Psychopathology of Everyday Life quotes

“Of course you would forget a name of that sort. The name is Nervi.”

To be sure, I have enough to do with nerves.

(b) Another patient spoke about a neighbouring summer resort, and maintained that besides the two familiar inns there was a third.

The answer of the stranger pointed to a superior knowledge of human nature:

“I readily believe that you did not grasp my name. My name is like yours—Lederer!”

One cannot suppress a slight feeling of unpleasantness on discovering his own name in a stranger. I had recently felt it very plainly when I was consulted during my office hours by a man named S. Freud.

If in the course of endeavouring to discover an escaped name one finds others with which the latter is intimately connected, it often happens that these new names also escape.

The forgetting thus jumps from one name to another, as if to demonstrate the existence of a hindrance not to be easily removed.

I cannot state, however, what basis I have for this estimate. Of late I have grown so bold that I always offer my estimate spontaneously, and still run no risk of grieving the father by displaying my ignorance in regard to his offspring.

Thus I extend my conscious memory by invoking my larger unconscious memory.

I shall report some striking examples of forgetting which for the most part I have observed in myself. I distinguish forgetting of impressions and experiences, that is, the forgetting of knowledge, from forgetting of resolutions, that is, the forgetting of omissions.

(d) Mislaying a thing really has the same significance as forgetting where we have placed it. Like most people delving in pamphlets and books, I am well oriented about my desk, and can produce what I want with one lunge.

What appears to others as disorder has become for me perfect order.

Why, then, did I mislay a catalogue which was sent to me not long ago so that it could not be found?

(d)

Mislaying a thing really has the same significance as forgetting where we have placed it.

Like most people delving in pamphlets and books, I am well oriented about my desk, and can produce what I want with one lunge. What appears to others as disorder has become for me perfect order.

enmity on account of similar pursuits, or the borrowing of somebody’s ideas. I am rather inclined to believe that every person who will undertake an inquiry into the motives underlying his forgetting will be able to fill up a similar sample card of vexatious circumstances.

The tendency to forget the disagreeable seems to me to be quite general; the capacity for it is naturally differently developed in different persons.

Certain denials which we encounter in medical practice can probably be ascribed to forgetting.[32] Our conception of such forgetting confines the distinction between this and that behaviour to purely psychologic relations, and permits us to see in both forms of reaction the expression of the …

What we see of this sort of thing in our country spoils all desire for it, and my character is little suited to the rôle of a protected child.

I have always entertained an immense desire to “be the strong man myself.”

And it had to happen that I should be reminded of such a, to be sure, never fulfilled, day-dream!

I refer to affairs of love and military service. A lover who is late at the appointed place will vainly tell his sweetheart that unfortunately he has entirely forgotten their rendezvous. She will not hesitate to answer him: “

A year ago you would not have forgotten. Evidently you no longer care for me.

” Even if he should grasp the above cited psychologic explanation, and should wish to excuse his forgetting on the plea of important business, he would only elicit the answer from the woman, who has become as keen-sighted as the physician in the psychoanalytic treatment, …

Similarly, in military service no distinction is recognized between an omission resulting from forgetting and one in consequence of intentional neglect. And rightly so.

The soldier dares forget nothing that military service demands of him.

If he forgets in spite of this, even when he is acquainted with the demands, then it is due to the fact that the motives which urge the fulfilment of the military exactions are opposed by contrary motives.

But it can be only a pleasure to me if I happen upon familiar matters which every one understands, for my main object is to collect everyday material and utilize it scientifically.

I cannot conceive why wisdom, which is, so to speak, the sediment of everyday experiences, should be denied admission among the acquisitions of knowledge.

For it is not the diversity of objects but the stricter method of verification and the striving for far-reaching connections which make up the essential character of scientific work.

I had added notes to the text without asking the author’s permission, and some years later I had cause to think that the author was dissatisfied with this arbitrary action.

There is a proverb which indicates the popular knowledge that the forgetting of intentions is not accidental. It says: “What one forgets once he will often forget again.”

Indeed, we sometimes cannot help feeling that no matter what may be said about forgetting and faulty actions, the whole subject is already known to everybody as something self-evident. It is strange enough that it is still necessary to push before consciousness such well-known facts.

… time I already entertained the impression that these conditions had a different connection, that the fall was already a preparation of the neurosis, and an expression of the same unconscious fantasies of sexual content which may be taken as the moving forces behind the symptoms.

Was not this very thing meant in the proverb which says, “When a maiden falls, she falls on her back?”

We can also add to these mistakes the case of one who gives a beggar a gold piece in place of a copper or a silver coin. The solution of such mishandling is simple:

Such mechanism is by no means rare.

