples it was justified and consistent.

¹ A recognition which, of course, has nothing of the character of a [true] recognition.9

The Roman who gave up an important undertaking if he saw an ill-omened flight of birds was therefore in a relative sense justified; his behaviour was consistent with his premisses. But if he withdrew from the undertaking because he had stumbled on the threshold of his door (‘un Romain retournerait’) he was also in an absolute sense superior to us unbelievers; he was a better psychologist than we are striving to be. For his stumbling must have revealed to him the existence of a doubt, a counter-current at work within him, whose force might at the moment of execution subtract from the force of his intention. For we are only sure of complete success if all our mental forces are united in striving towards the desired goal. How did Schiller’s Tell, who hesitated so long to shoot the apple on his son’s head, answer the Governor’s question why he had provided himself with a second arrow?

Mit diesem zweiten Pfeil durchschoss ich - Euch,

Wenn ich mein liebes Kind getroffen hätte,

Und Euer - wahrlich, hätt’ ich nicht gefehlt.¹

¹ [‘With this second arrow I would have transfixed - you, if I had struck my dear child; and you, truly, I should not have missed.’]0 (D) Anyone who has had the opportunity of studying the hidden mental impulses of human beings by means of psycho-analysis can also say something new about the quality of the unconscious motives that find expression in superstition. It can be recognized most clearly in neurotics suffering from obsessional thinking or obsessional states - people who are often of high intelligence - that superstition derives from suppressed hostile and cruel impulses. Superstition is in large part the expectation of trouble; and a person who has harboured frequent evil wishes against others, but has been brought up to be good and has therefore repressed such wishes into the unconscious, will be especially ready to expect punishment for his unconscious wickedness in the form of trouble threatening him from without.

Though we admit that these remarks of ours in no way exhaust the psychology of superstition, we shall at least have to touch on the question of whether we are to deny entirely that superstition has any real roots: whether there are definitely no such things as true presentiments, prophetic dreams, telepathic experiences, manifestations of supernatural forces and the like. I am far from meaning to pass so sweeping a condemnation of these phenomena, of which so many detailed observations have been made even by men of outstanding intellect, and which it would be best to make the subject of further investigations. We may even hope that some portion of these observations will then be explained by our growing recognition of unconscious mental processes, without necessitating radical alterations in the views we hold to-day. If the existence of still other phenomena - those, for example, claimed by spiritualists - were to be established, we should merely set about modifying our ‘laws’ in the way demanded by the new discovery, without being shaken in our belief in the coherence of things in the world.

In the compass of these discussions the only answer I can give to the questions raised here is a subjective one - that is, one in accordance with my personal experience. To my regret I must confess that I am one of those unworthy people in whose presence spirits suspend their activity and the supernatural vanishes away, so that I have never been in a position to experience anything myself which might arouse a belief in the miraculous. Like every human being, I have had presentiments and experienced trouble, but the two failed to coincide with one another, so that nothing followed the presentiments, and the trouble came upon me unannounced. During the days when I was living alone in a foreign city - I was a young man at the time - I quite often heard my name suddenly called by an unmistakable and beloved voice; I then noted down the exact moment of the hallucination and made anxious enquiries of those at home about what had happened at that time. Nothing had happened. To balance this, there was a later occasion when I went on working with my patients without any disturbance or foreboding while one of my children was in danger of bleeding to death. Nor have I ever been able to regard any of the presentiments reported to me by patients as veridical. - I must however confess that in the last few years I have had a few remarkable experiences which might easily have been explained on the hypothesis of telepathic thought-transference.

Belief in prophetic dreams can claim many adherents, because it can take support from the fact that a number of things do in reality turn out in the future in the way in which the wish had previously arranged them in the dream.¹ But there is little that is surprising in that, and as a rule, too, there are extensive differences between the dream and its fulfilment, which the dreamer’s credulity prefers to neglect. A good example of a dream which may justly be called prophetic was once brought to me for detailed analysis by an intelligent and truthful woman patient. Her story was that she had once dreamt she met a former friend of hers and family doctor in front of a certain shop in a certain street; and that when next morning she went into the Inner Town she in fact met him at the very spot named in the dream. I may observe that no subsequent event proved the importance of this miraculous coincidence,² which could not therefore be accounted for by what lay in the future.

