Forgetting Names and Order of Words
The analysis showed that I had formed a parallel between the visitor and my own brother which centred in the question: “Would my brother, in a similar case, have behaved like him or even more contrarily?” The outer connection between the thoughts concerning the stranger and my own family was rendered possible through the accident that the name of the mothers in each case was the same, Amelia. Subsequently I also understood the substitutive names, Daniel and Frank, which obtruded themselves without any explanation. These names, as well as Amelia, belong to Schiller’s play The Robbers; they are all connected with a joke of the Vienna pedestrian, Daniel Spitzer.
(e) On another occasion I was unable to find a patient s name which had a certain reference to my early life. The analysis had to be followed over a long devious road before the desired name was discovered. The patient expressed his apprehension lest he should lose his eyesight; this recalled a young man who became blind from a gunshot, and this again led to a picture of another youth who shot himself, and the latter bore the same name as my first patient, though not at all related to him. The name became known to me, however, only after the anxious apprehension from these two juvenile cases was transferred to a person of my own family.
Thus an incessant stream of “self-reference”
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