Association of ideas; Memory; Paragrammatism; Psychoanalysis; Psychology, Pathological; Repression (Psychology)
To explain the various forms of mistakes in speech, Meringer assumes a
varied psychic value of phonetics. As soon as the innervation affects
the first syllable of a word, or the first word of a sentence, the
stimulating process immediately strikes the succeeding sounds, and the
following words, and in so far as these innervations are synchronous
they may effect some changes in one another. The stimulus of the
psychically more intensive sound “rings” before or continues echoing,
and thus disturbs the less important process of innervation. It is
necessary therefore to determine which are the most important sounds
of a word. Meringer states: “If one wishes to know which sound of a
word possesses the greatest intensity he should examine himself while
searching for a forgotten word, for example, a name. That which first
returns to consciousness invariably had the greatest intensity prior to
the forgetting (p. 160). Thus the most important sounds are the initial
sound of the root-syllable and the initial sound of the word itself, as
well as one or another of the accentuated vowels” (p. 162).
Here I cannot help voicing a contradiction. Whether or not the initial
sound of the name belongs to the most important elements of the word,
it is surely not true that in the case of the forgetting of the word
it first returns to consciousness; the above rule is therefore of no
use. When we observe ourselves during the search for a forgotten name
we are comparatively often forced to express the opinion that it begins
with a certain letter. This conviction proves to be as often unfounded
as founded. Indeed, I would even go so far as to assert that in the
majority of cases one reproduces a false initial sound. Also in our
example _Signorelli_ the substitutive name lacked the initial sound,
and the principal syllables were lost; on the other hand, the less
important pair of syllables _elli_ returned to consciousness in the
substitutive name _Botticelli_.
How little substitutive names respect the initial sound of the lost
names may be learned from the following case. One day I found it
impossible to recall the name of the small country whose capital is
Monte Carlo. The substitutive names were as follows: _Piedmont_,
_Albania_, _Montevideo_, _Colico_. In place of Albania _Montenegro_
soon appeared, and then it struck me that the syllable _Mont_
(pronounced _Mon_) occurred in all but the last of the substitutive
names. It thus became easy for me to find from the name of Prince
Albert the forgotten name _Monaco_. _Colico_ practically imitates the
syllabic sequence and rhythm of the forgotten name.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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