Freud on the “Freudian Slip”

23 Tuesday Feb 2021

Posted by memoirandremains in Freud, Psychology

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Freud, Freudian Slip, Psychology, The Psychopathology of Everyday Life

The previous look at The Psychopathology of Everyday Life is found here.

The “Freudian slip” is the most famous of all concepts from Freud. It occurs when someone reveals a hidden motivation by substituting the “wrong” word. As he begins this essay, Freud reviews the work done by Meringer and Mayor, and then the observations of Wundt.

Freud underscores an element from Wundt – an element which Freud will enforce at the end of this essay: These slips of the tongue take place when there is a “suspension of the attention that it would inhibit it, the uninhibited flow of associations is activated and may be said, even more definitely, to do so through that suspension.” (60) As he says toward the end of the essay, “I do not think anyone would make a slip of the tongue [examples given], in short in all those cases where, as one may say, the mind is really concentrated on the matter in hand.” (96)

Freud rejects the argument that slips of the tongue are merely the result of confusing or substituting sounds of words. He does not deny that sounds of words can have an effect upon errors, and indeed may be the cause of some errors:

But they do not seem to me strong enough to impair correct speech by their own influence alone. In those cases that I have studied closely and of which I can claim some understanding, they merely represent an existing mechanism that can easily be used by a remote psychic motive without its binding itself to the sphere of influence of those connections. In a great many substitutions, a slip of the tongue occurs quite regardless of such laws of phonetics. (79)

Freud explains that he uses these slips to “resolve and track down neurotic symptoms.” (78) Patients “may try to conceal the subject, but cannot help revealing it unintentionally in many different ways.”

He contends that his theory “will stand up to examination even in its minor details.” (95)

To support his contention, he notes dozens of instances where someone substitutes one word for another, and thereby discloses a secret they had hoped to conceal.

I found most compelling the example he gave from the novel Egoist by George Meredith (I cannot agree with Freud that Meredith is the “greatest English novelist”). Without rehearsing the entire nature of the example, the proposition is that a woman in the novel, by a confusion of names reveals a secret hope and desire she tries to keep concealed – but cannot. Why I found this example compelling is that is an independent attestation by someone other than Freud (or a professional psychologist/psychiatrist) of the same idea. Now, since Meredith was a rough contemporary of Freud, it is possible that such ideas “were in the air.”

However, Freud provides an example from Shakespeare where Portia discloses herself by a slip.

Let’s take his concept seriously, that people sometimes say what they mean to conceal. I would think that best explained by the fact that a person is intently thinking about two things and is speaking with the hope of not saying something but the thoughts get the better of the tongue – we can’t concentrate on two things at once. For instance, Freud gives an example of where he is attempting to defend himself from a conflict with his wife and thus discloses something he did not wish to say.

But Freud has a rather different theory of what happens: He puts the emphasis on the unintended nature of the disclosure. In his theory, the concealed fact just finds a way out because sufficient control is not being brought to bear upon the speech so the unconscious makes a break for it.

Yet, I think his examples could easily be re-read as not an unconscious escape but rather the conflict of multiple thoughts.

For instance, he gives the example of where a soldier on trial for burglary used the word Diebstellung – position as thief – when he meant to use the word Dienstellung – military service. The soldier made this blunder while testifying in Court. But it is in just such a circumstance that Freud said a slip would not occur, “in a speech made in defense of his name and honor before a sworn jury” (96). The soldier was trying to explain that he could not have committed the crime because he was still in the military: but he would at the same time be thinking of what he had been accused.

If there are revealing substitutions, I don’t think he proves a subversive unconscious but rather a confusion of thoughts.

Philip Rieff, The Triumph of the Therapeutic 4.3

28 Friday Aug 2020

Posted by memoirandremains in Freud, Uncategorized

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Adler, Fee, Freud, Jung, pyschoanalysis, Socialism, Therapy

The last post concerning this book may be found here:

In the last section of the chapter In Defense of the Analytic Attitude, Rieff comes to the questions of Freud’s “children,” those who followed after him. This question of Freud’s descendants will comprise the majority of the remaining book. At this point, Rieff looks generally at psychoanalysts, with some mention of Adler and Jung. Jung will also get an entire chapter of consideration.