For the tendency to self-destruction exists to a certain degree in many more persons than in those who bring it to completion.

Self-inflicted injuries are, as a rule, a compromise between this impulse and the forces working against it, and even where it really comes to suicide the inclination has existed for a long time with less strength or as an unconscious and repressed tendency.

“Has your good son-in-law been spending so much of your money again?” She bitterly denied this, only to relate a few moments later the lamentable story of the aggravation caused by her son-in-law’s extravagances. And she has not sent for me since.

I cannot maintain that one always makes friends of those to whom he tells the meaning of their symptomatic actions.

He who observes his fellow-men while at table will be able to verify in them the nicest and most instructive symptomatic actions.

He was still able to reach his servant by telephone; the latter found the missing article in the coat discarded for the travelling clothes and brought it to the hotel to the waiting bridegroom, who had thus entered upon his marriage without means.

It is consoling to think that the “losing of objects” by people is merely an unsuspected extension of a symptomatic action, and is thus welcome at least to the secret intention of the loser.

Often it is only an expression of slight appreciation of the lost article, a secret dislike for the same, or perhaps for the person from whom it came, or the desire to lose this object was transferred to it from other and more important objects …

He becomes indignant when these conclusions drawn from his symptomatic actions are held up to him; he declares them baseless because he does not see any conscious intention in their execution, and complains of being misunderstood by the other.

Close examination shows that such misunderstandings are based on the fact that the person is too fine an observer and understands too much.

The more “nervous” two persons are the more readily will they give each other cause for disputes, which are based on the fact that one as definitely denies about his own person what he is sure to accept about the other.

… this is, indeed, the punishment for the inner dishonesty to which people grant expression under the guise of “forgetting,” of erroneous actions and accidental emotions, a feeling which they would do better to confess to themselves and others when they can no longer control it.

As a matter of fact it can be generally affirmed that every one is continually practising psychoanalysis on his neighbours, and consequently learns to know them better than each individual knows himself.

The road following the admonition γνῶθι σεαυτὁν leads through the study of one’s own apparently casual commissions and omissions.

And, what is more, in three carefully executed proof-readings I passed over these errors as if struck blind.

Goethe said of Lichtenberg: “Where he cracks a joke, there lies a concealed problem.”

Similarly we can affirm of these passages cited from my book: back of every error is a repression. More accurately stated: the error conceals a falsehood, a disfigurement which is ultimately based on repressed material.

Now I was compelled to practise justice; as I had so frequently interpreted my patient’s symptomatic actions I could save my prestige only by being honest and admitting to him the secret motives of my averseness to his trip.

It may cause general astonishment to learn how much stronger is the impulse to tell the truth than is usually supposed.

Perhaps it is a result of my occupation with psychoanalysis that I can scarcely lie any more.

It may cause general astonishment to learn how much stronger is the impulse to tell the truth than is usually supposed.

Perhaps it is a result of my occupation with psychoanalysis that I can scarcely lie any more.

As often as I attempt a distortion I succumb to an error or some other faulty act, which betrays my dishonesty, as was manifest in this and in the preceding examples.

You will find in the letter the number 2,467 as a jocose and arbitrary estimation of the number of errors that may be found in the dream-book. I meant to write: no matter how large the number might be, and this one presented itself.

But there is nothing arbitrary or undetermined in the psychic life.

You will therefore rightly suppose that the unconscious hastened to determine the number which was liberated by consciousness. Just previous to this I had read in the paper that General E. M. had been retired as Inspector-General of Ordnance.

I therefore differ from a superstitious person in the following manner:—

I do not believe that an occurrence in which my mental life takes no part can teach me anything hidden concerning the future shaping of reality; but I do believe that an unintentional manifestation of my own mental activity surely contains something concealed which belongs only to my mental life

—that is, I believe in outer (real) chance, but not in inner (psychic) accidents. With the superstitious person the case is reversed: he knows nothing of the motive of his chance and faulty actions, he believes in the existence of psychic contingencies;

If such a connection exists it can hardly be limited to this single case. As a matter of fact,

I believe that a large portion of the mythological conception of the world which reaches far into the most modern religions is nothing but psychology projected into the outer world.

The dim perception (the endo-psychic perception, as it were) of psychic factors and relations[79] of the unconscious was taken as a model in the construction of a transcendental reality, which is destined to be changed again by science into psychology of the unconscious.

his action was consistent with his principles. But if he withdrew from an undertaking because he had stumbled on his threshold (un Romain retournerait), he was absolutely superior even to us unbelievers.

He was a better psychologist than we are striving to become.

For his stumbling could demonstrate to him the existence of a doubt, an internal counter-current the force of which could weaken the power of his intention at the moment of its execution.

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.