Freud - Complete Works (198 page)

The Psychopathology Of Everyday Life

1121

   (7) The motive for forgetting a
name may also be a more refined one; it may consist in what might
be called a ‘sublimated’ grudge against the bearer of
it. A Fräulein I. von K. writes from Budapest as follows:

   ‘I have propounded a little
theory of my own. I have noticed that people who have a talent for
painting have no feeling for music, and vice versa. Some time ago I
had a conversation with someone on this point, in which I remarked:
"So far my observation has always held good, with the
exception of only one person." When I wanted to recall that
person’s name, I found it had been irretrievably forgotten,
even though I knew that the owner of it was one of my closest
friends. When I heard the name mentioned quite by chance a few days
later, I knew at once, of course, that it was the destroyer of my
theory who was being spoken of. The grudge I unconsciously bore
against him was expressed by my forgetting his name, which, apart
from that, I knew so well.’

   (8) The following case, reported
by Ferenczi, shows a somewhat different way in which the personal
reference led to a name being forgotten. Its analysis is
particularly instructive because of the explanation it gives of the
substitute associations (like Botticelli and Boltraffio as
substitutes for Signorelli).

   ‘A lady, who had heard
something about psycho-analysis, could not recall the name of the
psychiatrist Jung.¹

   ‘The following names came
to her mind instead: Kl--- (a name), Wilde, Nietzsche,
Hauptmann.

   ‘I did not tell her the
name and invited her to give free associations to each name in
turn.

   ‘Starting from Kl--- she
immediately thought of Frau Kl---, and of how she was a prim and
affected person, but looked very well for her
age
.
"She’s
not ageing
." As a common
characterization of Wilde and Nietzsche she named
"insanity". Then she said chaffingly: "You Freudians
will go on looking for the causes of insanity till you’re
insane yourselves." Then: "I can’t bear Wilde and
Nietzsche. I don’t understand them. I hear they were both
homosexuals; Wilde had dealings with
young
people." (In
spite of having uttered the correct name - in Hungarian, it is true
- in this sentence, she was still unable t recall it.)

   ‘Starting from Hauptmann,
first "
Halbe
" and then "
Jungend
’
occurred to her; and it was there for the first time, after I had
drawn her attention to the word "
Jungend
", that
she realized she had been in search of the name
Jung
.

   ‘This lady had lost her
husband when she was thirty-nine and had no prospect of marrying
again. Thus she had certainly reason enough to avoid recalling
anything that reminded her of
youth
or
age
. It is
striking that the ideas screening the missing name were associated
entirely with its content and that associations with its sound were
absent.’

  
¹
[‘
Jung
’ is also the
German for ‘young’.]

The Psychopathology Of Everyday Life

1122

   (9) Here is an example of
name-forgetting with yet another and a very subtle motivation,
which the subject of it has explained himself:

   ‘When I was being examined
in philosophy as a subsidiary subject I was questioned by the
examiner about the teachings of Epicurus, and after that I was
asked if I knew who had taken up his theories in later centuries. I
answered with the name of Pierre Gassendi, whom I had heard
described as a disciple of Epicurus while I was sitting in a
café only a couple of days before. To the surprised question
how I knew that, I boldly answered that I had long been interested
in Gassendi. The result of this was a certificate
magna cum
laude
, but also unfortunately a subsequent obstinate tendency
to forget the name Gassendi. My guilty conscience is, I think, to
blame for my inability to remember the name in spite of all my
efforts; for I really ought not to have known it on that occasion
either.’

   In order to appreciate the
intensity of our informant’s aversion to recalling this
examination episode, the reader would have to know the high value
he sets on his doctorate and for how many other things it has to
serve as a substitute.

The Psychopathology Of Everyday Life

1123

   (10) At this point I shall insert
another example of the name of a town being forgotten. It is not
perhaps as simple as the ones given above, but it will strike any
one who is fairly well versed in investigations of this nature as
authentic and valuable. The name of a town in Italy escaped the
subject’s memory as a consequence of its great similarity in
sound to a woman’s first name, with which a number of
memories charged with affect were connected, which are doubtless
not here reported in full. Sándor Ferenczi of Budapest, who
observed this case of forgetting in himself, has treated it in the
way in which one analyses a dream or a neurotic idea a - procedure
which is fully justified.

   ‘To-day I was with a family
that I know, and the conversation turned to cities of North Italy.
Someone observed that they still showed traces of Austrian
influence. A few of these cities were mentioned, and I wanted to
give the name of one too, but it escaped me, although I knew I had
spent two very pleasant days there - a fact which did not agree
very well with Freud’s theory of forgetting. In place of the
name I was looking for, the following associations forced
themselves on me:
Capua, Brescia, The Lion of Brescia
.

   ‘The picture that I had of
this "Lion" took the form of a
marble statue
standing before my eyes like a solid object; I noticed at once,
however, that it had less of a resemblance to the lion on the
Monument to Freedom at Brescia (of which I have only seen
illustrations) than to the other celebrated marble lion which I
have seen on the
monument to the dead at Lucerne - the monument
to the Swiss guards who fell at Tuileries
, and of which I have
a miniature replica on my bookcase. And now at last the missing
name came back to me: it was
Verona
.

   ‘At the same time I knew at
once who was to blame for my amnesia. It was no other than a former
servant of the family whose guest I was at the time. Her name was
Veronika
(
Verona
in Hungarian), and I had a strong
antipathy to her because of her repulsive looks, her
shrill,
raucous voice
and her insufferable assertiveness, to which she
believed herself entitled by her length of service. At the same
time the
tyrannical way
in which she used to treat the
children of the house was intolerable to me. I now also understood
the meaning of the associations.

