A General Introduction to PsychoanalysisFreud, Sigmund
Science
A General Introduction to Psychoanalysis
Freud, Sigmund
Psychoanalysis
The forgetting of projects can quite commonly be traced to an
antagonistic current which does not wish to carry out the project. We
psychoanalysts are not alone in holding this view, but this is the
general conception to which all persons subscribe the daily affairs, and
which they first deny in theory. The patron who makes apologies to his
protegé, saying that he has forgotten his requests, has not squared
himself with his protegé. The protegé immediately thinks: "There's
nothing to that; he did promise but he really doesn't want to do it."
Hence, daily life also proscribes forgetting, in certain connections,
and the difference between the popular and the psychoanalytic conception
of these errors appears to be removed. Imagine a housekeeper who
receives her guest with the words: "What, you come to-day? Why, I had
totally forgotten that I had invited you for to-day"; or the young man
who might tell his sweetheart that he had forgotten to keep the
rendezvous which they planned. He is sure not to admit it, it were
better for him to invent the most improbable excuses on the spur of the
moment, hindrances which prevented him from coming at that time, and
which made it impossible for him to communicate the situation to her. We
all know that in military matters the excuse of having forgotten
something is useless, that it protects one from no punishment; and we
must consider this attitude justified. Here we suddenly find everyone
agreed that a certain error is significant, and everyone agrees what its
meaning is. Why are they not consistent enough to extend this insight to
the other errors, and fully to acknowledge them? Of course, there is
also an answer to this.
If the meaning of this forgetting of projects leaves room for so little
doubt among laymen, you will be less surprised to find that poets make
use of these errors in the same sense. Those of you who have seen or
read Shaw's _Caesar and Cleopatra_ will recall that Caesar, when
departing in the last scene, is pursued by the idea that there was
something more he intended to do, but that he had forgotten it. Finally
he discovers what it is: to take leave of Cleopatra. This small device
of the author is meant to ascribe to the great Caesar a superiority
which he did not possess, and to which he did not at all aspire. You can
learn from historical sources that Caesar had Cleopatra follow him to
Rome, and that she was staying there with her little Caesarion when
Caesar was murdered, whereupon she fled the city.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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