Forgetting proper names

Sunday, June 30, 2019

12:08 AM 

Source: The Psychopathology of Everyday Life, Freud. 
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Scenario: A person forgets a name; comes up with substitutes and then picks the right one.

The question: Why did he forget?

What's not the case? : Strangeness of the name or the psychological character of the way it was inserted.
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What then? : Freud says that there is actually a background memory being suppressed and the conscious (or is it the subconscious?)  is trying to forget an unpleasant name associated with that particular memory. As the word is being dragged away, it is consistently trying to pull other names with it-but it gets successful only with names having a similar theme associated to them. Secondly, the substitutes that come up also relate to the same memory i.e the repressed theme is trying to find its way into the conscious again. 

e.g

Citing examples of himself, he forgot the word, Signorelli. As he noticed, at that time, he was under psychic trauma from the suicide of a fellow due to sexual deprivation; as it seemed, the forgotten word, in a distant way, had a relation to the same subject; Death and Sexuality. The graph that he used is:

What favors the theory? : In the words of Freud: "The given example does not contradict the conditions of memory reproduction and forgetting assumed by other psychologists, which they seek in certain relations and dispositions"