Association of ideas; Memory; Paragrammatism; Psychoanalysis; Psychology, Pathological; Repression (Psychology)
Perhaps it is not superfluous to remark that the given explanation does
not contradict the conditions of memory reproduction and forgetting
assumed by other psychologists, which they seek in certain relations
and dispositions. Only in certain cases have we added another _motive_
to the factors long recognized as causative in forgetting names,
and have thus laid bare the mechanism of faulty memory. The assumed
dispositions are indispensable also in our case, in order to make it
possible for the repressed element to associatively gain control
over the desired name and take it along into the repression. Perhaps
this would not have occurred in another name having more favourable
conditions of reproduction. For it is quite probable that a suppressed
element continually strives to assert itself in some other way, but
attains this success only where it meets with suitable conditions. At
other times the suppression succeeds without disturbance of function,
or, as we may justly say, without symptoms.
When we recapitulate the conditions for forgetting a name with faulty
recollection we find: (1) a certain disposition to forget the same;
(2) a process of suppression which has taken place shortly before;
and (3) the possibility of establishing an _outer_ association
between the concerned name and the element previously suppressed. The
last condition will probably not have to be much overrated, for the
slightest claim on the association is apt in most cases to bring it
about. But it is a different and farther-reaching question whether such
outer association can really furnish the proper condition to enable
the suppressed element to disturb the reproduction of the desired
name, or whether after all a more intimate connection between the two
themes is not necessarily required. On superficial consideration one
may be willing to reject the latter requirement and consider the
temporal meeting in perfectly dissimilar contents as sufficient. But
on more thorough examination one finds more and more frequently that
the two elements (the repressed and the new one) connected by an outer
association, possess besides a connection in content, and this can also
be demonstrated in the example _Signorelli_.
The value of the understanding gained through the analysis of the
example _Signorelli_ naturally depends on whether we must explain this
case as a typical or as an isolated process. I must now maintain that
the forgetting of a name associated with faulty recollection uncommonly
often follows the same process as was demonstrated in the case of
_Signorelli_. Almost every time that I observed this phenomenon in
myself I was able to explain it in the manner indicated above as being
motivated by repression.
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