Freud1
In several of his books, including Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis and On Dreams, Freud combines the topics of forgetting a proper name and dream analysis, formulating a thesis that helps to clarify his theories on both. He describes in psychoanalytic terms the mechanisms behind forgetting of a proper name and how they relate to the methods used in dream analysis. By looking at the two topics from a joint perspective, we can gain a greater understanding of them and how they relate to other areas of psychoanalysis. The tendency toward forgetting of a proper name is an important theme in Freud's work. He explained the way in which forgetting something like a name was actually a substitute for forgetting something that, unconsciously, an individual does not wish to remember. He described the unconscious force that prompted this forgetfulness as a "counter-will", or an unconscious desire parallel to an individual's conscious desire. According to Freud, there is a connection between what one consciously forgets and what one unconsciously wants to forget. When a person has some unpleasant thought or issue that they wish to banish from their mind, the will to forget may "miss its target", and the wish to forget may man
When he tries to remember the forgotten name, and later remembers it and brings it back to his consciousness, he plunges into a maze of explanations of how and why the particular substitutions occurred. This is where I find Freud to be stretching the limits of reasonable deduction; it is my opinion that the chart he included in Psychopathology of Everyday Life is unconvincing at best. The chart, however, manages to lead him from the substituted name to the source of the repressed material. Whether the chart and its analysis was superfluous to this discovery or not is something of which I am not convinced. The way he uses the first few letters of his mixed up words to relate them to each other and tie everything together seemed too orderly and simplified to be the product of something as willful as the unconscious mind, but it did seem to work in validating his points on the issue. ifest itself in some other way. In this case the individual may forget something seemingly unconnected to the thought they wish to banish, such as a proper name. Freud gives some relevant examples of this phenomenon in Introductory Lectures:
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Approximate Word count = 1133
Approximate Pages = 5 (250 words per page double spaced)
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