brother, who was seriously ill. In the course of the visit she actually
saw him. She found him looking very badly, and thought to herself that
he would soon die. But it happened that her own only brother had had a
serious attack of diphtheria some months before, and during his illness
she had lived for weeks with relatives far from her parental home. She
believed that her brother was taking part in this visit to the country,
imagined even that this was his first long journey since his illness;
still, her memory was remarkably indistinct in regard to these points,
whereas all other details, and particularly the dress which she wore
that day, remained most clearly before her eyes.
To the initiated it will not be difficult to conclude from these
suggestions that the expectation of her brother’s death had played a
great part in the girl’s mind at that time, and that either it never
became conscious or it was more energetically repressed after the
favourable issue of the illness. Under other circumstances she would
have been compelled to wear another dress--namely, mourning clothes.
She found the analogous situation in her friends’ home; their only
brother was in danger of an early death, an event that really came
to pass a short time after. She might have consciously remembered
that she had lived through a similar situation a few months previous,
but instead of recalling what was inhibited through repression she
transferred the memory feeling to the locality, to the garden, and the
house, and merged it into the _fausse reconnaissance_ that she had
already seen everything exactly as it was.
From the fact of the repression we may conclude that the former
expectation of the death of her brother was not far from evincing the
character of a wish-fantasy. She would then have become the only child.
In her later neurosis she suffered in the most intense manner from the
fear of losing her parents, behind which the analysis disclosed, as
usual, the unconscious wish of the same content.
My own experience of _Déjà vu_ I can trace in a similar manner to the
emotional constellation of the moment. It may be expressed as follows:
“That would be another occasion for awakening certain fantasies
(unconscious and unknown) which were formed in me at one time or
another as a wish to improve my situation.”[81]
V. Recently when I had occasion to recite to a colleague of a
philosophical turn of mind some examples of name-forgetting, with their
analyses, he hastened to reply: “That is all very well, but with me the
forgetting of a name proceeds in a different manner.” Evidently one
cannot dismiss this question as simply as that; I do not believe that
my colleague had ever thought of an analysis for the forgetting of a
name, nor could he say how the process differed in him. But his remark,
nevertheless, touches upon a problem which many would be inclined to
place in the foreground. Does the solution given for faulty and chance
actions apply in general or only in particular cases, and if only in
the latter, what are the conditions under which it may also be employed
in the explanation of the other phenomena?
In answer to this question my experiences leave me in the lurch. I can
only urge against considering the demonstrated connections as rare, for
as often as I have made the test in myself and with my patients it was
always definitely demonstrated exactly as in the examples reported,
or there were at least good reasons to assume this. One should not be
surprised, however, when one does not succeed every time in finding the
concealed meaning of the symptomatic action, as the amount of inner
resistances ranging themselves against the solution must be considered
a deciding factor. Also it is not always possible to explain every
individual dream of one’s self or of patients. To substantiate the
general validity of the theory, it is enough if one can penetrate only
a certain distance into the hidden associations. The dream which proves
refractory when the solution is attempted on the following day can
often be robbed of its secret a week or a month later, when the psychic
factors combating one another have been reduced as a consequence of a
real change that has meanwhile taken place. The same applies to the
solution of faulty and symptomatic actions. It would therefore be wrong
to affirm of all cases which resist analysis that they are caused by
another psychic mechanism than that here revealed; such assumption
requires more than negative proofs; moreover, the readiness to believe
in a different explanation of faulty and symptomatic actions, which
probably exists universally in all normal persons, does not prove
anything; it is obviously an expression of the same psychic forces
which produced the secret, which therefore strives to protect and
struggle against its elucidation.
On the other hand, we must not overlook the fact that the repressed
thoughts and feelings are not independent in attaining expression in
symptomatic and faulty actions. The technical possibility for such
an adjustment of the innervations must be furnished independently
of them, and this is then gladly utilized by the intention of the
repressed material to come to conscious expression. In the case of
linguistic faulty actions an attempt has been made by philosophers and
philologists to verify through minute observations what structural and
functional relations enter into the service of such intention. If in
the determinations of faulty and symptomatic actions we separate the
unconscious motive from its co-active physiological and psychophysical
relations, the question remains open whether there are still other
factors within normal limits which, like the unconscious motive, and in
its place can produce faulty and symptomatic actions on the road of the
relations. It is not my task to answer this question.
