influence of word associations. But that is not all. In a series of
cases, an explanation of the observed slip is unsuccessful unless we
take into account what phrase had been said or even thought previously.
This again makes it a case of perseveration of the sort stressed by
Meringer, but of a longer duration. I must admit, I am on the whole of
the impression that we are further than ever from an explanation of
slips of the tongue!
However, I hope I am not wrong when I say that during the above
investigation of these examples of slips of the tongue, we have all
obtained a new impression on which it will be of value to dwell. We
sought the general conditions under which slips of the tongue occur, and
then the influences which determine the kind of distortion resulting
from the slip, but we have in no way yet considered the effect of the
slip of the tongue in itself, without regard to its origin. And if we
should decide to do so we must finally have the courage to assert, "In
some of the examples cited, the product of the slip also makes sense."
What do we mean by "it makes sense"? It means, I think, that the product
of the slip has itself a right to be considered as a valid psychic act
which also has its purpose, as a manifestation having content and
meaning. Hitherto we have always spoken of errors, but now it seems as
if sometimes the error itself were quite a normal act, except that it
has thrust itself into the place of some other expected or intended act.
In isolated cases this valid meaning seems obvious and unmistakable.
When the president with his opening words closes the session of the
House of Representatives, instead of opening it, we are inclined to
consider this error meaningful by reason of our knowledge of the
circumstances under which the slip occurred. He expects no good of the
assembly, and would be glad if he could terminate it immediately. The
pointing out of this meaning, the interpretation of this error, gives us
no difficulty. Or a lady, pretending to admire, says to another, "I am
sure you must have messed up this charming hat yourself."[8] No
scientific quibbles in the world can keep us from discovering in this
slip the idea "this hat is a mess." Or a lady who is known for her
energetic disposition, relates, "My husband asked the doctor to what
diet he should keep. But the doctor said he didn't need any diet, he
should eat and drink whatever _I_ want." This slip of tongue is quite an
unmistakable expression of a consistent purpose.
Ladies and gentlemen, if it should turn out that not only a few cases of
slips of the tongue and of errors in general, but the larger part of
them, have a meaning, then this meaning of errors of which we have
hitherto made no mention, will unavoidably become of the greatest
interest to us and will, with justice, force all other points of view
into the background. We could then ignore all physiological and
psycho-physiological conditions and devote ourselves to the purely
psychological investigations of the sense, that is, the meaning, the
purpose of these errors. To this end therefore we will not fail,
shortly, to study a more extensive compilation of material.
But before we undertake this task, I should like to invite you to follow
another line of thought with me. It has repeatedly happened that a poet
has made use of slips of the tongue or some other error as a means of
poetic presentation. This fact in itself must prove to us that he
considers the error, the slip of the tongue for instance, as meaningful;
for he creates it on purpose, and it is not a case of the poet
committing an accidental slip of the pen and then letting his pen-slip
stand as a tongue-slip of his character. He wants to make something
clear to us by this slip of the tongue, and we may examine what it is,
whether he wishes to indicate by this that the person in question is
distracted or fatigued. Of course, we do not wish to exaggerate the
importance of the fact that the poet did make use of a slip to express
his meaning. It could nevertheless really be a psychic accident, or
meaningful only in very rare cases, and the poet would still retain the
right to infuse it with meaning through his setting. As to their poetic
use, however, it would not be surprising if we should glean more
information concerning slips of the tongue from the poet than from the
philologist or the psychiatrist.
Such an example of a slip of the tongue occurs in _Wallenstein_
(_Piccolomini_, Act 1, Scene 5). In the previous scene, Max Piccolomini
has most passionately sided with the Herzog, and dilated ardently on the
blessings of peace which disclosed themselves to him during the trip on
which he accompanied Wallenstein's daughter to the camp. He leaves his
father and the courtier, Questenberg, plunged in deepest consternation.
And then the fifth scene continues:
Q.
Alas! Alas! and stands it so?