Rieff notes some basic elements of a system. There is a canon, or a source of authority: “Every science has its established body of authoritative makers of opinion.” (69) There is also a system of conveying that knowledge through education. Rieff notes the poor quality of the education, which rather than delivery intellectually inquisitive analysts who can quarrel with their “father,” “Those post-Freudian analysts who remain orthodox never have had that healthy bout of rebelling which sharpens orthodoxy.” (84)

He lays a great deal of the trouble to analysis being made a branch of medicine. The discipline thus took on a non-productive empiricism and reductionism which was counterproductive to the process of analysis.

There is also the tendency to fall away from Freud’s anti-commitment. In the Freudian there are simply powerful psychic forces which seek for place in the functioning of the human being; there are also countervailing forces which seek to limit the demands of the id. There is then a negotiated peace of the ego.

Freud’s work was to merely lay bare the process of these competing forces: one welling up in the individual; the other pressing down from the outside, mediated by an internalization in the individual. To maintain an objective distance, and to prevent the patient from being brought into a more intimate relationship with the therapist, there is the necessity of the fee. The fee acts to “guarantee the essential impersonality behind the ostensibly intensely personal character of the psychoanalytic relationship.” (87)

But the pressure will always be present to select a new system of symbolic commitment to make such a competition of forces and the resolution of such forces into a meaningful whole.

Freud’s goal was to make men “free”: you could do what you wanted with your own forces welling up and forcing tapping down. There was a need for strength to understand these forces and to not succumb to any system which would soften the blow and make the resolutions on its own terms.

But the power of such knowledge proves too much, oftentimes, “For inevitably, at a certain point of societal power, knowledge seeks to transform itself into faith.” (83)

Jung did this by means of a “God [] rendered completely interior. The ‘Thou’ term becomes a function of ‘I.’” (83) But since Jung will receive a chapter, he is presented briefly.

Here Rieff directs some attention to Adler’s political theory of analysis. Rather than deal with the ambiguity of a multiplicity of forces and turns in the individual life, Adler however sought a single master narrative, an explanation which gathered up all the individual examples into a single force and competition.

Adler’s theory of an “inferiority complex.” Rieff explains Adler in terms of Adler’s socialism and class war. The feeling of “organ inferiority.” The North American Soceity of Adlerian Pyschology summarizes it thus:

“In his youth, Adler was a sickly child, which caused him embarrassment and pain. These early experiences with illnesses and accidents probably account for his theory of organ inferiority and were the foundation for his theories on inferiority feelings. According to Adler, each individual has a weak area in his or her body–organ inferiority, which tends to be the area where illness occurs, such as the stomach, head, heart, back, lungs, etc. Adler said that to some degree every emotion finds expression in the body. From his understanding of organ inferiority, Adler began to see each individual as having a feeling of inferiority.”

Rieff explains this in terms of Adler’s transformation of psychoanalysis into politics.

“Viewed thus, Alder’s psychology reveals the quality of his socialism; it was, said Freud, characterized by (1) protest and (2) self-assertion, the aggrandizement of personality. Here is a sudden swoop down into the very bowels of the socialist dynamic, with its inevitable cult of personality wherever it triumphs.” (81)

Rieff quotes Freud further on Adler’s system, “The view of life which is reflected in the Adlerian system is founded exclusively on the aggressive impulse; there is no room in it for love. It might surprise one that such a cheerless view of life should meet with any attention at all.” (82)

Rieff, Triumph of the Therapeutic 4.2

14 Tuesday Jul 2020

Posted by memoirandremains in Freud, Psychology

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Freud, Jung, Psychology, Rieff

(In Defense of the Analytic Attitude)

In the remainder of the chapter, Rieff distinguishes Freud from what came after. The distinction which Rieff draws is between Freudian “freedom” and a “cure.” Freud offers no solution, only a “technology” which will allow one to understand the working of their subconscious. The end game, as seemingly proposed by Rieff would be the freedom from the “residues of religious compulsion.” (79) This may be achievable with a combination of Freudian analysis and behavioral technique. (Ibid.)

