remember the forgotten name, and later remembers it and brings it back to his consciousness, he plunges into a maze of explanations of how and why the particular substitutions occurred. This is where I find Freud to be stretching the limits of reasonable deduction; it is my opinion that the chart he included in Psychopathology of Everyday Life is unconvincing at best. The chart, however, manages to lead him from the substituted name to the source of the repressed material. Whether the chart and its analysis was superfluous to this discovery or not is something of which I am not convinced. The way he uses the first few letters of his mixed up words to relate them to each other and tie everything together seemed too orderly and simplified to be the product of something as willful as the unconscious mind, but it did seem to work in validating his points on the issue.Comparing and contrasting the phenomenon of forgetting proper names and all that it entails with the practice of dream-analysis is challenging and adds another dimension to our understanding of both. Though study of both is focused on a part of the mind other than the conscious thoughts, there is a distinction between the roles played by the unconscious and the preconscious in these phenomena. In dream analysis, the dream-thoughts are recognized as unconscious material, waiting in the unconscious mind to be revealed to the dreamer in sleep. Much of this material could not be recognized by the individual in any form other than a dream, either because it is repressed or it has not yet reached the conscious level of recognition. In forgetting of a proper name, however, the answer seems to be “on the tip of the tongue”, or just out of reach of the conscious mind. In this case both the material that is forgotten and the material that the memory substitutes is found in the preconscious mind, the state in between conscious and unconscious thought.The significant t...