Careful questioning established that there was no evidence of her having had any recollection of the dream on the morning after she dreamt it - that is, until after her walk and the meeting. She could produce no objection to an account of what happened which robbed the episode of anything miraculous and left nothing but an interesting psychological problem. She was walking along the street in question one morning and met her old family doctor in front of a particular shop, and thereupon, on seeing him, she felt convinced that she had dreamt the night before of having this meeting at that precise spot. Analysis was then able to show with great probability how she arrived at this sense of conviction, which, according to general rules, cannot fairly be denied a certain right to be considered authentic. A meeting at a particular place, which has been expected beforehand, amounts in fact to a rendezvous. The old family doctor awakened her memory of former days, when meetings with a third person, also a friend of the doctor, had played a very important part in her life. Since then she had continued her relations with that gentleman and had waited for him in vain on the day before the dream was supposed to have taken place. If I were able to report the circumstances of the case in greater detail it would be easy for me to show that her illusion, when she saw her friend of former days, of having had a prophetic dream was equivalent to some such remark as this; ‘Ah! doctor - you remind me now of past times when I never had to wait in vain for N. if we’d arranged a meeting.’

¹ [Footnote added 1924:] See my paper on ‘Dreams and Telepathy’ (1922a).

² [The German ‘Zusammentreffen’ means both ‘coincidence’ and meeting’.]3

The ‘remarkable coincidence’ of meeting a person we were at that very moment thinking about is a familiar one. I have observed a simple and easily explained example of it in myself, which is probably a good model for similar occurrences. A few days after I had been awarded the title of professor - which carries considerable authority with it in countries under monarchical rule - my thoughts, while I was walking through the Inner Town, suddenly turned to a childish phantasy of revenge directed against a particular married couple. Some months earlier they had called me in to see their little daughter, who had developed an interesting obsessional symptom following upon a dream. I took a great interest in the case, whose genesis I thought I understood. My offer of treatment was however declined by her parents and I was given to understand that they thought of changing over to a foreign authority who effected cures by hypnotism. My present phantasy was that after the total failure of that attempt the parents begged me to start my treatment, saying that now they had complete confidence in me, and so on. I however answered: ‘Yes, now you have confidence in me - now that I too have become a professor. The title has done nothing to alter my capacities; if you could not make use of me as a university lecturer you can do without me as a professor as well.’ - At this point my phantasy was interrupted by a loud ‘Good day to you, Professor!’ and I looked up and saw walking past me the very married couple on whom I had just taken my revenge by rejecting their offer. Immediate reflection destroyed the impression of something miraculous. I had been walking towards the couple along a wide, straight and almost deserted street; when I was about twenty paces from them I had glanced up for a moment and caught a glimpse of their impressive figures and recognized them, but had set the perception aside - on the pattern of a negative hallucination - for the emotional reasons which then took effect in the phantasy that arose with apparent spontaneity.

Here is another ‘resolution of an apparent presentiment’, this time from Otto Rank (1912):

‘Some time ago I myself experienced an unusual variation of the "remarkable coincidence" of meeting someone one was at the very moment thinking about. Shortly before Christmas I was on my way to the Austro-Hungarian Bank to get some change in the form of ten new silver kronen for giving as presents. While I was absorbed in ambitious phantasies which had to do with the contrast between my small assets and the piles of money stored in the bank building, I turned into a narrow street in which the bank stood. I saw a car standing at the door and many people going in and out. I said to myself: No doubt the cashiers will have time even for my few kronen. In any case I shall be quick about it. I shall put down the banknote I want changed and say "Let me have gold please". I immediately noticed my error - I should, of course, have asked for silver - and awoke from my phantasies. I was now only a few steps from the entrance and saw a young man coming towards me whom I thought I recognized, but as I am short-sighted I was not yet able to identify him for certain. As he drew nearer I recognized him as a school-friend of my brother’s called Gold. Gold’s brother was a well-known writer from whom I had expected considerable help at the beginning of my literary career. This help, however, had not been forthcoming and in consequence I failed to win the material success I had hoped for, which had been the subject of my phantasy on the way to the bank. While I was absorbed in my phantasies therefore, I must have unconsciously perceived the approach of Herr Gold; and this was represented in my consciousness (which was dreaming of material success) in such a form that I decided to ask for gold at the counter, instead of the less valuable silver. On the other hand, however, the paradoxical fact that my unconscious is able to perceive an object which my eyes can recognize only later seems partly to be explained by what Bleuler terms "complexive preparedness". This was, as we have seen, directed to material matters and had from the beginning, contrary to my better knowledge, directed my steps to the building where only gold and paper money is changed.’

