You do not currently have permission to view the full text for this document. Please sign in to an account with an active subscription or contact support.
I shall begin with several vignettes which I've associated to the patient « Adrien » from François Richard's presentation, and then I will move on to refer more closely to this remarkably rich and sophisticated paper that opens our reflection to many registers of psychic functioning with respect to the issue of the fraternal.
In «A Childhood Memory in “Poetry and Truth”», Freud notes, with his amazing attention to detail, or, better yet, with his amazing sense of clues of the unconscious8, the following detail from the account of one of his patients. One of the first statements of the patient is: «I am the eldest of a family with eight or nine children » [my underlining]. Then the sentence: «I shortly afterwards [after I had got a new brother] (or a year before that?), threw these objects out of the window into the street […]» (Freud, 1917, p. 249, [my underlining].
Freud interpreted the act of throwing things out of the window - an act which we can find in Goethe's autobiography, as well as in the memories of other patients - as if it symbolized turning away from the newborn brother (p. 248). The same meaning is given to the patient's brief indecisiveness regarding the number of siblings: « eight or nine».
However, even though he noticed the other doubt of the patient, the one regarding time - «shortly afterwards (or a year before that?)» -, he didn't include it in the group of « turning away » acts », although it's not hard to deduct that «shortly afterwards» entails the existence of the brother, whereas «a year before that» entails the inexistence of the brother. Let's not call this symptomatic phenomenon a «slip» (Freud) and rather call it «doubt» (also Freud), more specifically, «temporal doubt ».
It acquires an exacerbated narrative shape in one of the female patients of Harold Searles: “I can't remember the house I lived in when I was four and five » (Searles, 1986, p. 45, my underlining). Searles pointed out in this case of borderline pathology: «Some unintegrat