Association of ideas; Memory; Paragrammatism; Psychoanalysis; Psychology, Pathological; Repression (Psychology)
(_c_) The B. and R. Company requested me to pay a professional call
on one of their officers. On my way to him I was engrossed in the
thought that I must already have been in the building occupied by the
firm. It seemed as if I used to see their signboard in a lower story
while my professional visit was taking me to a higher story. I could
not recall, however, which house it was nor when I had called there.
Although the entire matter was indifferent and of no consequence, I
nevertheless occupied myself with it, and at last learned in the usual
roundabout way, by collecting the thoughts that occurred to me in this
connection, that one story above the floor occupied by the firm B. and
R. was the _Pension Fischer_, where I had frequently visited patients.
Then I remembered the building which sheltered both the company and the
_pension_.
I was still puzzled, however, as to the motive that entered into
play in this forgetting. I found nothing disagreeable in my memory
concerning the firm itself or the _Pension Fischer_, or the patients
living there. I was also aware that it could not deal with anything
very painful, otherwise I hardly would have been successful in tracing
the thing forgotten in a roundabout way without resorting to external
aid, as happened in the preceding example. Finally it occurred to me
that a little before, while starting on my way to a new patient, a
gentleman whom I had difficulty in recalling greeted me in the street.
Some months previously I had seen this man in an apparently serious
condition and had made the diagnosis of general paresis, but later
I had learned of his recovery, consequently my judgment had been
incorrect. Was it not possible that we had in this case a remission,
which one usually finds in _dementia paralytica_? In that contingency
my diagnosis would still be justified. The influence emanating from
this meeting caused me to forget the neighbourhood of the B. and
R. Company, and my interest to discover the thing forgotten was
transferred from this case of disputed diagnosis. But the associative
connection in this loose inner relation was effected by means of a
similarity of names: the man who recovered, contrary to expectation,
was also an officer of a large company that recommends patients to me.
And the physician with whom I had seen the supposed paretic bore the
name of Fischer, the name of the _pension_ in the house which I had
forgotten.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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