Association of ideas; Memory; Paragrammatism; Psychoanalysis; Psychology, Pathological; Repression (Psychology)
In answer to this question my experiences leave me in the lurch. I can
only urge against considering the demonstrated connections as rare, for
as often as I have made the test in myself and with my patients it was
always definitely demonstrated exactly as in the examples reported,
or there were at least good reasons to assume this. One should not be
surprised, however, when one does not succeed every time in finding the
concealed meaning of the symptomatic action, as the amount of inner
resistances ranging themselves against the solution must be considered
a deciding factor. Also it is not always possible to explain every
individual dream of one’s self or of patients. To substantiate the
general validity of the theory, it is enough if one can penetrate only
a certain distance into the hidden associations. The dream which proves
refractory when the solution is attempted on the following day can
often be robbed of its secret a week or a month later, when the psychic
factors combating one another have been reduced as a consequence of a
real change that has meanwhile taken place. The same applies to the
solution of faulty and symptomatic actions. It would therefore be wrong
to affirm of all cases which resist analysis that they are caused by
another psychic mechanism than that here revealed; such assumption
requires more than negative proofs; moreover, the readiness to believe
in a different explanation of faulty and symptomatic actions, which
probably exists universally in all normal persons, does not prove
anything; it is obviously an expression of the same psychic forces
which produced the secret, which therefore strives to protect and
struggle against its elucidation.
On the other hand, we must not overlook the fact that the repressed
thoughts and feelings are not independent in attaining expression in
symptomatic and faulty actions. The technical possibility for such
an adjustment of the innervations must be furnished independently
of them, and this is then gladly utilized by the intention of the
repressed material to come to conscious expression. In the case of
linguistic faulty actions an attempt has been made by philosophers and
philologists to verify through minute observations what structural and
functional relations enter into the service of such intention. If in
the determinations of faulty and symptomatic actions we separate the
unconscious motive from its co-active physiological and psychophysical
relations, the question remains open whether there are still other
factors within normal limits which, like the unconscious motive, and in
its place can produce faulty and symptomatic actions on the road of the
relations. It is not my task to answer this question.
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