   ‘My immediate association
to
Capua
was
caput mortuum
. I very often compared
Veronika’s head to a death’s head. The Hungarian word
"
kapszi
" (avaricious) doubtless provided an
additional determinant for the displacement. I also, of course,
found the much more direct associative paths which connect
Capua
and
Verona
as geographical idea and as Italian
words that have the same rhythm.

The Psychopathology Of Everyday Life

1124

   ‘The same is true for
Brescia
; but here too there were winding by-paths in the
linkage of ideas.

   ‘My antipathy was at one
time so violent that I found Veronika positively nauseating, and I
had more than once expressed my astonishment that all the same it
was possible for her to have an erotic life and be loved by
someone. "Why," I said, "to kiss her would make one
feel sick!"¹ Nevertheless, she could certainly long since
have been brought into connection with the idea of the
fallen
Swiss Guards.

   ‘
Brescia
is very
often mentioned, at any rate here in Hungary, in connection not
with the lion but with another
wild animal
. The most hated
name in this country, and in the north of Italy too, is that of
General
Haynau
, commonly known as the "
Hyaena of
Brescia
". Thus one thread in my thoughts ran from the
hated
tyrant
Haynau
viâ
Brescia to the town of
Verona, while the other led,
viâ
the idea of the
animal that haunts the graves of the dead
(which helped to
determine the emergence in my mind of a
monument to the
dead
), to the death’s head and to the disagreeable voice
of Veronika - the victim of such gross abuse by my unconscious -
who in her time had acted almost as tyrannically in this house as
had the Austrian general after the Hungarian and Italian struggles
for freedom.

   ‘
Lucerne
is
connected with the thought of the summer which Veronika spent with
her employers
in the neighbourhood of the town of Lucerne
,
on the lake of that name. The
Swiss Guard
in turn recalls
that she knew how to play the tyrant not only to the children but
also to the grown-up members of the family, and fancied herself in
the part of a "Garde-Dame ".

   ‘I must expressly remark
that this antipathy of mine towards Veronika is - consciously -
something that has long been surmounted. Since those times both her
appearance and her manner have changed, greatly to her advantage,
and I can meet her, though I have in fact little occasion for doing
so, with genuinely warm feelings. As usual, my unconscious clings
more tenaciously to my impressions: it is "retrospective"
and resentful.²

   ‘The
Tuileries
are
an allusion to another person, an elderly French lady, who on many
occasions actually "
guarded
" the women of the
house; she was respected by everyone, young and old - and no doubt
somewhat
feared
as well was feared. For a while I was her
élève
for French conversation. The word
élève
further recalls that when I was on a
visit to the brother-in-law of my present host, in northern
Bohemia, I was very much amused because the local country-people
called the
élèves
at the school of forestry
there by the name of "Löwen"³. This
entertaining memory may also have played a part in the displacement
from the hyaena to the lion.’

  
¹
[The first half of the German word for
‘nausea’ (‘
Brech
reiz’) has a sound
similar to the first syllable of ‘Brescia’.]

  
²
[In German:
‘"
nachträglich
"  und
nachtragend
.’]

  
³
[The dialect pronunciation of the first
syllable of this word would resemble that of the second syllable of
‘élèves’.]

The Psychopathology Of Everyday Life

1125

   (11) The next example, too, shows
how a personal complex which is dominating someone at the time may
cause a name to be forgotten in some very remote connection.

   ‘Two men, an older and a
younger one, who six months before had made a trip together in
Sicily, were exchanging recollections of those pleasant and
memorable days. "Let’s see," said the younger,
"what was the name of the place where we spent the night
before making our trip to Selinunte? Wasn’t it
Calatafimi?" The older one rejected it: "No, it certainly
wasn’t, but I’ve forgotten the name too, though I
recall most clearly all the details of our stay there. I only need
to find someone else has forgotten a name, and it at once makes me
forget it too. Let’s look for the name. But the only thing
that occurs to me is Caltanisetta, which certainly isn’t
right." "No," said the younger man, "the name
begins with a ‘w’ or has a ‘w’ in it."
"But there’s no ‘w’ in Italian,"
objected the older. "I really meant a ‘v’, and I
only said ‘w’ because I’m so used to it in my own
language." The older man still opposed the "v".
"As a matter of fact," he declared, "I believe
I’ve forgotten a lot of the Sicilian names already; this
would be a good time to make some experiments. For example, what
was the name of the place on a hill that was called Enna in
antiquity? Oh, I know - Castrogiovanni." The next moment the
younger man had recalled the lost name as well.
"Castelvetrano," he exclaimed, and was pleased at being
able to point to the "v" he had insisted on. For a short
while the older one had no sense of recognition; but after he had
accepted the name it was for him to explain why he had forgotten
it. "Obviously," he said, "because the second half,
’-vetrano’, sounds like ‘veteran’. I know I
don’t much like to think about
growing old
, and I have
strange reactions when I’m reminded of it. For instance, I
recently charged a very dear friend of mine in the strangest terms
with having ‘left his youth far behind him’, for the
reason that once before, in the middle of the most flattering
remarks about me, he had added that I was ‘no longer a young
man’. Another sign that my resistance was directed against
the second half of the name Castelvetrano is that the initial sound
recurred in the substitute name Caltanisetta." "What
about the name Caltanisetta itself?" asked the younger man.
"That," confessed the older one, "has always seemed
to me like a pet name for a young woman."

   ‘Some time later he added:
"Of course the name for Enna was also a substitute name. And
it occurs to me now that Castrogiovanni - a name that forced its
way to the front with the help of a rationalization - sounds like
‘
giovane
’ (young) in exactly the same way as the
lost name Castelvetrano sounds like ‘
veteran
’
(old)."