of the pen slip. You may recall the case of the murderer H., who made a
practice of obtaining cultures of the most dangerous disease germs from
scientific institutions, by pretending to be a bacteriologist, and who
used these cultures to get his close relatives out of the way in this
most modern fashion. This man once complained to the authorities of such
an institution about the ineffectiveness of the culture which had been
sent to him, but committed a pen slip and instead of the words, "in my
attempts on mice and guinea pigs," was plainly written, "in my attempts
on people."[20] This slip even attracted the attention of the doctors at
the institution, but so far as I know, they drew no conclusion from it.
Now what do you think? Might not the doctors better have accepted the
slip as a confession and instituted an investigation through which the
murderer's handiwork would have been blocked in time? In this case was
not ignorance of our conception of errors to blame for an omission of
practical importance? Well, I am inclined to think that such a slip
would surely seem very suspicious to me, but a fact of great importance
stands in the way of its utilization as a confession. The thing is not
so simple. The pen slip is surely an indication, but by itself it would
not have been sufficient to instigate an investigation. That the man is
preoccupied with the thought of infecting human beings, the slip
certainly does betray, but it does not make it possible to decide
whether this thought has the value of a clear plan of injury or merely
of a phantasy having no practical consequence. It is even possible that
the person who made such a slip will deny this phantasy with the best
subjective justification and will reject it as something entirely alien
to him. Later, when we give our attention to the difference between
psychic and material reality, you will understand these possibilities
even better. Yet this is again a case in which an error later attained
unsuspected significance.
In misreading, we encounter a psychic situation which is clearly
differentiated from that of the tongue slips or pen slips. The one of
the two rival tendencies is here replaced by a sensory stimulus and
perhaps for that reason is less resistant. What one is reading is not a
production of one's own psychic activity, as is something which one
intends to write. In a large majority of cases, therefore, the
misreading consists in a complete substitution. One substitutes another
word for the word to be read, and there need be no connection in meaning
between the text and the product of the misreading. In general, the slip
is based upon a word resemblance. Lichtenberg's example of reading
"_Agamemnon_" for "_angenommen_"[21] is the best of this group. If one
wishes to discover the interfering tendency which causes the misreading,
one may completely ignore the misread text and can begin the analytic
investigation with the two questions: What is the first idea that occurs
in free association to the product of the misreading, and, in what
situation did the misreading occur? Now and then a knowledge of the
latter suffices by itself to explain the misreading. Take, for example,
the individual who, distressed by certain needs, wanders about in a
strange city and reads the word "_Closethaus_" on a large sign on the
first floor of a house. He has just time to be surprised at the fact
that the sign has been nailed so high up when he discovers that,
accurately observed, the sign reads "_Corset-haus_." In other cases the
misreadings which are independent of the text require a penetrating
analysis which cannot be accomplished without practice and confidence in
the psychoanalytic technique. But generally it is not a matter of much
difficulty to obtain the elucidation of a misreading. The substituted
word, as in the example, "_Agamemnon_," betrays without more ado the
thought sequence from which the interference results. In war times, for
instance, it is very common for one to read into everything which
contains a similar word structure, the names of the cities, generals and
military expressions which are constantly buzzing around us. In this
way, whatever interests and preoccupies one puts itself in the place of
that which is foreign or uninteresting. The after-effects of thoughts
blur the new perceptions.
There are other types of misreadings, in which the text itself arouses
the disturbing tendency, by means of which it is then most often changed
into its opposite. One reads something which is undesired; analysis then
convinces one that an intensive wish to reject what has been read should
be made responsible for the alteration.
In the first mentioned and more frequent cases of misreading, two
factors are neglected to which we gave an important role in the
mechanism of errors: the conflict of two tendencies and the suppression
of one which then indemnifies itself by producing the error. Not that
anything like the opposite occurs in misreading, but the importunity of
the idea content which leads to misreading is nevertheless much more
conspicuous than the suppression to which the latter may previously have
been subjected. Just these two factors are most tangibly apparent in the
various situations of errors of forgetfulness.
Forgetting plans is actually uniform in meaning; its interpretation is,
as we have heard, not denied even by the layman. The tendency
interfering with the plan is always an antithetical intention, an
unwillingness concerning which we need only discover why it does not
come to expression in a different and less disguised manner. But the
existence of this unwillingness is not to be doubted. Sometimes it is
possible even to guess something of the motives which make it necessary
for this unwillingness to disguise itself, and it always achieves its
purpose by the error resulting from the concealment, while its rejection
would be certain were it to present itself as open contradiction. If an
important change in the psychic situation occurs between the formulation
of the plan and its execution, in consequence of which the execution of
the plan does not come into question, then the fact that the plan was
forgotten is no longer in the class of errors. One is no longer
surprised at it, and one understands that it would have been superfluous
to have remembered the plan; it was then permanently or temporarily
effaced. Forgetting a plan can be called an error only when we have no
reason to believe there was such an interruption.
