Synthesized answer
The forgotten city of Verona reveals that the cause of amnesia was a former servant named Veronica, who was associated with the city's name in Hungarian. The narrator felt a strong antipathy towards Veronica due to her repulsive physiognomy, hoarse voice, self-assertion, and tyrannical treatment of children [1]. This antipathy, though consciously overcome, unconsciously linked to the name Verona [2].
The forgotten city also illustrates the concept of repression, where a motive actuated the interruption in communication and later influenced the exclusion of a connected thought from consciousness [5]. The narrator wished to forget something, and this repressed thought brought about an associative connection with the name of the city, leading to forgetting the city's name against his will while intentionally trying to forget something else [5]. The substitutive thoughts, like the association of Capua with "caput mortuum" and Veronica's head to a skull, also stemmed from this antipathy and repression [3].
Synthesized from the book passages below. Chat with the book on Feynman for follow-up.
From the book
at I had spent two very pleasant days there; this, of course, does not quite concur with Freud’s theory of forgetting. Instead of the desired name of the city there obtruded themselves the following thoughts: ‘Capua--Brescia--the lion of Brescia.’ This lion I saw objectively before me in the form of a marble statue, but I soon noticed that he resembled less the lion of the statue of liberty in Brescia (which I saw only in a picture) than the other marble lion which I saw in Lucerne on the monument in honour of the Swiss Guard fallen in the Tuileries. I finally thought of the desired…
this country, as well as in North Italy, is that of General Haynau, who is briefly referred to as the hyena of Brescia. From the hated tyrant Haynau one stream of thought leads over Brescia to the city of Verona, and the other over the idea of the _grave-digging animal with the hoarse voice_ (which corresponds to the thought of a monument to the dead), to the skull, and to the disagreeable organ of Veronica, which was so cruelly insulted in my unconscious mind. Veronica in her time ruled as tyrannically as did the Austrian General after the Hungarian and Italian struggles for liberty.…
she treated the children of the family was insufferable to me. Now I knew the significance of the substitutive thoughts. “To Capua I immediately associated _caput mortuum_. I had often compared Veronica’s head to a skull. The Hungarian word _kapzoi_ (greed after money) surely furnished a determinant for the displacement. Naturally I also found those more direct associations which connected Capua and Verona as geographical ideas and as Italian words of the same rhythm. “The same held true for Brescia; here, too, I found concealed side-tracks of associations of ideas. “My antipathy at that…
le as those given before, but which will appear credible and valuable to those more familiar with such investigations. The name of an Italian city withdrew itself from memory on account of its far-reaching sound-similarity to a woman’s first name, which was in turn connected with various emotional reminiscences which were surely not exhaustively treated in this report. Dr. S. Ferenczi, who observed this case of forgetting in himself, treated it--quite justly--as an analysis of a dream or an erotic idea. “To-day I visited some old friends, and the conversation turned to cities of…
ting of the name Signorelli as an accidental occurrence. I must recognize in this process the influence of a _motive_. There were motives which actuated the interruption in the communication of my thoughts (concerning the customs of the Turks, etc.), and which later influenced me to exclude from my consciousness the thought connected with them, and which might have led to the message concerning the incident in Trafoi--that is, I wanted to forget something, I _repressed_ something. To be sure, I wished to forget something other than the name of the master of Orvieto; but this other…