Psychopathology of Everyday Life

You know the feeling. A name you know perfectly well refuses to come, and in its place two wrong ones keep turning up, useless and oddly insistent.

The ordinary explanation is that proper names are simply slippery, and Freud grants that most psychologists would stop there. What caught his attention was the intruders. They are rejected the moment they appear, yet they come back "with great tenacity," as if they had business being there.

So he made a bet the whole book rests on: the detour from the right name to the wrong ones is not arbitrary. It follows "lawful and rational paths." If that is true, the wrong names are the clue, not the noise, and following them back should show why the right one went missing.

The case is his own. Freud is travelling by carriage from Ragusa, in Dalmatia, to a station in Herzegovina, chatting with a stranger. The talk turns to Italy, and he asks whether his companion has been to Orvieto and seen the great frescoes of the Last Judgment painted by...

Nothing. The name Signorelli is gone. Instead, Botticelli and Boltraffio press forward, two other painters he knows at once are wrong.

Notice what does not explain it. Signorelli was not an unusual name to him; it was as familiar as Botticelli and more familiar than Boltraffio, a painter he could hardly place beyond the Milanese school. When someone later told him the right name, he recognised it instantly. The name was not lost from memory. Something was keeping it out of reach.

What first made Freud suspect that forgetting Signorelli was more than an ordinary lapse?

• He had never actually seen the Orvieto frescoes
• The name was one he had rarely heard
• His companion also failed to recall the painter
• Wrong names kept intruding, rejected yet persistent✓Correct answer

The trigger was the false recollection: substitutes he rejected at once but that kept pushing in. The name itself was familiar to him, so strangeness cannot explain the gap, and nothing in the account says the companion forgot it too.

To find the path, Freud looked at what had been said just before Orvieto came up. The forgetting, he writes, showed itself as "a disturbance of the newly emerging theme caused by the theme preceding it."

The previous topic was the Turks of Bosnia and Herzegovina. A colleague who practised medicine among them had told Freud how completely they trust their doctor and accept fate. When told a patient cannot be saved, they answer: "Sir (Herr), what can I say? I know that if he could be saved you would save him."

Look at the words sitting in that small story: Bosnia, Herzegovina, Herr. Freud points out that exactly these can be slotted into a chain between Signorelli, Botticelli and Boltraffio. The previous conversation was still running underneath the new one, and its words were about to do something strange.

There was a second anecdote, stored right next to the first, that Freud chose not to tell. The same Turks, his colleague said, value sexual pleasure above everything, and fall into a despair over sexual troubles that contrasts oddly with their calm before death. One patient put it plainly: "if that ceases, life no longer has any charm."

Freud held it back because it was too delicate for a stranger. But he did more than keep quiet. He also turned his attention away from where the thought was heading: death and sexuality.

A few weeks earlier, while staying at Trafoi, he had received news that a patient he had worked hard to help had taken his own life over an incurable sexual disorder. Freud insists this memory never came to mind during the carriage ride. And yet it was active.

Freud says the news he received at Trafoi was consciously on his mind in the carriage, and he simply chose not to mention it.

False✓Correct answer

He says the opposite: he knows positively that the Trafoi news did not come to his conscious recollection on that trip. The anecdote about the Turks was held back deliberately, but the suicide was pushed out of awareness, and it still worked from there.