ABSTRACT
The work of groundbreaking theorists is often subject to misinterpretation by well-meaning followers. Karl Marx, when presented with the work of some self-styled Marxists, famously remarked that if this was Marxism then he was no Marxist. This is at least equally the case with Sigmund Freud: any number of self-styled Freudians would not be recognised as such by Freud himself. He has been endlessly represented in any number of popular cultural media, not the least of which is the movies. The image of both Freud specifically and of the psychoanalyst generally as a kind of psychic detective probably owes as much to Alfred Hitchcock’s 1945 film Spellbound which features Michael Chekhov as a Freud lookalike (complete with Freud-like glasses and beard, and a faux Viennese accent) guiding Gregory Peck through Salvador Dali designed dream sets. So let’s have a look at a piece of Freud’s own writing from early on in his career. In ‘The forgetting of foreign words’ he analyses an aspect of human behaviour which features largely in his early writings – what we reveal about ourselves when we get words wrong.
The current vocabulary of our own language, when it is confined to the range of normal usage, seems to be protected against being forgotten. With the vocabulary of a foreign language it is notoriously otherwise. The disposition to forget it extends to all parts of speech, and an early stage in functional disturbance is revealed by the fluctuations in the control we have over our stock of foreign words – according to the general condition of our health and to the degree of our tiredness. In a number of cases this kind of forgetting exhibits the same mechanism disclosed to us by the Signorelli example. In proof of this I shall give only a single analysis, one which is distinguished, however, by some useful characteristics: it concerns the forgetting of a non-substantival word in a Latin quotation. Perhaps I may be allowed to present a full and clear account of this small incident.
Last summer – it was once again on a holiday trip – I renewed my acquaintance with a certain young man of academic background. I soon found that he was familiar with some of my psychological publications. We had fallen into conversation – how I have now forgotten – about the social status of the race to which we both belonged; and ambitious feelings prompted him to give vent to a regret that his generation was doomed (as he expressed it) to atrophy, and could not develop its talents or satisfy its needs. He ended a speech of impassioned fervour with the well-known line of Virgil’s in which the unhappy Dido commits to posterity her vengeance on Aeneas: ‘Exoriare …’ Or rather, he wanted to end it in this way, for he could not get hold of the quotation and tried to conceal an obvious gap in what he remembered by changing the order of the words: ‘Exoriar(e) ex nostris ossibus ultor.’ At last he said irritably: ‘Please don’t look so scornful: you seem as if you were gloating over my embarrassment. Why not help me? There’s something missing in the line; how does the whole thing really go?’
‘I’ll help you with pleasure,’ I replied, and gave the quotation in its correct form: ‘Exoriar(e) ALIQUIS nostris ex ossibus ultor.’
‘How stupid to forget a word like that! By the way, you claim that one never forgets a thing without some reason. I should be very curious to learn how I came to forget the indefinite pronoun “aliquis” in this case.’
I took up this challenge most readily, for I was hoping for a contribution to my collection. So I said: ‘That should not take us long. I must only ask you to tell me, candidly and uncritically, whatever comes into your mind if you direct your attention to the forgotten word without any definite aim.’
‘Good. There springs to my mind, then, the ridiculous notion of dividing up the word like this: a and liquis.’
‘What does that mean?’ ‘I don’t know.’ ‘And what occurs to you next?’ ‘What comes next is Reliquien (relics), liquefying, fluidity, fluid. Have you discovered anything so far?’
‘No. Not by any means yet. But go on.’
‘I am thinking’ he went on with a scornful laugh, ‘of Simon of Trent, whose relics I saw two years ago in a church at Trent. I am thinking of the accusation of ritual blood-sacrifice which is being brought against the Jews again just now, and of Kleinpaul’s book [1892] in which he regards all these supposed victims as incarnations, one might say new editions, of the Saviour.’
‘The notion is not entirely unrelated to the subject we were discussing before the Latin word slipped your memory.’
‘True, my next thoughts are about an article that I read lately in an Italian newspaper. Its title, I think, was “What St Augustine says about Women”. What do you make of that?’
‘I am waiting’.
‘And now comes something that is quite clearly unconnected with our subject.’
‘Please refrain from any criticism and –’
‘Yes, I understand. I am thinking of a fine old gentleman I met on my travels last week. He was a real original, with all the appearance of a huge bird of prey. His name was Benedict, if it’s of interest to you.’
‘Anyhow, here are a row of saints and Fathers of the Church: St Simon, St Augustine, St Benedict. There was, I think, a Church Father called Origen. Moreover, three of these names are also first names, like Paul in Kleinpaul.’
‘Now it’s St Januarius and the miracle of his blood that comes into my mind – my thoughts seem to me to be running on mechanically.’
‘Just a moment: St Januarius and St Augustine both have to do with the calendar. But won’t you remind me about the miracle of his blood?’
