Freud - Complete Works (199 page)

   ‘The older man believed
that in this way he had accounted for his forgetting the name. No
investigation was made of the motive for the similar failure of the
younger man’s memory.’

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   Not only the motives, but also
the mechanism governing the forgetting of names, deserve our
interest. In a large number of cases a name is forgotten not
because the name itself arouses such motives, but because - owing
to similarity in sound and to assonance - it touches upon
another
name against which these motives do operate. If the
determinants are relaxed in this way, the occurrence of the
phenomenon will obviously be made very much easier, as the
following examples show.

   (12) Reported by Dr. Eduard
Hitschmann (1913
a
): ‘Herr N. wanted to give someone
the name of the firm of book sellers Gilhofer and Ranschburg. But
however much he thought over it, only the name Ranschburg occurred
to him, though he knew the firm perfectly well. He returned home
feeling somewhat dissatisfied, and thought it sufficiently
important to ask his brother (who was apparently already asleep)
what the first half of the firm’s name was. His brother gave
him the name without hesitation. Thereupon the word
"Gallhof" immediately sprang to Herr N.’s mind as
an association to "Gilhofer". Gallhof was the place where
a few months before he had gone for a memorable walk with an
attractive young lady. As a momento the lady had given him a
present which was inscribed "A souvenir of the happy hours at
Gallhof ". In the course of the days just before the name was
forgotten, this present had been badly damaged, seemingly by
accident, through N.’s shutting a drawer too hastily. He
noticed this with a certain sense of guilt, for he was familiar
with the meaning of symptomatic acts. At the time his feelings
towards the lady were somewhat ambivalent: he certainly loved her,
but he felt hesitation in the face of her desire that they should
get married.’

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1127

   (13) Reported by Dr. Hanns Sachs:
‘In a conversation about Genoa and its immediate
surroundings, a young man wanted to mention the place called
Pegli
, but could only recall the name with an effort after
racking his brains. On the way home he thought of the distressing
manner in which so familiar a name had slipped away, and in doing
so was led to a word sounding very similar:
Peli
. He knew
that there was a South Sea island of that name, whose inhabitants
still retained a few remarkable customs. He had read about them
recently in an ethnological work and had at the time made up his
mind to use the information in support of a hypothesis of his own.
It then occurred to him that Peli was also the setting of a novel
which he had read with interest and enjoyment - namely
Van
Zanten’s glücklichste Zeit
by Laurids Bruun. The
thoughts that had occupied his mind almost incessantly during the
day centred round a letter he had received that same morning from a
lady he was very fond of. This letter gave him reason to fear that
he would have to forgo a meeting that had been arranged. After
being in a very bad mood all day, he had gone out in the evening
resolved not to plague himself any longer with the tiresome thought
but to enjoy the social occasion in front of him, on which he in
fact set an extremely high value, in as serene a mood as possible.
It is clear that his resolution could have been gravely imperilled
by the word
Pegli
, as its connection in sound with
Peli
was so close; and Peli in turn, having acquired a
personal connection with himself by its ethnological interest,
embodied not only Van Zanten’s but also his own
"happiest time", and therefore the fears and anxieties as
well which he had nursed all day long. It is characteristic that
this simple explanation only became clear after a second letter
from his friend had transformed his doubt into the happy certainty
of seeing her again soon.’

   This example may recall what
might be described as its geographical neighbour, in which the name
of the town of Nervi could not be remembered (Example 1). Thus we
see how a pair of words that are similar in sound can have the same
effect as a single word that has two meanings.

   (14) When war broke out with
Italy in 1915 I was able to make the observation upon myself that a
whole quantity of Italian place-names which at ordinary times were
readily available to me had suddenly been withdrawn from my memory.
Like so many other Germans I had made it my habit to spend a part
of my holidays on Italian soil, and I could not doubt that this
large-scale forgetting of names was the expression of an
understandable hostility to Italy which had now replaced my former
partiality. In addition to this directly motivated forgetting of
names, however, an indirect amnesia could also be detected, which
it was possible to trace back to the same influence. I showed a
tendency to forget non-Italian place-names as well; and on
investigating the incidents I found that these names were in some
way connected by means of remote similarities of sound with the
proscribed enemy names. Thus I tormented myself one day in trying
to recall the name of the Moravian town of Bisenz. When it finally
came to my mind I at once recognized that this act of forgetting
was to be laid to the charge of the Palazzo Bisenzi at Orvieto. The
Hotel Belle Arti, where I had stayed on all my visits to Orvieto,
is located in this palazzo. The most precious memories had
naturally been the most severely damaged by the change in my
emotional attitude.

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   Some examples may also help to
remind us of the variety of purposes that can be served by the
parapraxis of name-forgetting.

   (15) Reported by A. J. Storfer
(1914): ‘One morning a lady who lived in Basle received news
that a friend of her youth, Selma X. of Berlin, who was just then
on her honeymoon, was passing through Basle, but staying only one
day. The Basle lady hurried straight away to her hotel. When the
friends separated, they made an arrangement to meet again in the
afternoon and to be with each other up to the time of the Berlin
lady’s departure.

