Association of ideas; Memory; Paragrammatism; Psychoanalysis; Psychology, Pathological; Repression (Psychology)
In the aforementioned essay I only touched upon, but in no way
exhausted, the varieties in the relations and meanings of concealed
memories. In the given example fully analysed I particularly emphasized
a peculiarity in the temporal relation between the concealing memory
and the contents of the memory concealed by it. The content of the
concealing memory in that example belonged to one of the first years
of childhood, while the thoughts represented by it, which remained
practically unconscious, belonged to a later period of the individual
in question. I called this form of displacement a retro-active
or _regressive_ one. Perhaps more often one finds the reversed
relation--that is, an indifferent impression of the most remote period
becomes a concealing memory in consciousness, which simply owes its
existence to an association with an earlier experience, against
whose direct reproduction there are resistances. We would call these
_encroaching_ or _interposing_ concealing memories. What most concerns
the memory lies here chronologically beyond the concealing memory.
Finally, there may be a third possible case, namely, the concealing
memory may be connected with the impression it conceals, not only
through its contents, but also through contiguity of time; this is the
_contemporaneous_ or _contiguous_ concealing memory.
How large a portion of the sum total of our memory belongs to the
category of concealing memories, and what part it plays in various
neurotic hidden processes, these are problems into the value of which I
have neither inquired nor shall I enter here. I am concerned only with
emphasizing the sameness between the forgetting of proper names with
faulty recollection and the formation of concealing memories.
At first sight it would seem that the diversities of both phenomena are
far more striking than their exact analogies. There we deal with proper
names, here with complete impressions experienced either in reality
or in thought; there we deal with a manifest failure of the memory
function, here with a memory act which appears strange to us. Again,
there we are concerned with a momentary disturbance--for the name just
forgotten could have been reproduced correctly a hundred times before,
and will be so again from to-morrow on; here we deal with lasting
possession without a failure, for the indifferent childhood memories
seem to be able to accompany us through a great part of life. In both
these cases the riddle seems to be solved in an entirely different way.
There it is the forgetting, while here it is the remembering which
excites our scientific curiosity.
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