What friend! and do we let him go away
In this delusion--let him go away?
Not call him back immediately, not open
His eyes upon the spot?
OCTAVIO.
(_Recovering himself out of a deep study_)
He has now opened mine,
And I see more than pleases me.
Q.
What is it?
OCTAVIO.
A curse on this journey!
Q.
But why so? What is it?
OCTAVIO.
Come, come along, friend! I must follow up
The ominous track immediately. Mine eyes
Are opened now, and I must use them. Come!
(_Draws Q. on with him._)
Q.
What now? Where go you then?
OCTAVIO.
(_Hastily._) To _her_ herself
Q.
To--
OCTAVIO.
(_Interrupting him and correcting himself._)
To the duke. Come, let us go--.
Octavio meant to say, "To him, to the lord," but his tongue slips and
through his words "_to her_" he betrays to us, at least, the fact that
he had quite clearly recognized the influence which makes the young war
hero dream of peace.
A still more impressive example was found by O. Rank in Shakespeare. It
occurs in the _Merchant of Venice_, in the famous scene in which the
fortunate suitor makes his choice among the three caskets; and perhaps I
can do no better than to read to you here Rank's short account of the
incident:
"A slip of the tongue which occurs in Shakespeare's _Merchant of
Venice_, Act III, Scene II, is exceedingly delicate in its poetic
motivation and technically brilliant in its handling. Like the slip in
_Wallenstein_ quoted by Freud (_Psychopathology of Everyday Life_, 2d
ed., p. 48), it shows that the poets well know the meaning of these
errors and assume their comprehensibility to the audience. Portia, who
by her father's wish has been bound to the choice of a husband by lot,
has so far escaped all her unfavored suitors through the fortunes of
chance. Since she has finally found in Bassanio the suitor to whom she
is attached, she fears that he, too, will choose the wrong casket. She
would like to tell him that even in that event he may rest assured of
her love, but is prevented from so doing by her oath. In this inner
conflict the poet makes her say to the welcome suitor:
PORTIA:
I pray you tarry; pause a day or two,
Before you hazard; for, in choosing wrong
I lose your company; therefore, forbear a while:
There's something tells me, (but it is not love)
I would not lose you: * * *
* * * I could teach you
How to choose right, but then I am forsworn,
So will I never be: so may you miss me;
But if you do, you'll make me wish a sin
That I had been forsworn. Beshrew your eyes.
They have o'erlook'd me, and divided me;
One half of me is yours, the other half _yours_,
_Mine own_, I would say: but if mine, then yours,
And so all yours.
Just that, therefore, which she meant merely to indicate faintly to him
or really to conceal from him entirely, namely that even before the
choice of the lot she was his and loved him, this the poet--with
admirable psychological delicacy of feeling--makes apparent by her slip;
and is able, by this artistic device, to quiet the unbearable
uncertainty of the lover, as well as the equal suspense of the audience
as to the issue of the choice."
Notice, at the end, how subtly Portia reconciles the two declarations
which are contained in the slip, how she resolves the contradiction
between them and finally still manages to keep her promise:
"* * * but if mine, then yours,
And so all yours."
Another thinker, alien to the field of medicine, accidentally disclosed
the meaning of errors by an observation which has anticipated our
attempts at explanation. You all know the clever satires of Lichtenberg
(1742-1749), of which Goethe said, "Where he jokes, there lurks a
problem concealed." Not infrequently the joke also brings to light the
solution of the problem. Lichtenberg mentions in his jokes and satiric
comments the remark that he always read "Agamemnon" for "angenommen,"[9]
so intently had he read Homer. Herein is really contained the whole
theory of misreadings.
At the next session we will see whether we can agree with the poets in
their conception of the meaning of psychological errors.
