Page:Freud - Psychopathology of everyday life.djvu/45

Forgetting Names and Order of Words &lsquo;A Pine-tree Stands Alone,&rsquo; etc. In the line &lsquo;He felt drowsy&rsquo; he became hopelessly stuck at the words &lsquo;with the white sheet.&rsquo; This forgetting of such a well-known verse seemed to me rather peculiar, and I therefore asked him to reproduce what came to his mind when he thought of the words &lsquo;with the white sheet.&rsquo; He gave the following series of associations: &lsquo;The white sheet makes one think of a white sheet on a corpse—a linen sheet with which one covers a dead body—[pause]—now I think of a near friend—his brother died quite recently—he is supposed to have died of heart disease—he was also very corpulent—my friend is corpulent, too, and I thought that he might meet the same fate—probably he doesn&rsquo;t exercise enough—when I heard of this death I suddenly became frightened: the same thing might happen to me, as my own family is predisposed to obesity—my grandfather died of heart disease—I, also, am somewhat too corpulent, and for that reason I began an obesity cure a few days ago.&rsquo;&rdquo;

Jung remarks: &ldquo;The man had unconsciously immediately identified himself with the pine-tree which was covered with a white sheet.&rdquo; For the following example of forgetting the order of words I am indebted to my friend Dr. Ferenczi, of Budapest. Unlike the former examples, it does not refer to a verse taken from 33