“The Psychopathology of Everyday Life” by Sigmund Freud: Freud’s alternate personality breaks ink pot without damaging more precious objects

“It is very rare for me to break anything…Shortage of space in my study has often forced me to handle a number of pottery and stone antiquities…in the most uncomfortable positions, so that onlookers have expressed anxiety that I should knock something down and break it. That however has never happened. Why then did I once dash the marble cover of my plain ink pot to the ground so that it broke?…my sweeping movement was only apparently clumsy; in reality it was extremely adroit and well-directed, and understood how to avoid damaging any of the more precious objects that stood around” (1, pp. 167-168).

Freud focuses his analysis on his motivation for breaking his ink pot (he concludes that he hoped to get a new one as a gift), but he fails to address who broke it, which is a question, since he, himself, had no memory of deciding to break it, and had no memory of guiding his hand so adroitly that he broke nothing else.

A decision to break the ink pot must have been made, and his hand must have been guided, by an intelligence of some sort, but Freud’s regular intelligence had no memory for making that decision or guiding his hand.

Freud would call his alternate intelligence his “unconscious,” but it was unconscious only from the point of view of his regular consciousness.

Freud’s problem was that his model of the mind did not allow for multiple consciousness and alternate personalities. He acknowledged that such cases had been observed and did exist—and it has been pointed out that some of Freud’s own patients probably had it—but Freud, himself, never made the diagnosis. The closest he came to recognizing the dissociation of a personality was probably his colleague’s patient, Anna O.

Freud had a blind spot for multiple personality, possibly because he, himself, had the trait, and his self-analysis was incomplete.

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1. Sigmund Freud. The Psychopathology of Everyday Life [1901]. Translated from the German by Alan Tyson. Edited by James Strachey. New York, WW Norton, 1965.