VI. Since the discussion of speech blunders we have been content to
demonstrate that faulty actions have a concealed motive, and through
the aid of psychoanalysis we have traced our way to the knowledge of
their motivation. The general nature and the peculiarities of the
psychic factors brought to expression in these faulty actions we have
hitherto left almost without consideration; at any rate, we have not
attempted to define them more accurately or to examine into their
lawfulness. Nor will we now attempt a thorough elucidation of the
subject, as the first steps have already taught us that it is more
feasible to enter this structure from another side. Here we can put
before ourselves certain questions which I will cite in their order.
(1) What is the content and the origin of the thoughts and feelings
which show themselves through faulty and chance actions? (2) What are
the conditions which force a thought or a feeling to make use of these
occurrences as a means of expression and place it in a position to do
so? (3) Can constant and definite associations be demonstrated between
the manner of the faulty action and the qualities brought to expression
through it?
I shall begin by bringing together some material for answering the last
question. In the discussion of the examples of speech blunders we found
it necessary to go beyond the contents of the intended speech, and we
had to seek the cause of the speech disturbance outside the intention.
The latter was quite clear in a series of cases, and was known to the
consciousness of the speaker. In the example that seemed most simple
and transparent it was a similar sounding but different conception of
the same thought, which disturbed its expression without any one being
able to say why the one succumbed and the other came to the surface
(Meringer and Mayers’ _Contaminations_).
In a second group of cases one conception succumbed to a motive which
did not, however, prove strong enough to cause complete submersion. The
conception which was withheld was clearly presented to consciousness.
Only of the third group can we affirm unreservedly that the disturbing
thought differed from the one intended, and it is obvious that it
may establish an essential distinction. The disturbing thought is
either connected with the disturbed one through a thought association
(disturbance through inner contradiction), or it is substantially
strange to it, and just the disturbed word is connected with the
disturbing thought through a surprising outer association, which is
frequently unconscious.
In the examples which I have given from my psychoanalyses it is found
that the entire speech is either under the influence of thoughts which
have become active simultaneously, or under absolutely unconscious
thoughts which betray themselves either through the disturbance itself,
or which evince an indirect influence by making it possible for the
individual parts of the unconsciously intended speech to disturb
one another. The retained or unconscious thoughts from which the
disturbances in speech emanate are of most varied origin. A general
survey does not reveal any definite direction.
Comparative examinations of examples of mistakes in reading and writing
lead to the same conclusions. Isolated cases, as in speech blunders,
seem to owe their origin to an unmotivated work of condensation
(_e.g._, the _Apel_). But we should be pleased to know whether special
conditions must not be fulfilled in order that such condensation,
which is considered regular in the dream-work and faulty in our waking
thoughts, should take place. No information concerning this can be
obtained from the examples themselves. But I merely refuse from this
to draw the conclusion that there are no such conditions, as, for
instance, the relaxation of conscious attention; for I have learned
elsewhere that automatic actions are especially characterized by
correctness and reliability. I would rather emphasize the fact that
here, as so frequently in biology, it is the normal relations, or
those approaching the normal, that are less favourable objects for
investigation than the pathological. What remains obscure in the
explanation of these most simple disturbances will, according to my
expectation, be made clear through the explanation of more serious
disturbances.
Also mistakes in reading and writing do not lack examples in which more
remote and more complicated motivation can be recognized.
There is no doubt that the disturbances of the speech functions occur
more easily and make less demand on the disturbing forces than other
psychic acts.
