a-general-introduction-to-psychoanalysis-sigmund-freud

In the first mentioned and more frequent cases of misreading, two factors are
neglected to which we gave an important role in the mechanism of errors: the
conflict of two tendencies and the suppression of one which then indemnifies
itself by producing the error. Not that anything like the opposite occurs in
misreading, but the importunity of the idea content which leads to misreading
is nevertheless much more conspicuous than the suppression to which the
latter may previously have been subjected. Just these two factors are most
tangibly apparent in the various situations of errors of forgetfulness.
Forgetting plans is actually uniform in meaning; its interpretation is, as we
have heard, not denied even by the layman. The tendency interfering with the
plan is always an antithetical intention, an unwillingness concerning which we
need only discover why it does not come to expression in a different and less
disguised manner. But the existence of this unwillingness is not to be
doubted. Sometimes it is possible even to guess something of the motives
which make it necessary for this unwillingness to disguise itself, and it always
achieves its purpose by the error resulting from the concealment, while its
rejection would be certain were it to present itself as open contradiction. If an
important change in the psychic situation occurs between the formulation of
the plan and its execution, in consequence of which the execution of the plan
does not come into question, then the fact that the plan was forgotten is no
longer in the class of errors. One is no longer surprised at it, and one
understands that it would have been superfluous to have remembered the
plan; it was then permanently or temporarily effaced. Forgetting a plan can
be called an error only when we have no reason to believe there was such an
interruption.
The cases of forgetting plans are in general so uniform and transparent that
they do not interest us in our investigation. There are two points, however,
from which we can learn something new. We have said that forgetting, that
is, the non-execution of a plan, points to an antipathy toward it. This certainly
holds, but, according to the results of our investigations, the antipathy may
be of two sorts, direct and indirect. What is meant by the latter can best be
explained by one or two examples. If a patron forgets to say a good word for
his protegé to a third person, it may be because the patron is not really very
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