We must also include in the category of the miraculous and the ‘uncanny’ the peculiar feeling we have, in certain moments and situations, of having had exactly the same experience once before or of having once before been in the same place, though our efforts never succeed in clearly remembering the previous occasion that announces itself in this way. I am aware that I am merely following loose linguistic usage when I call what arises in a person at such moments a ‘feeling’. What is no doubt in question is a judgement, and, more precisely, a perceptual judgement; but these cases have nevertheless a character quite of their own, and we must not leave out of account the fact that what is looked for is never remembered. I do not know whether this phenomenon of ‘déjà vu’ has ever been seriously offered in proof of an individual’s previous psychical existence; but psychologists have certainly turned their attention to it and have endeavoured to solve the problem in a whole variety of speculative ways. None of the attempted explanations which they have brought forward seems to me to be correct, because none of them takes into consideration anything other than the concomitant manifestations and the conditions which favour the phenomenon. Those psychical processes which according to my observations are alone responsible for the explanation of ‘déjà vu’ - namely, unconscious phantasies - are still generally neglected by psychologists even to-day.

It is in my view wrong to call the feeling of having experienced something before an illusion. It is rather that at such moments something is really touched on which we have already experienced once before, only we cannot consciously remember it because it has never been conscious. To put it briefly, the feeling of ‘déjà vu’ corresponds to the recollection of an unconscious phantasy. There exist unconscious phantasies (or day-dreams) just as there exist conscious creations of the same kind which everybody knows from his own experience.

I know that the subject would merit the most exhaustive treatment; but I shall here do no more than give the analysis of a single case of ‘déjà vu’ where the feeling was characterized by especial intensity and persistence. A lady who is now thirty-seven claimed to have a most distinct memory of having at the age of twelve and a half paid her first visit to some school friends in the country. When she entered the garden, she had an immediate feeling of having been there before. This feeling was repeated when she went into the reception rooms, so that she felt she knew in advance what room would be the next one, what view there would be from it, and so on. But the possibility that this feeling of familiarity could have owed its origin to an earlier visit to the house and garden, perhaps one in her earliest childhood, was absolutely ruled out and was disproved as a result of her questioning her parents. The lady who reported this was not in search of any psychological explanation, but saw the occurrence of this feeling as a prophetic indication of the significance for her emotional life which these same school friends later acquired. However, a consideration of the circumstances in which the phenomenon occurred in her shows us the way to another view of the matter. At the time when she paid the visit she knew that these girls had an only brother, who was seriously ill. During the visit she actually set eyes on him, though he looked very ill and she said to herself that he would die soon. Now, her own only brother had been dangerously ill with diphtheria a few months earlier; during his illness she had spent several weeks away from her parents’ house, staying with a relative. She believed that her brother had been with her on this visit to the country; she even thought it had been his first considerable journey after his illness; but her memory was remarkably uncertain on these points while of all the other details, and in particular of the dress she was wearing that day, she had an ultra-clear picture. Anyone who is well-informed will find no difficulty in concluding from these hints that the expectation that her brother would die had at that time played an important part in the girl’s thoughts and either had never become conscious or, after the favourable termination of the illness, had succumbed to energetic repression. If things had turned out otherwise, she would have had to wear a different dress - mourning. She found an analogous situation in the home of her friends, whose only brother was in danger of dying soon, as in fact he did shortly after. She ought to have remembered consciously that she herself had lived through this situation a few months before: instead of remembering it - which was prevented by repression - she transferred her feeling of remembering something to her surroundings, the garden and the house, and fell a victim to the ‘fausse reconnaissance’ of having seen all this exactly the same once before. From the fact that repression occurred we may conclude that her former expectation of her brother’s death had not been far removed from a wishful phantasy. She would then have been the only child. In her later neurosis she suffered most severely from a fear of losing her parents, behind which, as usual, analysis was able to reveal the unconscious wish with the same content.

I have been able in a similar way to derive my own fleeting experiences of ‘déjà vu’ from the emotional constellation of the moment. ‘This would once more be an occasion for wakening the (unconscious and unknown) phantasy which was formed in me at this or that time as a wish to improve the situation.’ - This explanation of ‘déjà vu’ has so far been taken into consideration by only one observer. Dr. Ferenczi, to whom the third edition of this book is indebted for so many valuable contributions, writes to me on this subject as follows: "From my own case, as well as that of others, I have convinced myself that the unaccountable feeling of familiarity is to be traced to unconscious phantasies of which one is unconsciously reminded in a situation of the present time. With one of my patients what happened was apparently something different, but in reality it was quite analogous. This feeling returned to him very often, but it regularly proved to have originated from a forgotten (repressed) portion of a dream of the preceding night. It seems therefore that "déjà vu" can derive not only from day-dreams but from night-dreams as well.’