   ‘In the afternoon the Basle
lady
forgot
about the rendezvous. I do not know what
determined her forgetting it, yet in this particular situation (a
meeting with a
school-friend who has just married
) various
typical constellations are possible which could determine an
inhibition against the repetition of the meeting. The point of
interest in this case lies in a
further
parapraxis, which
represents an unconscious safeguarding of the first one. At the
time when she was to have met her friend from Berlin the Basle lady
happened to be in company at another place. The recent marriage of
the Viennese opera singer Kurz came up in conversation; the Basle
lady gave vent to some critical remarks (!) about this marriage,
but when she wanted to mention the singer by name, she found to her
very great embarrassment that she could not think of her first
name. (There is, as is well known, a particular tendency to give
the first name also, precisely in cases where the surname is a
monosyllable.) The Basle lady was all the more put out by her lapse
of memory since she had often heard Kurz sing and ordinarily knew
her (whole) name perfectly well. Before anyone had mentioned the
missing first name the conversation took another direction.

   ‘In the evening of the same
day our Basle lady was among a number of people, some of whom were
the same as those she had been with in the afternoon. By a
coincidence the conversation again turned to the marriage of the
Viennese singer; and without any difficulty the lady produced the
name "
Selma
Kurz". "Oh dear!" she at
once exclaimed, "it’s just struck me - I’ve
completely forgotten I had an appointment with my friend Selma this
afternoon." A glance at the clock showed that her friend must
have left already.’

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1129

   We are perhaps not ready yet to
appreciate all the aspects of this pretty example. The following is
a simpler specimen, though here it was not a name but a foreign
word that was forgotten, from a motive arising out of the
situation. (We can already see that we are dealing with the same
processes, whether they apply to proper names, first names, foreign
words or sets of words.) Here it was a case of a young man
forgetting the English word for ‘
Gold
’ - which
is identical with the German word - so as to find an opportunity
for carrying out an action he desired.

   (16) Reported by Dr. Hanns Sachs:
‘A young man became acquainted in a pension with an English
lady, whom he took a liking to. On the first evening of their
acquaintance he was having a conversation with her in her native
language, which he knew fairly well; and in the course of it he
wanted to use the English word for "
Gold
". In
spite of strenuous efforts the word would not come to him. Instead,
the French
or
, the Latin
aurum
and the Greek
chrysos
obstinately forced themselves on him as substitutes,
so that it needed quite an effort to reject them, though he knew
for certain that they were not related at all to the word he was
looking for. In the end the only way he could find of making
himself understood was by touching a gold ring on the lady’s
hand; and he was very much abashed on learning from her that the
long-lost word for gold was exactly the same as the German one,
namely "gold". The great value of this touching, for
which the forgetting gave an opportunity, did not lie merely in the
unobjectionable satisfaction of the instinct for laying hold or
touching - for there are other opportunities for this which are
eagerly exploited by lovers. It lay much more in the way in which
it assisted in clarifying the prospects of the courtship. The
lady’s unconscious would divine the erotic aim of the
forgetting, hidden by its mask of innocence, especially if her
unconscious was sympathetically drawn to the man she was talking
with. The manner in which she treated his touching of her and
accepted its motivation could in this way become a means -
unconscious for both of them, yet full of significance - of
reaching an understanding on the chances of the flirtation just
begun.’

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   (17) From J. Stärcke (1916)
I report another interesting observation that concerns the
forgetting and subsequent recovery of a proper name. This case is
distinguished by the fact that the forgetting of the name was
connected with the misquoting of a set of words from a poem, as in
the example of the ‘Bride of Corinth’.

   ‘Z., an old jurist and
philologist, was describing in company how in his student days in
Germany he had known a quite exceptionally stupid student, and had
some anecdotes to tell of his stupidity. He could not, however,
recall the student’s name; he believed it began with a
"W", but later took back the idea. He recalled that the
stupid student later became a
wine merchant
. He then told
another anecdote about the student’s stupidity, and once
again expressed surprise that his name did not come back to him.
"He was such an ass," he then remarked, "that I
still don’t understand how I succeeded in drumming Latin into
his head." A moment later he remembered that the name he was
looking for ended in ". . . 
man
".
At this point we asked him if any other name ending in
"man" occurred to him, and he gave "
Erdmann
". "Who is that?" "That was another student of
those days." His daughter, however, observed that there was
also a Professor Erdmann. Some closer questioning revealed that
this Professor Erdmann, who was the editor of a periodical, had
recently refused to accept a piece of work submitted by Z., with
which he partly disagreed, except in a shortened form; and Z. had
been considerably put out. (In addition, I later discovered that
years before, Z. had very probably expected to become professor in
the same department in which Professor Erdmann now lectured. This,
then, may have been another reason why the name touched on a
sensitive spot.)

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1131

   ‘At this point the stupid
student’s name suddenly came back to him:
"Lindeman". Since he had already recalled that the name
ended in "man", it was "
Linde
" that had
remained repressed for longer. When he has asked what came to his
mind when he thought of "
Linde
", he at first said
"Absolutely nothing." When I urged that something
connected with this word would no doubt occur to him, he remarked
with an upward gaze and a gesture of his hand in the air: "A
linden - well, a linden is a beautiful tree." Nothing further
would come to his mind. No one spoke and everyone went on with
their reading or other activity, till a few moments later Z. quoted
the following passage in a dreamy voice:

                                                               
Steht er mit festen

                                                               
Gefügigen Knochen

                                                               
Auf der
erde
,

                                                               
So reicht er nicht auf

                                                               
Nur mit der
Linde