Part 26

An important conclusion can be drawn from, this combination: the peculiar mode of operation, whose most striking function we recognize in the dream content, should not be adjudged only to the sleeping state of the psychic life when we possess abundant proof of its activity during the waking state in the form of faulty actions. The same connection also forbids us assuming that these psychic processes which impress us as abnormal and strange are determined by deep-seated decay of psychic activity or by morbid state of function.

The correct understanding of this strange psychic work which allows the faulty actions to originate like the dream pictures will only be possible after we have discovered that the psychoneurotic symptoms, particularly the psychic formations of hysteria and compulsion neurosis, repeat in their mechanisms all the essential features of this mode of operation. The continuation of our investigation would therefore have to begin at this point.

There is still another special interest for us in considering the faulty, chance, and symptomatic actions in the light of this last analogy. If we compare them to the function of the psychoneuroses and the neurotic symptoms, two frequently recurring statements gain in sense and support--namely, that the border-line between the nervous, normal, and abnormal states is indistinct, and that we are all slightly nervous. Regardless of all medical experience, one may construe various types of such barely suggested nervousness, the formes frustes of the neuroses. There may be cases in which only a few symptoms appear, or they may manifest themselves rarely or in mild forms; the extenuation may be transferred to the number, intensity, or to the temporal outbreak of the morbid manifestation. It may also happen that just this type, which forms the most frequent transition between health and disease, may never be discovered. The transition type, whose morbid manifestations come in the form of faulty and symptomatic actions, is characterized by the fact that the symptoms are transformed to the least important psychic activities, while everything that can lay claim to a higher psychic value remains free from disturbance. When the symptoms are disposed of in a reverse manner--that is, when they appear in the most important individual and social activities in a manner to disturb the functions of nourishment and sexual relations, professional and social life--such disposition is found in the severe cases of neuroses, and is perhaps more characteristic of the latter than the multiformity or vividness of the morbid manifestations.

But the common character of the mildest as well as the severest cases, to which the faulty and chance actions contribute, lies in the ability to refer the phenomena to unwelcome, repressed, psychic material, which, though pushed away from consciousness, is nevertheless not robbed of all capacity to express itself.

INDEX

Actions-- Accidental, 192 Chance, 215 Symbolic, 210 Symptomatic, 178, 215, 235 Collection of, 238 Examples, 216, 217 Grouping of, 219

Adler, 283, 287

Amnesia, 139 Infantile, 62 Temporary, 35

Analysis of-- Aliquis, 18 Castelvetrano, 50 Ode to Apollo, 29 Signorelli, 4 Young, 44

Anticipations, 72

Association, 11

Auditifs, 63

Awkwardness, accidental, 209

Bed-wetting, 150

Behaviour of paranoiacs, 304

Bernheim, 161

Bleuler, 38, 120, 303, 319

Blood miracle, 20

Blunders, speech, 74

Boileau, quoted from, 114

Brantôme, 93

Breaking of objects, 184, 186, 187, 189

Brill, 19, 29, 32, 101, 102, 103, 130, 147, 169, 170, 197, 241, 249, 258, 293, 316

Chance, 277

Chance numbers, 282, 283

Charcot, 63, 157

Child, intellectual accomplishments of, 62

Childhood activities, trace of, 62