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My Will, While I Intentionally Wished To Forget The Other. The Disinclination To Recall Directed Itself

The author refrained from discussing a delicate theme with a stranger during a trip in Herzegovina. This reminded him of a sad event from a few weeks prior in Trafoi, where a patient had taken his own life due to an incurable sexual disturbance. The author intentionally tried to avoid recalling this memory, but its association with his trip in Herzegovina forced him to acknowledge it was brought to mind despite his efforts. He recognizes that he wanted to forget something related to death and sexuality, and that this motivated his interruption in communicating thoughts about Turkish customs. The name he forgot, Signorelli, was associated with what he wanted to repress rather than what he wanted to remember, showing his attempt to

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Vikram Rao
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58 views1 page

My Will, While I Intentionally Wished To Forget The Other. The Disinclination To Recall Directed Itself

The author refrained from discussing a delicate theme with a stranger during a trip in Herzegovina. This reminded him of a sad event from a few weeks prior in Trafoi, where a patient had taken his own life due to an incurable sexual disturbance. The author intentionally tried to avoid recalling this memory, but its association with his trip in Herzegovina forced him to acknowledge it was brought to mind despite his efforts. He recognizes that he wanted to forget something related to death and sexuality, and that this motivated his interruption in communicating thoughts about Turkish customs. The name he forgot, Signorelli, was associated with what he wanted to repress rather than what he wanted to remember, showing his attempt to

Uploaded by

Vikram Rao
Copyright
© © All Rights Reserved
We take content rights seriously. If you suspect this is your content, claim it here.
Available Formats
Download as DOC, PDF, TXT or read online on Scribd
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[p.

7] I refrained from imparting this characteristic feature because I did not wish to touch upon such
a delicate theme in conversation with a stranger. But I went still further; I also deflected my attention
from the continuation of the thought which might have associated itself in me with the theme "Death
and Sexuality." I was at that time under the after-effects of a message which I had received a few
weeks before, during a brief sojourn in Trafoi. A patient on whom I had spent much effort had ended
his life on account of an incurable sexual disturbance. I know positively that this sad event, and
everything connected with it, did not come to my conscious recollection on that trip in Herzegovina.
However, the agreement between Trafoi and Boltraffio forces me to assume that this reminiscence
was at that time brought to activity despite all the intentional deviation of my attention.

(d) I can no longer conceive the forgetting of the name Signorelli as an accidental occurrence. I
must recognize in this process the influence of a motive. There were motives which actuated the
interruption in the communication of my thoughts (concerning the customs of the Turks, etc.), and
which later influenced me to exclude from my consciousness the thought connected with them, and
which might have led to the message concerning the incident in [p. 8] Trafoi --that is, I wanted to
forget something, I repressed something. To be sure, I wished to forget something other than the
name of the master of Orvieto; but this other thought brought about an associative connection
between itself and this name, so that my act of volition missed the aim, and I forgot the one against
my will, while I intentionally wished to forget the other. The disinclination to recall directed itself
against the one content; the inability to remember appeared in another. The case would have been
obviously simpler if this disinclination and the inability to remember had concerned the same
content. The substitutive names no longer seem so thoroughly justified as they were before this
explanation. They remind me (after the form of a compromise) as much of what I wished to forget
as of what I wished to remember, and show me that my object to forget something was neither a
perfect success nor a failure.

(e) The nature of the association formed between the lost name and the repressed theme (death
and sexuality, etc.), containing the names of Bosnia, Herzegovina, and Trafoi, is also very strange. In
the scheme inserted here, which originally appeared in 1898, an attempt is made to graphically
represent these associations.

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