THIRD LECTURE
THE PSYCHOLOGY OF ERRORS--(_Continued_)
At the last session we conceived the idea of considering the error, not
in its relation to the intended act which it distorted, but by itself
alone, and we received the impression that in isolated instances it
seems to betray a meaning of its own. We declared that if this fact
could be established on a larger scale, then the meaning of the error
itself would soon come to interest us more than an investigation of the
circumstances under which the error occurs.
Let us agree once more on what we understand by the "meaning" of a
psychic process. A psychic process is nothing more than the purpose
which it serves and the position which it holds in a psychic sequence.
We can also substitute the word "purpose" or "intention" for "meaning"
in most of our investigations. Was it then only a deceptive appearance
or a poetic exaggeration of the importance of an error which made us
believe that we recognized a purpose in it?
Let us adhere faithfully to the illustrative example of slips of the
tongue and let us examine a larger number of such observations. We then
find whole categories of cases in which the intention, the meaning of
the slip itself, is clearly manifest. This is the case above all in
those examples in which one says the opposite of what one intended. The
president said, in his opening address, "I declare the meeting closed."
His intention is certainly not ambiguous. The meaning and purpose of his
slip is that he wants to terminate the meeting. One might point the
conclusion with the remark "he said so himself." We have only taken him
at his word. Do not interrupt me at this point by remarking that this is
not possible, that we know he did not want to terminate the meeting but
to open it, and that he himself, whom we have just recognized as the
best judge of his intention, will affirm that he meant to open it. In so
doing you forget that we have agreed to consider the error entirely by
itself. Its relation to the intention which it distorts is to be
discussed later. Otherwise you convict yourself of an error in logic by
which you smoothly conjure away the problem under discussion; or "beg
the question," as it is called in English.
In other cases in which the speaker has not said the exact opposite of
what he intended, the slip may nevertheless express an antithetical
meaning. "I am not _inclined_ to appreciate the merits of my
predecessor." "_Inclined_" is not the opposite of "_in a position to_,"
but it is an open betrayal of intent in sharpest contradiction to the
attempt to cope gracefully with the situation which the speaker is
supposed to meet.
In still other cases the slip simply adds a second meaning to the one
intended. The sentence then sounds like a contradiction, an
abbreviation, a condensation of several sentences. Thus the lady of
energetic disposition, "He may eat and drink whatever _I_ please." The
real meaning of this abbreviation is as though the lady had said, "He
may eat and drink whatever he pleases. But what does it matter what _he_
pleases! It is _I_ who do the pleasing." Slips of the tongue often give
the impression of such an abbreviation. For example, the anatomy
professor, after his lecture on the human nostril, asks whether the
class has thoroughly understood, and after a unanimous answer in the
affirmative, goes on to say: "I can hardly believe that is so, since the
people who understand the human nostril can, even in a city of millions,
be counted on _one finger_--I mean, on the fingers of one hand." The
abbreviated sentence here also has its meaning: it expresses the idea
that there is only one person who thoroughly understands the subject.
In contrast to these groups of cases are those in which the error does
not itself express its meaning, in which the slip of the tongue does not
in itself convey anything intelligible; cases, therefore, which are in
sharpest opposition to our expectations. If anyone, through a slip of
the tongue, distorts a proper name, or puts together an unusual
combination of syllables, then this very common occurrence seems already
to have decided in the negative the question of whether all errors
contain a meaning. Yet closer inspection of these examples discloses the
fact that an understanding of such a distortion is easily possible,
indeed, that the difference between these unintelligible cases and the
previous comprehensible ones is not so very great.
A man who was asked how his horse was, answered, "Oh, it may _stake_--it
may take another month." When asked what he really meant to say, he
explained that he had been thinking that it was a _sorry_ business and
the coming together of "_take_" and "_sorry_" gave rise to "_stake_."
(Meringer and Mayer.)
Another man was telling of some incidents to which he had objected, and
went on, "and then certain facts were _re-filed_." Upon being
questioned, he explained that he meant to stigmatize these facts as
"_filthy_." "_Revealed_" and "_filthy_" together produced the peculiar
"_re-filled_." (Meringer and Mayer.)