The cases of forgetting plans are in general so uniform and transparent
that they do not interest us in our investigation. There are two points,
however, from which we can learn something new. We have said that
forgetting, that is, the non-execution of a plan, points to an antipathy
toward it. This certainly holds, but, according to the results of our
investigations, the antipathy may be of two sorts, direct and indirect.
What is meant by the latter can best be explained by one or two
examples. If a patron forgets to say a good word for his protege to a
third person, it may be because the patron is not really very much
interested in the protege, therefore, has no great inclination to
commend him. It is, at any rate, in this sense that the protege will
construe his patron's forgetfulness. But the matter may be more
complicated. The patron's antipathy to the execution of the plan may
originate in another quarter and fasten upon quite a different point. It
need not have anything to do with the protege, but may be directed
toward the third person to whom the good word was to have been said.
Thus, you see what doubts here confront the practical application of our
interpretation. The protege, despite a correct interpretation of the
forgetfulness, stands in danger of becoming too suspicious, and of doing
his patron a grave injustice. Or, if an individual forgets a rendezvous
which he has made, and which he had resolved to keep, the most frequent
basis will certainly be the direct aversion to encountering this person.
But analysis might here supply the information that the interfering
intention was not directed against that person, but against the place in
which they were to have met, and which was avoided because of a painful
memory associated with it. Or, if one forgets to mail a letter, the
counter-intention may be directed against the content of that letter,
yet this does not in any way exclude the possibility that the letter is
harmless in itself, and only subject to the counter-intention because
something about it reminds the writer of another letter written
previously, which, in fact, did afford a basis for the antipathy. One
can say in such a case that the antipathy has here transferred itself
from that former letter where it was justified to the present one in
which it really has no meaning. Thus you see that one must always
exercise restraint and caution in the application of interpretations,
even though the interpretations are justified. That which is
psychologically equivalent may nevertheless in practice be very
ambiguous.
Phenomena such as these will seem very unusual to you. Perhaps you are
inclined to assume that the "indirect" antipathy is enough to
characterize the incident as pathological. Yet I can assure you that it
also occurs in a normal and healthy setting. I am in no way willing to
admit the unreliability of our analytic interpretation. After all, the
above-discussed ambiguity of plan-forgetting exists only so long as we
have not attempted an analysis of the case, and are interpreting it only
on the basis of our general suppositions. When we analyze the person in
question, we discover with sufficient certainty in each case whether or
not it is a direct antipathy, or what its origin is otherwise.
A second point is the following: when we find in a large majority of
cases that the forgetting of a plan goes back to an antipathy, we gain
courage to extend this solution to another series of cases in which the
analyzed person does not confirm, but denies, the antipathy which we
inferred. Take as an example the exceedingly frequent incidents of
forgetting to return books which one has borrowed, or forgetting to pay
one's bills or debts. We will be so bold as to accuse the individual in
question of intending to keep the books and not to pay the debts, while
he will deny such an intention but will not be in a position to give us
any other explanation of his conduct. Thereupon we insist that he has
the intention, only he knows nothing about it; all we need for our
inference is to have the intention betray itself through the effect of
the forgetfulness. The subject may then repeat that he had merely
forgotten it. You now recognize the situation as one in which we once
before found ourselves. If we wish to be consistent in our
interpretation, an interpretation which has been proved as manifold as
it is justified, we will be unavoidably forced to the conclusion that
there are tendencies in a human being which can become effective without
his being conscious of them. By so doing, however, we place ourselves in
opposition to all the views which prevail in daily life and in
psychology.
Forgetting proper names and foreign names as well as foreign words can
be traced in the same manner to a counter-intention which aims either
directly or indirectly at the name in question. I have already given you
an example of such direct antipathy. The indirect causation, however, is
particularly frequent and generally necessitates careful analysis for
its determination. Thus, for example, in war times which force us to
sacrifice so many of our former inclinations, the ability to recall
proper names also suffers severely in consequence of the most peculiar
connections. A short time ago it happened that I could not reproduce the
name of that harmless Moravian city of Bisenz, and analysis showed that
no direct dislike was to blame, but rather the sound resemblance to the
name of the Bisenzi palace in Orrieto, in which I used to wish I might
live. As a motive for the antagonism to remembering the name, we here
encounter for the first time a principle which will later disclose to us
its whole tremendous significance in the causation of neurotic symptoms,
viz., the aversion on the part of the memory to remembering anything
which is connected with unpleasant experience and which would revive
this unpleasantness by a reproduction. This intention of avoiding
unpleasantness in recollections of other psychic acts, the psychic
flight from unpleasantness, we may recognize as the ultimate effective
motive not only for the forgetting of names, but also for many other
errors, such as omissions of action, etc.
