Association of ideas; Memory; Paragrammatism; Psychoanalysis; Psychology, Pathological; Repression (Psychology)
I refrained from imparting this characteristic feature because I did
not wish to touch upon such a delicate theme in conversation with a
stranger. But I went still further; I also deflected my attention from
the continuation of the thought which might have associated itself in
me with the theme “Death and Sexuality.” I was at that time under the
after-effects of a message which I had received a few weeks before,
during a brief sojourn in _Trafoi_. A patient on whom I had spent
much effort had ended his life on account of an incurable sexual
disturbance. I know positively that this sad event, and everything
connected with it, did not come to my conscious recollection on that
trip in Herzegovina. However, the agreement between _Trafoi_ and
_Boltraffio_ forces me to assume that this reminiscence was at that
time brought to activity despite all the intentional deviation of my
attention.
(_d_) I can no longer conceive the forgetting of the name Signorelli
as an accidental occurrence. I must recognize in this process the
influence of a _motive_. There were motives which actuated the
interruption in the communication of my thoughts (concerning the
customs of the Turks, etc.), and which later influenced me to exclude
from my consciousness the thought connected with them, and which might
have led to the message concerning the incident in Trafoi--that is,
I wanted to forget something, I _repressed_ something. To be sure,
I wished to forget something other than the name of the master of
Orvieto; but this other thought brought about an associative connection
between itself and this name, so that my act of volition missed the
aim, and I _forgot the one against my will_, while I _intentionally_
wished to forget the other. The disinclination to recall directed
itself against the one content; the inability to remember appeared
in another. The case would have been obviously simpler if this
disinclination and the inability to remember had concerned the same
content. The substitutive names no longer seem so thoroughly justified
as they were before this explanation. They remind me (after the form of
a compromise) as much of what I wished to forget as of what I wished to
remember, and show me that my object to forget something was neither a
perfect success nor a failure.
(_e_) The nature of the association formed between the lost name and
the repressed theme (death and sexuality, etc.), containing the names
of Bosnia, Herzegovina, and Trafoi, is also very strange. In the scheme
inserted here, which originally appeared in 1898, an attempt is made to
graphically represent these associations.
[Illustration:
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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