But one is on different ground when it comes to the examination of
forgetting in the literal sense--_i.e._, the forgetting of past
experiences. (To distinguish this forgetting from the others we
designate _sensu strictiori_ the forgetting of proper names and
foreign words, as in Chapters I and II, as “slips”; and the forgetting
of resolutions as “omissions.”) The principal conditions of the
normal process in forgetting are unknown.[82] We are also reminded
of the fact that not all is forgotten which we believe to be. Our
explanation here deals only with those cases in which the forgetting
arouses our astonishment, in so far as it infringes the rule that
the unimportant is forgotten, while the important matter is guarded
by memory. Analysis of these examples of forgetting which seem to
demand a special explanation shows that the motive of forgetting is
always an unwillingness to recall something which may evoke painful
feelings. We come to the conjecture that this motive universally
strives for expression in psychic life, but is inhibited through other
and contrary forces from regularly manifesting itself. The extent and
significance of this dislike to recall painful impressions seems worthy
of the most painstaking psychologic investigation. The question as
to what special conditions render possible the universally resistant
forgetting in individual cases cannot be solved through this added
association.
A different factor steps into the foreground in the forgetting of
resolutions; the supposed conflict resulting in the repression of the
painful memory becomes tangible, and in the analysis of the examples
one regularly recognizes a counter-will which opposes but does not put
an end to the resolution. As in previously discussed faulty acts, we
here also recognize two types of the psychic process: the counter-will
either turns directly against the resolution (in intentions of some
consequence) or it is substantially foreign to the resolution itself
and establishes its connection with it through an outer association (in
almost indifferent resolutions).
The same conflict governs the phenomena of erroneously carried-out
actions. The impulse which manifests itself in the disturbances of the
action is frequently a counter-impulse. Still oftener it is altogether
a strange impulse which only utilizes the opportunity to express itself
through a disturbance in the execution of the action. The cases in
which the disturbance is the result of an inner contradiction are the
most significant ones, and also deal with the more important activities.
The inner conflict in the chance or symptomatic actions then merges
into the background. Those motor expressions which are least thought
of, or are entirely overlooked by consciousness, serve as the
expression of numerous unconscious or restrained feelings. For the most
part they represent symbolically wishes and phantoms.
The first question (as to the origin of the thoughts and emotions
which find expression in faulty actions) we can answer by saying
that in a series of cases the origin of the disturbing thoughts can
be readily traced to repressed emotions of the psychic life. Even in
healthy persons egotistic, jealous and hostile feelings and impulses,
burdened by the pressure of moral education, often utilize the path of
faulty actions to express in some way their undeniably existing force
which is not recognized by the higher psychic instances. Allowing
these faulty and chance actions to continue corresponds in great
part to a comfortable toleration of the unmoral. The manifold sexual
currents play no insignificant part in these repressed feelings. That
they appear so seldom in the thoughts revealed by the analyses of
my examples is simply a matter of coincidence. As I have undertaken
the analyses of numerous examples from my own psychic life, the
selection was partial from the first, and aimed at the exclusion of
sexual matters. At other times it seemed that the disturbing thoughts
originated from the most harmless objection and consideration.
We have now reached the answer to the second question--that is, what
psychologic conditions are responsible for the fact that a thought
must seek expression, not in its complete form but, as it were, in
parasitic form, as a modification and disturbance of another. From
the most striking examples of faulty actions it is quite obvious that
this determinant should be sought in a relation to conscious capacity,
or in the more or less firmly pronounced character of the “repressed”
material. But an examination of this series of examples shows that
this character consists of many indistinct elements. The tendency to
overlook something because it is wearisome, or because the concerned
thought does not really belong to the intended matter--these feelings
seem to play the same rôle as motives for the suppression of a thought
(which later depends for expression on the disturbance of another), as
the moral condemnation of a rebellious emotional feeling, or as the
origin of absolutely unconscious trains of thought. An insight into the
general nature of the condition of faulty and chance actions cannot be
gained in this way.