Freudian analysis “is the aim of science – power; in this case a transformative technology of the inner life….This is ultimate technology.” (79)

The purpose of “faith” is to mitigate suffering: “all religions have a therapeutic function.” (76) Jung sought to scoop up all religions with his theory of archtypes. An interesting observation is how Rieff sees Jung and Freud as inversions of one another. Freud understood “erotic instinctual forces” sublimate themselves into the “highest ethical and religious interests of man.” While Jung saw the process going in the other direction. (77)

Freud’s aim of “freedom” comes at a cost:

“What men lose when they become as free as gods is precisely that sense of being chosen, which encourages them, in their gratitude, to take their subsequent choices seriously. Put in another way, this means: Freedom does not exist without responsibility.” (79)

This freedom is of course something which is at issue. It is taken by everyone that Freud’s theories of pscyho-social development and dream analysis and slips of the tongue – however interesting – are unquestionably not “scientific.” His technology is simply untrue.

What is strange is that his basic proposition that your sensation of ethical constraint is a trick society has played upon, that restraint is what is holding you back, mixed with Rousseau and Hegel and whatnot and developed by his followers (some who – as we shall see – were criminally insane) has become a default argument over against the “illusion” of religion and God. It is a curious sort of position to occupy.

But on the same ground, by what basis do Hegel’s thesis-antithesis, Rousseau’s sociology, Marx’s economic history still have currency? It seems that people pick bits and pieces of ideas without ever well-understanding either what they believe or why. They could never articulate their axioms much less their conclusions.

We live too easily in cages built of the thought of others. Freud in his effort to bring a technology of freedom foisted insupportable conceits upon the world. When his conceits proved to be nonsense, the conceits remained.

Rieff, The Triumph of the Therapeutic 2.2 (Therapy as Re-Education)

12 Tuesday May 2020

Posted by memoirandremains in Freud, Psychology, Uncategorized

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Freud, Philip Rieff, Pscyhology, Therapy, Triumph of the Therapeutic

The previous post on Rieff may be found here.

Therapy as Re-Education

Rieff has a useful understanding of therapy in contrast religion (which in the case of Freud would be Christianity of Judaism) which Rieff refers to as “older moral pedagogies.” (45) The prior moral system required one “concentrating on the life of trying to order the warring parts of the personality into a hierarchy.” (45).

This ordering of one’s competing demands and impulses is done in accord with the requires of a “positive community” which promised “a kind of salvation” for such accord. (43).

Freud and therapy provide a completely different manner of understanding one’s self. Rather looking at the various “impulses” as a matter of good or bad, higher or lower, one should consider demands as “a jostling democracy of contending predispositions”. (46-47)

Freud realized that this new means of understanding the various “impulses” would result in a subversions of the expectations of life. In particular, the position of the “father” would be particularly subverted, because the position of father takes the position of maintaining of “repressive command”. (47).

Now it may be thought that Freud encourages immorality. But the understanding of the impulses as there does not necessarily result in the encouragement of acting on such impulses. What Freud did do was seek to exhaust a sense of guilt built upon these moralities.

At this point, Reiff makes a rather self-contradicting argument. Freud’s analysis:

Help[s] us distinguish between guilt on one hand and a sense of guilt on the other, between responsibility for an offense committed and fantasies about offenses intended or merely imagined, seems a moral as a well as a therapeutic aim.

This argument seems to be that the older moral orders merely imposed a “fantasy” of moral order in exchange for a promise of salvation as contrasted one making a conscious decision based upon “responsibility.” Upon what moral basis could one determine concern for “responsibility”?

There is not any rational basis for responsibility. You could say I would like to avoid whatever I might see as a negative consequence (like avoiding imprisonment) was rational – but seeing a connection between the consequence and the result does not determine whether I should not engage in the conduct. The decision to avoid the behavior to avoid the consequence is a moral decision. Granted it is a very limited morality (I want to avoid negative consequence), but it is still a moral decision.

If the negative consequence is less than imprisonment or death, than what do we mean by “responsibility”? Does he that I could care about what my behavior would do to another? That would be a moral decision.

The only sort of amoral decision would be one where I see the consequence and have not concern for the consequence.

