I will discuss the unconscious and conscious in detail further into the paper, but it's obvious that without accepting those theories, not much else makes sense thereafter. .
Part 2 – Opinion.
Before he even starts to convince us that any of his theories hold any water, Freud – deliberately or not – reveals that he has mastered the ability to use anecdotal evidence to his point's advantage. In the first instance of one of his many anecdotes, Freud recalls a dilemma, in which he could not remember the name Signorelli, but inaccurately recalled the name as Botticelli and Boltraffio. As a person who lives almost a hundred years after Freud, it still isn't difficult to imagine myself in a similar situation. In fact, I would venture to say that most of us have found ourselves in a similar, forgetful predicament. Tauber, et al. discuss this commonality in their study, stating "a growing area of research examines memory for proper names. Such research has consistently demonstrated that such names (e.g. Mr. Smith) are more challenging to learn and remember than other types of information, such as a job or a hobby. While deficits of proper name learning are well documented, comparatively little work has examined the metacognitive basis for proper name learning (p.522).".
Often times, as Freud notes, I would attribute myself remembering incorrect names, instead of the correct ones, to a subconscious attempt to trigger the name in my memory, fishing it out of the cobwebs. This unfortunately isn't a satisfying explanation for Freud. In his attempts to find a more indicative reasoning behind this false recollection, he realizes that the "interruption of communication" – in what I assume to be neural pathways – occurs due to the individual repressing a memory closely knit to the forgotten one. Through an eerily simple diagram, Freud illustrates his point by pairing the forgotten memories with ones that would possibly be forgotten, but not otherwise repressed.