However, this investigation gives us one single significant fact; the
more harmless the motivation of the faulty act the less obnoxious,
and hence the less incapable of consciousness, the thought to which
it gives expression is; the easier also becomes the solution of the
phenomenon after we have turned our attention toward it. The simplest
cases of speech blunders are immediately noticed and spontaneously
corrected. Where one deals with motivation through actually repressed
feelings the solution requires a painstaking analysis, which may
sometimes strike against difficulties or turn out unsuccessful.
One is therefore justified in taking the result of this last
investigation as an indication of the fact that the satisfactory
explanation of the psychologic determinations of faulty and chance
actions is to be acquired in another way and from another source.
The indulgent reader can therefore see in these discussions the
demonstration of the surfaces of fracture in which this theme was quite
artificially evolved from a broader connection.
VII. Just a few words to indicate the direction of this broader
connection. The mechanism of the faulty and chance actions, as we
have learned to know it through the application of analysis, shows in
the most essential points an agreement with the mechanism of dream
formation, which I have discussed in the chapter “The Dream Work” of
my book on the interpretation of dreams. Here, as there, one finds
the condensation and compromise formation (“contaminations”); in
addition the situation is much the same, since unconscious thoughts
find expression as modifications of other thoughts in unusual ways
and through outer associations. The incongruities, absurdities, and
errors in the dream content by virtue of which the dream is scarcely
recognized as a psychic achievement originate in the same way--to be
sure, through freer usage of the existing material--as the common error
of our everyday life; _here, as there, the appearance of the incorrect
function is explained through the peculiar interference of two or more
correct actions_.
An important conclusion can be drawn from, this combination: the
peculiar mode of operation, whose most striking function we recognize
in the dream content, should not be adjudged only to the sleeping state
of the psychic life when we possess abundant proof of its activity
during the waking state in the form of faulty actions. The same
connection also forbids us assuming that these psychic processes which
impress us as abnormal and strange are determined by deep-seated decay
of psychic activity or by morbid state of function.[83]
The correct understanding of this strange psychic work which allows
the faulty actions to originate like the dream pictures will only be
possible after we have discovered that the psychoneurotic symptoms,
particularly the psychic formations of hysteria and compulsion
neurosis, repeat in their mechanisms all the essential features of
this mode of operation. The continuation of our investigation would
therefore have to begin at this point.
There is still another special interest for us in considering the
faulty, chance, and symptomatic actions in the light of this last
analogy. If we compare them to the function of the psychoneuroses and
the neurotic symptoms, two frequently recurring statements gain in
sense and support--namely, that the border-line between the nervous,
normal, and abnormal states is indistinct, and that we are all slightly
nervous. Regardless of all medical experience, one may construe various
types of such barely suggested nervousness, the _formes frustes_ of the
neuroses. There may be cases in which only a few symptoms appear, or
they may manifest themselves rarely or in mild forms; the extenuation
may be transferred to the number, intensity, or to the temporal
outbreak of the morbid manifestation. It may also happen that just
this type, which forms the most frequent transition between health and
disease, may never be discovered. The transition type, whose morbid
manifestations come in the form of faulty and symptomatic actions, is
characterized by the fact that the symptoms are transformed to the
least important psychic activities, while everything that can lay claim
to a higher psychic value remains free from disturbance. When the
symptoms are disposed of in a reverse manner--that is, when they appear
in the most important individual and social activities in a manner to
disturb the functions of nourishment and sexual relations, professional
and social life--such disposition is found in the severe cases of
neuroses, and is perhaps more characteristic of the latter than the
multiformity or vividness of the morbid manifestations.
But the common character of the mildest as well as the severest cases,
to which the faulty and chance actions contribute, lies _in the ability
to refer the phenomena to unwelcome, repressed, psychic material,
which, though pushed away from consciousness, is nevertheless not
robbed of all capacity to express itself_.