Perhaps the concept is that I can decide whether I wish to abide by the moral code I see raised by my “impulse”. But one still must made a decision to be moral; that decision may have a very habitual basis, but it is not a reflex in the sense of blinking an eye.

Indeed the decision to forgo an “older moral paradigm” is itself a moral decision.

Freud may make one explicitly conscious of the moral decision. Freud also grants a certain sort of sanction to forgo moral decisions (this is an evil desire, it is just a desire – evil is what I have been taught to call this desire; but the desire is not in itself evil). All Freud has done lay the basis for a new morality where personal desire is necessarily good.

Thus, therapy is a matter of “re-education” into a new basis for morality.

Rieff, The Triumph of the Therapeutic, Chapter 2.1 (Discipleship and Therapy)

21 Tuesday Apr 2020

Posted by memoirandremains in Apologetics, Biblical Counseling, Freud, Theology of Biblical Counseling, Uncategorized

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Biblical Counseling, Freud, Integration, Presuppositional apologetics, Rieff, The Triumph of the Therapeutic, Theology of Biblical Counseling

Chapter Two

The Impoverishment of Western Culture

There is an implicit claim here that symbols function as a mechanism by which a culture gains ascent over the various individuals in the culture: the means by which the superego functions. A curious question which is left unanswered is “Why symbols?”

We could argue that symbols point to the transcendent, but a proposition of Freud must be that there is no real transcendent. Why then any sort of desire or inclination in that direction? That is left unanswered. We simply learn that Freud provides us a mechanism to strip out the symbols.

We then learn that essentially Western Culture developed by means of suppressing sexual desire. (40) The control over sexual desire was the high water mark of character.

Since there is no objective morality, only pragmatics, there is no particular need for such suppression except in and so far as it is functional for the culture.

On an aside, I have noticed that the treatment for “sexual addiction” is distinction amoral in this regard. The problem is not whatever inclination, but rather whether there are negative consequences for following such an inclination.

There is an unstated morality which is present in this: Desires are inherently good. That is a moral equation in the guise of amorality. But if it were truly amoral there would be nothing better about indulging or refraining. Moreover, personal happiness could not be relevant, because anyone else’s concern for your well-being is also irrelevant. In short, the moral question is really not as absent as some pretend. It is always there; the difference is where does not draw a line?

But back to Freud: The “analytic attitude”, the aim of “therapy” is always at the distinct individual. There is no reason to “cure” any sort of desire; because what makes Mr. X happy is necessarily good. “Well-being is a delicate personal achievement”. (41)

This is taken as an ethical demand upon “therapy”. We start with the idiosyncratic evaluation of the patient and seek to assist in achieving that end.

That is fundamentally antithetical to the Christian demand. In Matthew 28, Christ places a solitary command upon the Church: “make disciples”. The process of disciple making is “teach the to observe all that I have commanded.”

Now one can reject the proposition that Christ spoke or that Christ spoke these words. That is an honest position, and the position of Freud, for instance. But for one to claim to be a “Christian” and also take a position that Freud has a contribution on this issue is perplexing.

The position of the Scripture is not terribly confusing. Yes, there can be knotty issues, but those are not the main. The center of the road is abundantly clear.

What is confusing is when someone proposes that there is any sort of integration possible at this key point. No one is contesting the ability of anyone to make observations about the relative frequency of X behavior. But when it comes to this question of the fundamental presuppositions, What is a human being, What is the purpose of a human being, What is necessary for human beings to change: those issues are beyond compromise or “integration”. When we get to presuppositions, those are questions of grammar.

In the English and German language, the sound “gift” has a fundamentally different meaning. In English you get one at Christmas. In German, it is “poison”.

Discipleship and therapy are similar in that both involve words and directions and people who know something is wrong. “Gift” sounds the same in English and German. But O the difference!

As a final note, if you are at all curious about the matter of the importance of “presupposition”, I must direct you to my brothers at:

Domain for Truth: https://veritasdomain.wordpress.com

Philip Rieff: The Triumph of the Therapeutic.3 (Religion and Therapy)

14 Tuesday Apr 2020

Posted by memoirandremains in Culture, Freud, Psychology, Uncategorized

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On page 27, Rieff interprets religion in terms of therapy. Religion creates mechanisms for “therapeutic” control and remission: it is a mechanism for responding to and dolling out “instinct.” The distinctions between religions are largely uninteresting except in the efficacy of providing for a means of successful in providing for “continuity of mood.”

