ABSTRACT
Many patients have the tendency to express their ideas and fancies by comparisons. Sometimes they are far-fetched analogies, little suited to express what the patient wants to make clear, but often the comparisons are really apt, clever, or witty. People carry out their ‘symptomatic actions’ the more completely the more they are absorbed by something else. In the ‘forgetting of one’s own name’ the conscious search for it usually avails nothing; with cessation of the effort the forgotten word recurs of itself. The symptomatology of hypnosis and suggestion also becomes more comprehensible by consideration of the reciprocal relations of concentration and repression. Proof of the functional relationship between repression and degree of interest is also to be found in the pathology of the psyche. The pleasure, peculiar to comparisons, of rediscovering the same thing in quite different material is certainly to be classified with the saving of intellectual effort that is responsible for the fore-pleasure of wit technique.