You will recall the case of the young man who wished to "_inscort_" an
unknown lady. We took the liberty of resolving this word construction
into the two words "_escort_" and "_insult_," and felt convinced of this
interpretation without demanding proof of it. You see from these
examples that even slips can be explained through the concurrence, the
interference, of two speeches of different intentions. The difference
arises only from the fact that in the one type of slip the intended
speech completely crowds out the other, as happens in those slips where
the opposite is said, while in the other type the intended speech must
rest content with so distorting or modifying the other as to result in
mixtures which seem more or less intelligible in themselves.
We believe that we have now grasped the secret of a large number of
slips of the tongue. If we keep this explanation in mind we will be able
to understand still other hitherto mysterious groups. In the case of the
distortion of names, for instance, we cannot assume that it is always an
instance of competition between two similar, yet different names. Still,
the second intention is not difficult to guess. The distorting of names
occurs frequently enough not as a slip of the tongue, but as an attempt
to give the name an ill-sounding or debasing character. It is a familiar
device or trick of insult, which persons of culture early learned to do
without, though they do not give it up readily. They often clothe it in
the form of a joke, though, to be sure, the joke is of a very low order.
Just to cite a gross and ugly example of such a distortion of a name, I
mention the fact that the name of the President of the French Republic,
_Poincare_, has been at times, lately, transformed into
"_Schweinskarre_." It is therefore easy to assume that there is also
such an intention to insult in the case of other slips of the tongue
which result in the distortion of a name. In consequence of our
adherence to this conception, similar explanations force themselves upon
us, in the case of slips of the tongue whose effect is comical or
absurd. "I call upon you to _hiccough_ the health of our chief."[10]
Here the solemn atmosphere is unexpectedly disturbed by the introduction
of a word that awakens an unpleasant image; and from the prototype of
certain expressions of insult and offense we cannot but suppose that
there is an intention striving for expression which is in sharp contrast
to the ostensible respect, and which could be expressed about as
follows, "You needn't believe this. I'm not really in earnest. I don't
give a whoop for the fellow--etc." A similar trick which passes for a
slip of the tongue is that which transforms a harmless word into one
which is indecent and obscene.[11]
We know that many persons have this tendency of intentionally making
harmless words obscene for the sake of a certain lascivious pleasure it
gives them. It passes as wit, and we always have to ask about a person
of whom we hear such a thing, whether he intended it as a joke or
whether it occurred as a slip of the tongue.
Well, here we have solved the riddle of errors with relatively little
trouble! They are not accidents, but valid psychic acts. They have their
meaning; they arise through the collaboration--or better, the mutual
interference--of two different intentions. I can well understand that at
this point you want to swamp me with a deluge of questions and doubts to
be answered and resolved before we can rejoice over this first result of
our labors. I truly do not wish to push you to premature conclusions.
Let us dispassionately weigh each thing in turn, one after the other.
What would you like to say? Whether I think this explanation is valid
for all cases of slips of the tongue or only for a certain number?
Whether one can extend this same conception to all the many other
errors--to mis-reading, slips of the pen, forgetting, picking up the
wrong object, mislaying things, etc? In the face of the psychic nature
of errors, what meaning is left to the factors of fatigue, excitement,
absent-mindedness and distraction of attention? Moreover, it is easy to
see that of the two competing meanings in an error, one is always
public, but the other not always. But what does one do in order to guess
the latter? And when one believes one has guessed it, how does one go
about proving that it is not merely a probable meaning, but that it is
the only correct meaning? Is there anything else you wish to ask? If
not, then I will continue. I would remind you of the fact that we really
are not much concerned with the errors themselves, but we wanted only to
learn something of value to psychoanalysis from their study. Therefore,
I put the question: What are these purposes or tendencies which can thus
interfere with others, and what relation is there between the
interfering tendencies and those interfered with? Thus our labor really
begins anew, after the explanation of the problem.