There really is no question concerning truth or falsity; there is no morally objective right: that is the analytic posture of Freud. What Freud has done is to strip out all of the accidents, the fungible elements and consider only the real effect of religion: what and how well it controls and expressions the instincts. Thus, “The analytic attitude is an alternative to all religious ones.” (29)

There is an interesting charting of the similarity and distinctive nature of therapy and religion:

Similarities: (1) the patient or adherent must be honest “in performance”. Gravity cares very little for my position; but for either religion or analysis to “work,” I must be honest in my presentation. As a corollary, I must be “receptive” for the process to work. In short, the process must be internalized to have effect.

The divergence in the ways in which the character can be transformed.

Rieff here makes an interesting observation: While Freud is often seen as revolutionary, he actually is not poised to create some new revolutionary culture. “Freud appears as a defender of high culture.” (29) In the remainder of the book, Rieff contrasts Freud which his disciples who set far more revolutionary goals.

Since Freud’s analysis works upon the character, the eventual effect is a work upon the culture. As such it is not set to remake the world at the level of official politics, but rather at the level of the “mind.”

Freud came about because the “inherited moral systems have failed us.” (30) Since the inherited systems no longer function at a cultural level, the world was ripe for Freud to provide some mechanisms to shore up the psyche and permit human beings to function.

“The religious question: How are we to be consoled for the misery of living?” (23) Christianity and Judaism did not seek to make us happy, but to console us in our misery (although not said, you will have heaven later). Freud did not promise happiness, either; rather, he simply sought “less misery”. (30)

As such, Freud birthed an as yet not fully developed “psychological man” who has a “durable sense of well-being”. (32) This man has the capacity to make some sense out of the chaos of his psyche and the world about him. Morality is “that which is conducive to increased activity.” (33)

Freud preserved “the very notion of tradition,” by preserving a mechanism for understanding what was taking place with humanity. The theologians will find Freud helpful, because they need – as Archbishop Temple said was needed, “a theology based on psychology.” (33)

Rieff proposes that Jung has provided that psychology upon which the theologians can begin to build.

Philip Rieff, The Triumph of the Therapeutic.2 (You are “sick” should ask if life is meaningful.)

09 Thursday Apr 2020

Posted by memoirandremains in Culture, Freud, Uncategorized

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Culture, Freud, Meaning, religion, Superego, Triumph of the Therapeutic

The prior post in this series may be found here.

Rieff, pp. 23-27

There are two interrelated issues which run through this section of his discussion of Freud. The two issues are not unrelated, but they are also not coterminous. One issue concerns the function of culture vis-à-vis impulse (the inherent desires of the human being). These two, the Superego and Id, are in conflict with one-another.

In wildly simplified terms, the ego is the negotiation and expression of this conflict. Freud’s work was to make plain the nature of this conflict and allow the individual who had obtained “maturity” (Rieff’s term) was to become aware of this conflict and to set the relationship between the two oneself: “Maturity, according to Freud, lay in the trained capacity to keep the negotiations from breaking down.” (24)

There is a related issue concerning, culture, religion and the superego. The superego functions as the cultural representative. The requirements and limitations of the culture become effective in the individual. The tools developed by Freud permit the individual to keep these tools at a distance.

It is for this reason, the “modern intellectuals” (26) find Freud appealing. His tools provide one a way to read and thence to disarm the culture’s effect upon the individual. Although not discussed here, this explains why Freud was so valuable in the literature departments in cultural criticism because his critique – even if not considered scientifically valid as a psychology – was practically valuable as a means of putting cultural limits at bay.

Essentially, one could critique moral standards as merely archaic residue of an earlier commonly held superego.

Concept of culture is tightly related to the concept of religion in this thinking. Adherence to cultural understanding permitted one to have “meaning.” But Freudian analysis sidesteps this issue and simply does not permit the question of “meaning” to arise. Life is neither meaningful nor meaningless. This is the religious question.

