Page:Freud - Psychopathology of everyday life.djvu/59

This page has been validated.

Forgetting Names and Order of Words

No other than a former servant of the family whom I visited at the time. Her name was Veronica; in Hungarian Verona. I felt a great antipathy for her on account of her repulsive physiognomy, as well as her hoarse, shrill voice and her unbearable self-assertion (to which she thought herself entitled on account of her long service). Also the tyrannical way in which she treated the children of the family was insufferable to me. Now I knew the significance of the substitutive thoughts.

“To Capua I immediately associated caput mortuum. I had often compared Veronica’s head to a skull. The Hungarian word kapzoi (greed after money) surely furnished a determinant for the displacement. Naturally I also found those more direct associations which connected Capua and Verona as geographical ideas and as Italian words of the same rhythm.

“The same held true for Brescia; here, too, I found concealed side-tracks of associations of ideas.

“My antipathy at that time was so violent that I thought Veronica very ugly, and have often expressed my astonishment at the fact that any one should love her: ‘Why, to kiss her,’ I said, ‘must provoke nausea.’

“Brescia, at least in Hungary, is very often mentioned not in connection with the lion but with another wild beast. The most hated name

47