hade and a certain width when I went to town. I
was thinking of my dentist appointment. However, I heard your request,
answered it graciously, took the money you offered, still wondering if
the dentist would have to draw that tooth. And the chances are that I
forgot your ribbon. I was giving you only a passive and divided
attention.

Or I have more to do than I can possibly accomplish in the next six
hours. You ask me to buy the ribbon. I attend accurately for the moment,
think distractedly, "How can I do it all?--but I will"--and crowd the
intention into an already overburdened corner of my mind, fail to
associate it with the other thoughts already there, and return six hours
later without the ribbon. My sense of hurry, of stress, of the more
important thing to be done, or a reaction of impatience at the request,
forced back the ribbon thought and allowed it to be hidden by others. I
was really giving you only partial attention, or an emotion interfered
with attention; and I forgot.

Hence we find that a faulty memory may exist in an otherwise normal mind
when poor attention, or divided attention due to emotional stress or to
an overcrowded mind, which makes it impossible to properly assort its
material, interferes.

Again, we forget many things because they are unpleasant to remember. We
have no desire, no emotional stimulus to make us remember; or because
some of the associations with the forgotten incident are undesirable.
We forget many things because if we remembered them we would feel called
upon to do some unpleasant duty. You forgot your tennis engagement with
B, perhaps, because you were so engrossed in a pleasure at hand, or in
your work, that anything which interrupted was, under the circumstances,
undesirable. You may have wanted very much to play with him, but some
more pressing desire--to care well for your patient, or to continue the
present amusement--was stronger. Or you forgot because you did not want
to play with him and had no excuse to offer at the time. You wished to
forget. Perhaps he does not play a good game, or you do not like him, or
at least you like some one else much more, and he happened along; so you
forgot B. The unconscious mind saw to it that something else was kept so
prominently before your attention that it could not return to the less
desired.

Thus a forgetting may be purely the result of an emotional interference
which makes it, all in all, more pleasant to forget than to re