Freud held that to ask the question concerning “the meaning and value of life he is sick, since objectively neither has any existence.” (27)

Philip Rieff, Trumph of the Therapeutic.1

07 Tuesday Apr 2020

Posted by memoirandremains in Culture, Freud, Psychology, Uncategorized

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Introductory: Toward a Theory of Culture

If I am tracking Rieff correctly at the beginning, he speaks of the older forms of culture which fell apart in 19^th Century; a culture which in particular utilized a religious form as the means of “controlling the infinite variety of panic and emptiness to which they are disposed.” (3) A culture is a mechanism which makes possible a communal understanding such that the people can live with one another and themselves.

A culture permits its members to “sublimate”, a process of renunciation and from that the creation of something greater.

But throughout the 19^th century there was a “deconversion” form a “series of symbols” to a superior “system of symbols – Science”. (6) This system, which Rieff compares to a stiff collar is in process of being changed. Freud sought to “soften” the collar; others have sought to take it altogether off.

Freud saw as a necessary the elements of coercion and renunciation to the maintenance of a culture. This process of renunciation works itself out in sublimation, which the creation of cultural artifacts of value within the culture.

Here is where becomes interesting: There are those who seek not merely to soften the collar but rather to remove it altogether. They seek a culture with no aspect of renunciation. Rieff refers to this as a cultural suicide. It is a religion of self; thus, apparently something without any culture, because culture “is another name for a design of motives directing the self outward, toward those communal purposes in which alone the self can be realized and satisfied.” (3)

This is an anti-culture of intellectuals Rieff describes as “the most elaborate act of suicide that Western intellectuals have ever staged.” (7)

He sees a force toward an atomization of the individual and the countervailing force toward structures which permit communal life. “Every culture must establish itself as a system of moralizing demands”. (8)

He then comes to the “unreligion of the age”, the “therapeutic” which has “nothing at stake beyond the manipulatable sense of well-being.” Prior culture had mechanisms to permit renunciation, provide for sublimation and provide a type of judgment, admonitions and reassurances. (11) There is a type of human aimed by such a mechanism. And when the culture changes the nature of human “perfection” changes. (8)

It should be noted that the mechanisms do not seek merely the complete extirpation of desires. In reference to Christian asceticism, the aim was “control and complete spiritualization” of sexual desire. (13).

Speaking of modern culture (at the time of his writing in the 1960’s) he noted that the movement of sexual desire was away from renunciation toward “release”. The previous “desire” has become a “need”. (13)

And so, since the previous religious (primarily) culture makers have failed to communicate their symbolic vision to others in an inherently compelling way, “We are probably witnessing the end of a cultural history dominated by book religious and word-makers.” (15)

We have moved to a therapeutic culture of individualized management of the self for a sense of well-being, “With the arts of psychiatric management enhanced and perfected, men will come to know one another in ways that could facilitate total socialization without a symbolic of communal purpose.” (17)

“Religious man was born to be saved; psychological man is born to be pleased.” (19)

Thus, what may have been before considered immoral may be rejected if it is seen in a therapeutic light of “enhancing one’s sense of well-being.” (21)

What is not mentioned in this end of individualized well-being (particularly as to sexual desires) brought about without a cultural control which applies to others is the conflict of my desire and your counter-desire. The history after Rieff has witnessed a contrast of predators and then the pain or remorse or shame or ruin of their prey. But on what account can they be accounted wrong? We have to reach back to prior categories that do not quite make sense.

We have the question as to why “consent” carries sufficient moral weight to require imprisonment. I’m not saying by any stretch that non-consensual actions are morally good. But rather that consent is made to carry enormous moral weight.

Consent is a difficult matter, because it raises all sorts of questions of moral ability, freewill, influence, excessive influence and such. Moreover, those questions of human moral capacity do not fit easily into a naturalistic empiricism. The moral reasoning which underlies such matters borrows from other understandings of human value.

We are also seeing the emergence of a new sort of insistent moral reasoning respecting sexual desire which is every bit as demanding as any parody of previous Western moralities (influenced obviously by Christianity). Indeed, this new religiously insistent morality sees it perfectly fit to end the public life of those who violate the rules (whatever those rules may be).