Forgetting names does, however, seem to be especially facilitated
psycho-physiologically and therefore also occurs in cases in which the
interference of an unpleasantness-motive cannot be established. If
anyone once has a tendency to forget names, you can establish by
analytical investigation that he not only loses names because he himself
does not like them, or because they remind him of something he does not
like, but also because the same name in his mind belongs to another
chain of associations, with which he has more intimate relations. The
name is anchored there, as it were, and denied to the other associations
activated at the moment. If you will recall the tricks of mnemonic
technique you will ascertain with some surprise that one forgets names
in consequence of the same associations which one otherwise purposely
forms in order to save them from being forgotten. The most conspicuous
example of this is afforded by proper names of persons, which
conceivably enough must have very different psychic values for different
people. For example, take a first name, such as Theodore. To one of you
it will mean nothing special, to another it means the name of his
father, brother, friend, or his own name. Analytic experience will then
show you that the first person is not in danger of forgetting that a
certain stranger bears this name, while the latter will be constantly
inclined to withhold from the stranger this name which seems reserved
for intimate relationships. Let us now assume that this associative
inhibition can come into contact with the operation of the
unpleasantness-principle, and in addition with an indirect mechanism,
and you will be in a position to form a correct picture of the
complexity of causation of this temporary name-forgetting. An adequate
analysis that does justice to the facts, however, will completely
disclose these complications.
Forgetting impressions and experiences shows the working of the tendency
to keep unpleasantness from recollection much more clearly and
conclusively than does the forgetting of names. It does not, of course,
belong in its entirety to the category of errors, but only in so far as
it seems to us conspicuous and unjustified, measured by the measuring
stick of our accustomed conception--thus, for example, where the
forgetfulness strikes fresh or important impressions or impressions
whose loss tears a hole in the otherwise well-remembered sequence. Why
and how it is in general that we forget, particularly why and how we
forget experiences which have surely left the deepest impressions, such
as the incidents of our first years of childhood, is quite a different
problem, in which the defense against unpleasant associations plays a
certain role but is far from explaining everything. That unpleasant
impressions are easily forgotten is an indubitable fact. Various
psychologists have observed it, and the great Darwin was so struck by it
that he made the "golden rule" for himself of writing down with
particular care observations which seemed unfavorable to his theory,
since he had convinced himself that they were just the ones which would
not stick in his memory.
Those who hear for the first time of this principle of defense against
unpleasant recollections by means of forgetting, seldom fail to raise
the objection that they, on the contrary, have had the experience that
just the painful is hard to forget, inasmuch as it always comes back to
mind to torture the person against his will--as, for example, the
recollection of an insult or humiliation. This fact is also correct, but
the objection is not valid. It is important that one begin betimes to
reckon with the fact that the psychic life is the arena of the struggles
and exercises of antagonistic tendencies, or, to express it in
non-dynamic terminology, that it consists of contradictions and paired
antagonisms. Information concerning one specific tendency is of no avail
for the exclusion of its opposite; there is room for both of them. It
depends only on how the opposites react upon each other, what effects
will proceed from the one and what from the other.
Losing and mislaying objects is of especial interest to us because of
the ambiguity and the multiplicity of tendencies in whose services the
errors may act. The common element in all cases is this, that one wished
to lose something. The reasons and purposes thereof vary. One loses an
object when it has become damaged, when one intends to replace it with a
better one, when one has ceased to like it, when it came from a person
whose relations to one have become strained, or when it was obtained
under circumstances of which one no longer wishes to think. The same
purpose may be served by letting the object fall, be damaged or broken.
In the life of society it is said to have been found that unwelcome and
illegitimate children are much more often frail than those born in
wedlock. To reach this result we do not need the coarse technique of the
so-called angel-maker. A certain remissness in the care of the child is
said to suffice amply. In the preservation of objects, the case might
easily be the same as with the children.
