The Significance of an Alteration of Name

A patient who was about to enter into analysis had occasion to order some visiting cards. On the impulse of the moment he decided to stop using his middle name and accordingly instructed the engraver to make a new plate with the middle initial omitted. Thereafter he consistently signed his name without the middle initial, though formerly he had always used it, and likewise he omitted it from his letterheads, etc.

Months later, in the course of the treatment, this apparently insignificant matter came up for discussion, and the patient offered what he termed a 'simple explanation' for it. He stated that he had been obliged to look up his birth certificate just prior to ordering the visiting cards and, noticing that his middle name was not recorded in the document, vaguely felt that he ought to dispense with it, since it was not, strictly speaking, a part of his legal designation. During the next few days the impulse gradually became stronger and was finally carried out under the circumstances related.

The patient expressed complete satisfaction with this explanation, but when free associations were obtained it was demonstrated that the act of dropping the name owed its origin to causes quite other than the 'reasons' offered by the patient. Indeed, his explanation was a typical rationalization.

It was under very special circumstances that the patient had acquired the name in question. At the age of six he had contracted one of the more serious of the childhood diseases in a severe form, and his life was despaired of. Now, it is the custom among Jewish people to give an additional name to a child who is desperately ill, almost as if the disease were like a curse directed specifically against a person of a particular name, who might, by having his name altered, escape the curse. The patient's parents, pious Jews, resorted to this expedient, and thus it was that he came into possession of his middle name.