I have later learnt that Grasset (1904) has given an explanation of the phenomenon which comes very close to my own.8

In 1913 I wrote a short paper describing another phenomenon that is very similar to ‘déjà vu’. This is ‘déjà raconté', the illusion of having already reported something of special interest when it comes up in the course of psycho-analytic treatment. On these occasions the patient maintains with every sign of subjective certainty that he has already recounted a particular memory a long time ago. The physician is however sure of the contrary and is as a rule able to convince the patient of his error. The explanation of this interesting parapraxis is probably that the patient has felt are urge to communicate this information and intended to do so, but has failed to carry it into effect, and that he now takes the memory of the former as a substitute for the latter, the carrying out of his intention.

A similar state of affairs, and probably also the same mechanism, is to be seen in what Ferenczi (1915) has called ‘supposed’ parapraxes. We believe there is something - some object - that we have forgotten or mislaid or lost; but we are able to convince ourselves we have done nothing of the kind and that everything is as it should be. For example, a woman patient returns to the doctor’s room, giving as a reason that she wants to collect the umbrella she has left behind there; but the doctor sees that she is in fact holding it in her hand. There was therefore an impulse towards this parapraxis, and the impulse was sufficient to serve as a substitute for its actual execution. Except for this difference, the supposed parapraxis is equivalent to the real one. It is, however, what one might call cheaper.

9 (E) When I recently had occasion to report some examples of the forgetting of names, with their analyses, to a colleague with a philosophical education, he hastened to reply: ‘That’s all very well; but in my case the forgetting of names happens differently.’ The matter can obviously not be dealt with as easily as this; I do not suppose that my colleague had ever before thought of analysing the forgetting of a name, nor could he say how it happened differently in his case. But his comment nevertheless touches on a problem which many people will be inclined to put in the foreground. Does the elucidation given here of parapraxes and chance actions apply quite generally or only in certain cases? and if the latter, what are the conditions under which it can be called in to explain phenomena that might also have been brought about in another way? In answering this question my experiences leave me in the lurch. I can but utter a warning against supposing that a connection of the kind here demonstrated is only rarely found; for every time I have made the test on myself or on my patients, a connection has been clearly shown to exist just as in the examples reported, or there have at least been good grounds for supposing that it did. It is not surprising if success in finding the hidden meaning of a symptomatic act is not achieved every time, for the magnitude of the internal resistances opposing the solution comes into account as a deciding factor. Equally, it is not possible to interpret every single dream of one’s own or of one’s patients; to prove that the theory holds good in general it is enough if one can penetrate a part of the way into the hidden connection. It often happens that a dream which proves refractory during an attempt to solve it the next day will allow its secret to be wrested from it a week or a month later, after a real change has come about in the meantime and has reduced the contending psychical values. The same applies to the solving of parapraxes and symptomatic acts. The example of misreading on page 1194 (‘Across Europe in a Tub’) gave me the opportunity of showing how a symptom that is at first insoluble becomes accessible to analysis when the real interest in the repressed thoughts has passed away.¹ As long as the possibility existed of my brother obtaining the envied title before me, this misreading resisted every one of my repeated efforts to analyse it; after it had turned out to be unlikely that he would be preferred to me in this way, the path that led to its solution was suddenly cleared. It would therefore be incorrect to maintain that all the cases which resist analysis are due to a mechanism other than the psychical mechanism disclosed here. Such an assumption would need more than negative evidence. Furthermore, the readiness to believe in a different explanation of parapraxes and symptomatic acts, which is probably to be found in all healthy people, is quite devoid of evidential value; it is obviously a manifestation of the same mental forces which produced the secret and which therefore also devote themselves to preserving it and resist its elucidation.

¹ [Footnote added 1924:] At this point very interesting problems of an economic nature come in, questions taking into consideration the fact that the psychical processes aim at gaining pleasure and removing unpleasure. There is already an economic problem in how it becomes possible by way of substitutive associations to recapture a name that has been forgotten through motives of unpleasure. An excellent paper by Tausk (1913) gives good examples of how the forgotten name becomes accessible once more if one succeeds in connecting it with a pleasurably-toned association, which can counterbalance the unpleasure to be expected from the reproduction of the name.

On the other hand we must not overlook the fact that repressed thoughts and impulses certainly do not achieve expression in symptomatic acts and parapraxes by their own unaided efforts. The technical possibility for such side-slipping on the part of the innervations must be presented independently; this will then be readily exploited by the intention of the repressed to make itself felt consciously. In the case of verbal parapraxes, detailed investigations by philosophers and philologists have endeavoured to determine what are the structural and functional relations that put themselves at the service of such an intention. If we distinguish, among the determinants of parapraxes and symptomatic acts, between the unconscious motive on the one hand and the physiological and psycho-physical relations that come to meet it on the other, it remains an open question whether there are, within the range of normality, yet other factors that can - like the unconscious motive, and in place of it - create parapraxes and symptomatic acts along the lines of these relations. It is not my task to answer this question.

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