Freud, The Psychopathology of Everyday Life – Screen Memories

11 Wednesday Apr 2018

Posted by memoirandremains in Psychology, Uncategorized

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In this chapter, Freud discusses memories which function in a manner similar to the word substitutions in earlier chapters: one thing stands in for another; one idea is repressed and another fills the space to cover up the repression. He is in particular interested in childhood memories which “frequently seem to be of trivial and unimportant matters”.

Why don’t we remember more of our childhood? When we consider the matter, it seems strange. A child does have a “high intellectual achievements and complex emotions”. The events of earliest years have a profound effect upon the entire rest of our lives; and yet we remember a few, often innocuous, seemingly random events.

Freud proposes that similar to his theory of words there is the “construction of a substitute” through “displacement by way of some superficial association”. Yet, these differ from word substitutions, because when we get words wrong, we typically realize the error. Moreover, the word substitution does not persist; whereas the “screen memory” is not recognized as false (indeed, it may very well be a real event) and it does not fade like a misspoken word.

Why this is important,

It is perfectly possible that the forgetting of events in childhood can give us the keys to understanding the amnesia of the king which, according to the latest findings, lies at the heart of the construction of all neurotic symptoms.

He gives an example of a young man who had the memory of his aunt teaching him that a M was like an N except for the “extra part” — which of course relates to the boy realizing that boy were like girls except for “an extra part” (this is Freud, after all).

In a line which helps show the line from from Freud to Jung, he writes, “Childhood memories in general thus take on the significance of ‘screen memories’ and in this are remarkably analogous to early racial or national memories as recorded in myths and legends.”

Freud: Forgetting Names and Sequences of Words

23 Friday Mar 2018

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Sigmund Freud

This chapter in The Psychopathology of Everyday Life concerns the maddening event of forgetting a name or sequence of words (in one’s own language). The gist of his argument is some-things, some people are painful to us and so a ‘physic power deprives me of access” to information sought.

He “proves” this point by a number of case studies: examples where someone forgets a name or sequence of words (such as a line from a poem). When the breakdown happens he uses something such as free-association to draw down on the cause (“In many of these examples all the subtleties of psychoanalytic technique have been employed to explain why a name was forgotten.”)

Thus, a person forgets a particular name or phrase : the then runs associations (say) until he draws a connection between some unpleasant thing (the woman I want to marry will soon be grey; the man I forgot caused me embarrassment, et cetera) the name (or phrase) forgotten. The connection between the unpleasantness and the forgotten word may be either direct or “by what may seem a tortuous route”. [For example, it may not be that the person named is the source of pain but rather that “some similarity of sound suggests another name which we do have good reason to forget.”]

This mechanism is particularly effective if the pain is especially personal and sensitive. “A wish to avoid arousing unpleasant feelings through the agency of memory is a very strong motive for such disturbances.”

This mechanism presumes “a constant stream of self-referentiality’ going through my mind. I am not usually aware of it, but it betrays itself when I forget names in this way.”

The theory makes some sense on its: Of course one would desire to forget painful things. We have the experience of shying away from things which remind of us particularly painful events: one might avoid a particular person or place because the sight (or sound or smell) provokes an unpleasant feeling.

Freud presents a number of “proofs” (there are 19 number examples in this chapter, not all of which are from Freud’s personal observation).

But is any of this true? Is there really a mechanism which censurers painful names and words by association? Do I really carrying a constant chain of references (X links to A links to Z links to Y, et cetera)? Wouldn’t painful things be more easily remembered, as being more sensitive? Would the suppression be “unconscious” (by some unobservable — except in effect — mechanism) – our wouldn’t be rather, I don’t want to talk about that?

The whole mechanism hinges upon two thesis: (1) a constant chain of reference; and (2) a self-censuring mechanism seeking to block this unconscious chain of reference from conscious observation.

Freud’s theory here is marvelous, because it cannot really be observed. The mechanism is all unconscious. It can only be inferred by this glitches (lost words) and dug-up psychoanalytic technique (such as free association). It can be asserted, but not really proved.