Swiss Medical Society for Psychoanalysis: Meeting of March 17, 1929: “An Infantile Cover-Memory—A Fragment of an Analysis”: (A Demonstration of the Chain of Reasoning in an Analysis)

A twenty-five-year-old patient, suffering from compulsion neurosis with latent schizophrenia, retained a precise memory from his third year. The recollection was of an, in itself, insignificant occurrence (dragging his foot on the way home from Z—with his mother), but in the course of the analysis it turned out to be a substitute for a previous highly affective childhood experience, namely, the overhearing of parental sexual intercourse in the house of a relative in Z—. Due to repression, the memory of this event had remained unconscious and incapable of becoming conscious.

With the help of material from the analysis, the speaker showed how the recollection of dragging the foot proved to be a cover-memory (substitute): it always arose in connection with certain definite associations, and stood in close relationship to some typical dreams of the patient—dreams, for example, in which a cow, maltreated by the patient's father, dragged its foot; dreams in which the patient suffered from locomotory inhibitions, was rooted to the spot, was unable, in a critical moment, to put on his trousers, etc. These dreams, which had occurred repeatedly for years before the analytic cure was started, were likewise repeated frequently during the analysis, and were very closely related to the childhood experience of overhearing parental intercourse, consciously represented by the insignificant memory mentioned above. The latter was communicated by the patient in the first week of the treatment, and was then relegated to the background, not to play a part for months, until, in a critical phase of the analysis, it came up in the same connection as before, and proved beyond all doubt to be a cover-memory.

The paper does not lend itself to a brief review. At the same time a contribution to and illustration of analytic method and technique, it aimed at a complete demonstration of the chain of reasoning in an analysis, and owing to special circumstances it was possible in this case to show that