INDEX
Actions--
Accidental, 192
Chance, 215
Symbolic, 210
Symptomatic, 178, 215, 235
Collection of, 238
Examples, 216, 217
Grouping of, 219
Adler, 283, 287
Amnesia, 139
Infantile, 62
Temporary, 35
Analysis of--
Aliquis, 18
Castelvetrano, 50
Ode to Apollo, 29
Signorelli, 4
Young, 44
Anticipations, 72
Association, 11
Auditifs, 63
Awkwardness, accidental, 209
Bed-wetting, 150
Behaviour of paranoiacs, 304
Bernheim, 161
Bleuler, 38, 120, 303, 319
Blood miracle, 20
Blunders, speech, 74
Boileau, quoted from, 114
Brantôme, 93
Breaking of objects, 184, 186, 187, 189
Brill, 19, 29, 32, 101, 102, 103, 130, 147, 169, 170, 197, 241, 249,
258, 293, 316
Chance, 277
Chance numbers, 282, 283
Charcot, 63, 157
Child, intellectual accomplishments of, 62
Childhood activities, trace of, 62
Combined faulty acts, 265
Examples of, 266, 267
Complex--
Ambition, 100
Family, 40
Œdipus, 198
Personal, 38, 49
Professional, 40
Self-reference, 52
Compromise formation, examples of, 81
Consciousness, 10
Bringing hidden ideas to, 19
Contaminations, 72
Contradiction from repression, 26
Counter-will, 170
In resolutions, 170
Damaging things, 190, 191
Darwin, 154
Dattner, B., 129, 232, 233, 239
Daudet, 156
Death and sexuality, 7
_Déjà vu_--
Explanation of, 321
Phenomenon of, 320
Delusions, formation of, 155
Denials, 149
Determinant, inner, 13
Determinism, 277
In mental life, 278
Psychic, 302
Displacement, 4, 10, 57
Retro-active, 58
Disturbance of newly emerging theme, 6
Don Quixote, 202
Dream, prophetic, 312
Element, suppressed, 11
Erroneously carried-out actions, 177, 278, 332
As an expression of self-reproach, 184
Examples of, 178, 179, 180
Errors, 249
Examples of, 250, 251, 253
Of memory, 249
Mechanism of, 256
Examples arbitrarily chosen, 279, 281
Fall, 191
False recollection, 4
Faulty acts, 192
Actions, 326
Faulty actions--
Explanation of, 322
In relation to nervousness, 337
The psychoneurotic symptom, 337
Memory, mechanism of, 10
Relation to the dream, 335
Ferenczi, 33, 43, 46, 98, 204, 324
Folk-lore, 154
Forebodings, 312
Fore-sounds, influence of, 78
Forget, disposition to, 11
Tendency to, 17
Forgetfulness, 168
Due to disturbances of pain, 27
Excusing power of, 165
Psychic mechanism of, 3
Temporary, of proper names, 3, 29, 45
Forgetting--
As a spontaneous process, 135
Defensive tendency of, 153
Examples of, 139, 140, 141, 148, 149
Intentional, 8
Mechanism of, 52, 330
Of experiences, 138
Of foreign words, 17
Of impressions, 135, 138
Of intentions, 159
Of knowledge, 139
Of names, 29, 39, 40, 155, 324
Of resolutions, 135, 173, 332
Pain motive of, 155
Preference for proper names, 3, 4, 11
Psychologic analysis of, 136
Purposive, 24
The order of words, 29, 33, 34
Through neglect, 163
Free will, 303
Freud, 43, 300
Gross, Hans, 154, 304
Hallucination, 313
Henri V. and C., 61
Hitschman, 301
Identification, 100
Impotence, psychic, 34
Injury, self-inflicted, 199, 201
Intention, 159
Intentions--
Forgetting of, 160
Secondary, 163
Interchangings, 72
Jones, E., 31, 51, 97, 109, 127, 129, 148, 151, 155, 163, 179, 221,
239, 267, 290, 292
Jung, C. G., 32, 43, 292
Keys, 179, 180
Lapses in reading, 117, 278
In speech, 117, 256, 278
In writing, 120, 278
Lapsus calami, 122
Maeder, 179, 236, 258
Mayer and Meringer, 71, 177
Memories--
Childhood, 57, 61, 211
Concealing, 57, 58, 64
Cause of, 58
Formation of, 59, 60
Painful, 154