‘Surely you must have heard of that? They keep the blood of St Januarius in a phial inside a church at Naples, and on a particular holy day it miraculously liquefies. The people attach great importance to this miracle and get very excited if it’s delayed, as happened once at a time when the French were occupying the town. So the general in command – or have I got it wrong? was it Garibaldi? – took the reverend gentleman aside and gave him to understand, with an unmistakable gesture towards the soldiers posted outside, that he hoped the miracle would take place very soon. And in fact it did take place …’
‘Well, go on. Why do you pause?’
‘Well, something has come into my mind … but it’s too intimate to pass on … Besides, I don’t see any connection, or any necessity for saying it.’
‘You can leave the connection to me. Of course I can’t force you to talk about something that you find distasteful; but then you mustn’t insist on learning from me how you came to forget your aliquis.’
‘Really? Is that what you think? Well then, I’ve suddenly thought of a lady from whom I might easily hear a piece of news that would be very awkward for both of us.’
‘That her periods have stopped?’
‘How could you guess that?’
‘That’s not difficult any longer; you’ve prepared the way sufficiently. Think of the calendar saints, the blood that starts to flow on a particular day, the disturbance when the event fails to take place, the open threats that the miracle must be vouchsafed, or else … In fact you’ve made use of the miracle of St Januarius to manufacture a brilliant allusion to women’s periods.’
Without being aware of it. And you really mean to say that it was this anxious expectation that made me unable to produce an unimportant word like aliquis?’
‘It seems to me undeniable. You need only recall the division you made into a-liquis, and your associations: relics, liquefying, fluid. St Simon was sacrificed as a child – shall I go on and show how he comes in? You were led on to him by the subject of relics.’
‘No, I’d much rather you didn’t. I hope you don’t take these thoughts of mine too seriously, if indeed I really had them. In return I will confess to you that the lady is Italian and that I went to Naples with her. But mayn’t all this just be a matter of chance?’
‘I must leave it to your own judgement to decide whether you can explain all these connections by the assumption that they are matters of chance. I can however tell you that every case like this that you care to analyse will lead you to “matters of chance” that are just as striking.’
I have several reasons for valuing this brief analysis; and my thanks are due to my former travelling-companion who presented me with it. In the first place, this is because I was in this instance allowed to draw on a source that is ordinarily denied to me. For the examples collected here of disturbances of a psychical function in daily life I have to fall back mainly on self-observation. I am anxious to steer clear of the much richer material provided by my neurotic patients, since it might otherwise be objected that the phenomena in question are merely consequences and manifestations of neurosis. My purpose is therefore particularly well served when a person other than myself, not suffering from nervous illness, offers himself as the object of such an investigation. This analysis is significant in a further respect: it throws light on the case of a word being forgotten without a substitute for it appearing in the memory. It thus confirms my earlier assertion that the appearance or non-appearance in the memory of incorrect substitutes cannot be made the basis for any radical distinction.
The chief importance however of the aliquis example lies in another of the ways in which it differs from the Signorelli specimen. In the latter, the reproducing of a name was disturbed by the after-effect of a train of thought begun just before and then broken off, whose content, however, had no clear connection with the new topic containing the name of Signorelli. Contiguity in time furnished the only relation between the repressed topic and the topic of the forgotten name; but this was enough to enable the two topics to find a connection in an external association. Nothing on the other hand can be seen in the aliquis example of an independent repressed topic of this sort, which had engaged conscious thinking directly before and then left its echoes in a disturbance. The disturbance in reproduction occurred in this instance from the very nature of the topic hit upon in the quotation, since opposition unconsciously arose to the wishful idea expressed in it. The circumstances must be construed as follows. The speaker had been deploring the fact that the present generation of his people was deprived of its full rights; a new generation, he prophesied like Dido, would inflict vengeance on the oppressors. He had in this way expressed his wish for descendants. At this moment a contrary thought intruded. ‘Have you really so keen a wish for descendants? That is not so. How embarrassed you would be if you were to get news just now that you were to expect descendants from the quarter you know of. No: no descendants – however much we need them for vengeance.’ This contradiction then asserts itself by exactly the same means as in the Signorelli example – by setting up an external association between one of its ideational elements and an element in the wish that has been repudiated; this time, indeed, it does so in a most arbitrary fashion by making use of a roundabout associative path which has every appearance of artificiality. A second essential in which the present case agrees with the Signorelli instance is that the contradiction has its roots in repressed sources and derives from thoughts that would lead to a diversion of attention.
So much for the dissimilarity and the inner affinity between these two typical specimens of the forgetting of words. We have got to know a second mechanism of forgetting – the disturbance of a thought by an internal contradiction which arises from the repressed. Of the two processes this is, I think, the easier to understand; and we shall repeatedly come across it again in the course of this discussion.
(Freud 1974: 45–52)