Now, is this the explanation of all tongue slips? I am very much
inclined to think so and for this reason, that as often as one
investigates a case of a slip of the tongue, it reduces itself to this
type of explanation. But on the other hand, one cannot prove that a slip
of the tongue cannot occur without this mechanism. It may be so; for our
purposes it is a matter of theoretical indifference, since the
conclusions which we wish to draw by way of an introduction to
psychoanalysis remain untouched, even if only a minority of the cases of
tongue slips come within our conception, which is surely not the case. I
shall anticipate the next question, of whether or not we may extend to
other types of errors what we have gleaned from slips of the tongue, and
answer it in the affirmative. You will convince yourselves of that
conclusion when we turn our attention to the investigation of examples
of pen slips, picking up wrong objects, etc. I would advise you,
however, for technical reasons, to postpone this task until we shall
have investigated the tongue slip itself more thoroughly.
The question of what meaning those factors which have been placed in the
foreground by some authors,--namely, the factors of circulatory
disturbances, fatigue, excitement, absent-mindedness, the theory of the
distraction of attention--the question of what meaning those factors can
now have for us if we accept the above described psychic mechanism of
tongue slips, deserves a more detailed answer. You will note that we do
not deny these factors. In fact, it is not very often that
psychoanalysis denies anything which is asserted on the other side. As a
rule psychoanalysis merely adds something to such assertions and
occasionally it does happen that what had hitherto been overlooked, and
was newly added by psychoanalysis, is just the essential thing. The
influence on the occurrence of tongue slips of such physiological
predispositions as result from slight illness, circulatory disturbances
and conditions of fatigue, should be acknowledged without more ado.
Daily personal experience can convince you of that. But how little is
explained by such an admission! Above all, they are not necessary
conditions of the errors. Slips of the tongue are just as possible when
one is in perfect health and normal condition. Bodily factors,
therefore, have only the value of acting by way of facilitation and
encouragement to the peculiar psychic mechanism of a slip of the tongue.
To illustrate this relationship, I once used a simile which I will now
repeat because I know of no better one as substitute. Let us suppose
that some dark night I go past a lonely spot and am there assaulted by a
rascal who takes my watch and purse; and then, since I did not see the
face of the robber clearly, I make my complaint at the nearest police
station in the following words: "Loneliness and darkness have just
robbed me of my valuables." The police commissioner could then say to
me: "You seem to hold an unjustifiably extreme mechanistic conception.
Let us rather state the case as follows: Under cover of darkness, and
favored by the loneliness, an unknown robber seized your valuables. The
essential task in your case seems to me to be to discover the robber.
Perhaps we can then take his booty from him again."
Such psycho-physiological moments as excitement, absent-mindedness and
distracted attention, are obviously of small assistance to us for the
purpose of explanation. They are mere phrases, screens behind which we
will not be deterred from looking. The question is rather what in such
cases has caused the excitement, the particular diversion of attention.
The influence of syllable sounds, word resemblances and the customary
associations which words arouse should also be recognized as having
significance. They facilitate the tongue slip by pointing the path which
it can take. But if I have a path before me, does that fact as a matter
of course determine that I will follow it? After all, I must have a
stimulus to make me decide for it, and, in addition, a force which
carries me forward on this path. These sound and word relationships
therefore serve also only to facilitate the tongue slip, just as the
bodily dispositions facilitate them; they cannot give the explanation
for the word itself. Just consider, for example, the fact that in an
enormously large number of cases, my lecturing is not disturbed by the
fact that the words which I use recall others by their sound
resemblance, that they are intimately associated with their opposites,
or arouse common associations. We might add here the observation of the
philosopher Wundt, that slips of the tongue occur when, in consequence
of bodily fatigue, the tendency to association gains the upper hand over
the intended speech. This would sound very plausible if it were not
contradicted by experiences which proved that from one series of cases
of tongue-slips bodily stimuli were absent, and from another, the
association stimuli were absent.