THE PSYCHOPATHOLOGY OF EVERYDAY LIFE

In the 1898 volume of the Monatschrift für Psychiatrie und Neurologie I published under the title of ‘The Psychical Mechanism of Forgetfulness’ a short paper the substance of which I shall recapitulate here and take as the starting-point for more extensive discussions. In it I applied psychological analysis to the frequent circumstance of proper names being temporarily forgotten, by exploring a highly suggestive example drawn from my self-observation; and I reached the conclusion that this particular instance (admittedly commonplace and without much practical significance), in which a psychical function - the memory - refuses to operate, admits of an explanation much more far-reaching than that which the phenomenon is ordinarily made to yield.
   If a psychologist were asked to explain why it is that on so many occasions a proper name which we think we know perfectly well fails to enter our heads, he would, unless I am much mistaken, be satisfied with answering that proper names succumb more easily to the process of being forgotten than other kinds of memory-content. He would bring forward the plausible reasons why proper names should thus be singled out for special treatment, but would not suspect that any other conditions played their part in such occurrences.