But things may be singled out for loss without their having forfeited
any of their value, namely, when there exists the intention to sacrifice
something to fate in order to ward off some other dreaded loss. Such
exorcisings of fate are, according to the findings of analysis, still
very frequent among us; therefore, the loss of things is often a
voluntary sacrifice. In the same way losing may serve the purposes of
obstinacy or self-punishment. In short, the more distant motivation of
the tendency to get rid of a thing oneself by means of losing it is not
overlooked.
Mistakes, like other errors, are often used to fulfill wishes which one
ought to deny oneself. The purpose is thus masked as fortunate
accident; for instance, one of our friends once took the train to make a
call in the suburbs, despite the clearest antipathy to so doing, and
then, in changing cars, made the mistake of getting into the train which
took him back to the city. Or, if on a trip one absolutely wants to make
a longer stay at a half-way station, one is apt to overlook or miss
certain connections, so that he is forced to make the desired
interruption to the trip. Or, as once happened to a patient of mine whom
I had forbidden to call up his fiancee on the telephone, "by mistake"
and "absent-mindedly" he asked for a wrong number when he wanted to
telephone to me, so that he was suddenly connected with the lady. A
pretty example and one of practical significance in making a direct
mistake is the observation of an engineer at a preliminary hearing in a
damage suit:
"Some time ago I worked with several colleagues in the laboratory of a
high school on a series of complicated elasticity experiments, a piece
of work which we had undertaken voluntarily but which began to take more
time than we had expected. One day as I went into the laboratory with my
colleague F., the latter remarked how unpleasant it was to him to lose
so much time that day, since he had so much to do at home. I could not
help agreeing with him, and remarked half jokingly, alluding to an
incident of the previous week: 'Let's hope that the machine gives out
again so that we can stop work and go home early.'
"In the division of labor it happened that F. was given the regulation
of the valve of the press, that is to say, he was, by means of a
cautious opening of the valve, to let the liquid pressure from the
accumulator flow slowly into the cylinder of the hydraulic press. The
man who was directing the job stood by the manometer (pressure gauge)
and when the right pressure had been reached called out in a loud voice:
'Stop.' At this command F. seized the valve and turned with all his
might--to the left! (All valves, without exception, close to the right.)
Thereby the whole pressure of the accumulator suddenly became effective
in the press, a strain for which the connecting pipes are not designed,
so that a connecting pipe immediately burst--quite a harmless defect,
but one which nevertheless forced us to drop work for the day and go
home.
"It is characteristic, by the way, that some time afterward when we were
discussing this occurrence, my friend F. had no recollection whatever
of my remark, which I could recall with certainty."
From this point you may reach the conjecture that it is not harmless
accident which makes the hands of your domestics such dangerous enemies
to your household property. But you can also raise the question whether
it is always an accident when one damages himself and exposes his own
person to danger. There are interests the value of which you will
presently be able to test by means of the analysis of observations.
Ladies and gentlemen, this is far from being all that might be said
about errors. There is indeed much left to investigate and to discuss.
But I am satisfied if, from our investigations to date, your previous
views are somewhat shaken and if you have acquired a certain degree of
liberality in the acceptance of new ones. For the rest, I must content
myself with leaving you face to face with an unclear condition of
affairs. We cannot prove all our axioms by the study of errors and,
indeed, are by no means solely dependent on this material. The great
value of errors for our purpose lies in the fact that they are very
frequent phenomena that can easily be observed on oneself and the
occurrence of which do not require a pathological condition. I should
like to mention just one more of your unanswered questions before
concluding: "If, as we have seen in many examples, people come so close
to understanding errors and so often act as though they penetrated their
meaning, how is it possible that they can so generally consider them
accidental, senseless and meaningless, and can so energetically oppose
their psychoanalytic elucidation?"
You are right; that is conspicuous and demands an explanation. I shall
not give this explanation to you, however, but shall guide you slowly to
the connecting links from which the explanation will force itself upon
you without any aid from me.
II
THE DREAM
FIFTH LECTURE
THE DREAM
_Difficulties and Preliminary Approach_
One day the discovery was made that the disease symptoms of certain
nervous patients have a meaning.[22] Thereupon the psychoanalytic method
of therapy was founded. In this treatment it happened that the patients
also presented dreams in place of their symptoms. Herewith originated
the conjecture that these dreams also have a meaning.
We will not, however, pursue this historical path, but enter upon the
opposite one. We wish to discover the meaning of dreams as preparation
for the study of the neuroses. This inversion is justified, for the
study of dreams is not only the best preparation for that of the
neuroses, but the dream itself is also a neurotic symptom, and in fact
one which possesses for us the incalculable advantage of occurring in
all normals. Indeed, if all human beings were well and would dream, we
could gain from their dreams almost all the insight to which the study
of the neuroses has led.