Association of ideas; Memory; Paragrammatism; Psychoanalysis; Psychology, Pathological; Repression (Psychology)
A short time ago I had a similar experience. I wished to make merry
with an intimate friend over a statement made by my wife only a few
hours earlier, but I found myself hindered by the noteworthy fact that
I had entirely forgotten the statement. I had first to beg my wife to
recall it to me. It is easy to understand that my forgetting in this
case may be analogous to the typical disturbance of judgment which
dominates us when it concerns those nearest to us.
(_b_) To oblige a woman who was a stranger in Vienna I had undertaken
to procure a small iron safe for the preservation of documents and
money. When I offered my services, the image of an establishment in
the heart of the city where I was sure I had seen such safes floated
before me with extraordinary visual vividness. To be sure, I could
not recall the name of the street, but I felt certain that I would
discover the store in a walk through the city, for my memory told me
that I had passed it countless times. To my chagrin I could not find
this establishment with the safes, though I walked through the inner
part of the city in every direction. I concluded that the only thing
left to do was to search through a business directory, and if that
failed, to try to identify the establishment in a second round of the
city. It did not, however, require so much effort; among the addresses
in the directory I found one which immediately presented itself as
that which had been forgotten. It was true that I had passed the show
window countless times, each time, however, when I had gone to visit
the M. family, who have lived a great many years in this identical
building. After this intimate friendship had turned to an absolute
estrangement, I had taken care to avoid the neighbourhood as well as
the house, though without ever thinking of the reason for my action. In
my walk through the city searching for the safe in the show window I
had traversed every street in the neighbourhood but the right one, and
I had avoided this as if it were forbidden ground.
The motive of displeasure which was at the bottom of my disorientation
is thus comprehensible. But the mechanism of forgetting is no longer so
simple as in the former example. Here my aversion naturally does not
extend to the vendor of safes, but to another person, concerning whom
I wish to know nothing, and later transfers itself from the latter to
this incident where it brings about the forgetting. Similarly, in the
case of _Burckhard_ mentioned above, the grudge against the one brought
about the error in writing the name of the other. The similarity of
names which here established a connection between two essentially
different streams of thought was accomplished in the showcase window
instance by the contiguity of space and the inseparable environment.
Moreover, this latter case was more closely knit together, for money
played a great part in the causation of the estrangement from the
family living in this house.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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