A General Introduction to PsychoanalysisFreud, Sigmund
Science
A General Introduction to Psychoanalysis
Freud, Sigmund
Psychoanalysis
In the first mentioned and more frequent cases of misreading, two
factors are neglected to which we gave an important role in the
mechanism of errors: the conflict of two tendencies and the suppression
of one which then indemnifies itself by producing the error. Not that
anything like the opposite occurs in misreading, but the importunity of
the idea content which leads to misreading is nevertheless much more
conspicuous than the suppression to which the latter may previously have
been subjected. Just these two factors are most tangibly apparent in the
various situations of errors of forgetfulness.
Forgetting plans is actually uniform in meaning; its interpretation is,
as we have heard, not denied even by the layman. The tendency
interfering with the plan is always an antithetical intention, an
unwillingness concerning which we need only discover why it does not
come to expression in a different and less disguised manner. But the
existence of this unwillingness is not to be doubted. Sometimes it is
possible even to guess something of the motives which make it necessary
for this unwillingness to disguise itself, and it always achieves its
purpose by the error resulting from the concealment, while its rejection
would be certain were it to present itself as open contradiction. If an
important change in the psychic situation occurs between the formulation
of the plan and its execution, in consequence of which the execution of
the plan does not come into question, then the fact that the plan was
forgotten is no longer in the class of errors. One is no longer
surprised at it, and one understands that it would have been superfluous
to have remembered the plan; it was then permanently or temporarily
effaced. Forgetting a plan can be called an error only when we have no
reason to believe there was such an interruption.
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