Freud - Complete Works (203 page)

           
jagen,               
             dauert,                        
Vorschein

           
lagen,                            
traurig,                        
. . . schwein.

   Now in my
Interpretation of
Dreams
(1900
a
) I have demonstrated the part played by
the work of
condensation
in forming what is called the
manifest dream-content out of the latent dream-thoughts. A
similarity of any sort between two elements of the unconscious
material - a similarity between the things themselves or between
their verbal presentations - is taken as an opportunity for
creating a third, which is a composite or compromise idea. In the
dream-content this third element represents both its components;
and it is as a consequence of its originating in this way that it
so frequently has various contradictory characteristics. The
formation of substitutions and contaminations which occurs in slips
of the tongue is accordingly a beginning of the work of
condensation which we find taking a most vigorous share in the
construction of dreams.

  
¹
[What he intended to say was: ‘Well,
it will last (
dauerti
) another month perhaps.’ Instead
of ‘
dauert
’ he used the meaningless word
‘
draut
’]

The Psychopathology Of Everyday Life

1150

   In a short essay designed for a
wider circle of readers Meringer (1900) has claimed that a special
practical significance attaches to particular cases in which one
word is put for another - viz. to those cases in which a word is
replaced by another that has the opposite meaning. ‘You
probably still recall’, he writes, ‘the way in which
the President of the Lower House of the Austrian Parliament
opened
the sitting a short while ago: "Gentlemen: I
take notice that a full quorum of members is present and herewith
declare the sitting
closed
!" His attention was only
drawn by the general merriment and he corrected his mistake. In
this particular case the explanation no doubt was that the
President secretly
wished
he was already in a position to
close the sitting, from which little good was to be expected. But
this accompanying idea, as frequently happens, broke through, at
least partially, and the result was "closed" instead of
"open" - the opposite, that is, of what was intended to
be expressed. Now extensive observations have taught me that words
with opposite meanings are, quite generally, very often
interchanged; they are already associated in our linguistic
consciousness, they lie very close to each other and it is easy for
the wrong one to be evoked.’

   It cannot be said that in all
cases where words are replaced by their opposites it is as easy as
in this instance of the President to show the probability of the
slip being a consequence of a contradiction arising in the
speaker’s mind against the uttered sentence. We found an
analogous mechanism in our analysis of the
aliquis
example.
There the internal contradiction expressed itself in a word being
forgotten, instead of its being replaced by its opposite. But in
order to soften the distinction we may note that the word
aliquis
is in fact incapable of having an opposite like
‘to close’ and ‘to open’, and that
‘to open’ is a word that cannot be forgotten as it is
too familiar a part of our vocabulary.

The Psychopathology Of Everyday Life

1151

   If the last examples of Meringer
and Mayer show that the disturbance of speech can arise on the one
hand from the influence of anticipatory or perseverating sounds and
words of the same sentence which are intended to be spoken, and on
the other hand from the effect of words outside the intended
sentence
whose excitation would not otherwise have been
revealed
, the first thing we shall want to know is whether the
two classes of slips of the tongue can be sharply divided, and how
an example of one class can be distinguished from a case of the
other. At this point in the discussion one must however bear in
mind the views expressed by Wundt, who deals with the phenomena of
slips of the tongue in the course of his comprehensive discussion
of the laws of the development of speech.

   According to him, a feature that
is never missing from these and other related phenomena is the
activity of certain psychical influences. ‘First of all they
have a positive determinant in the form of the uninhibited stream
of
sound-associations
and
word-associations
evoked by
the spoken sounds. In addition there is a negative factor in the
form of the suppression or relaxation of the inhibitory effects of
the will on this current, and of the attention which is also active
here as a function of the will. Whether this play of association
manifests itself by a coming sound being anticipated, or by the
preceding sounds being reproduced, or by a habitually practised
sound being intercalated between others, or finally by quite
different words, which stand in an associative relation to the
sounds that are spoken, having an effect upon them - all these
indicate only differences in the direction and at the most in the
scope of the associations taking place, and not differences in
their general nature. In some cases, too, it may be doubtful to
which form a certain disturbance is to be assigned, or whether it
would not be more justifiable,
in accordance with the principle
of the complication of causes
,¹ to trace it back to a
concurrence of several motive forces.’ (Wundt, 1900,
380-1.)

  
¹
My italics.

The Psychopathology Of Everyday Life

1152

   I consider these observations of
Wundt’s fully justified and very instructive. Perhaps it
would be possible to emphasize more definitely than Wundt does that
the positive factor favouring the slip of the tongue (the
uninhibited stream of associations) and the negative factor (the
relaxation of the inhibiting attention) invariably achieve their
effect in combination, so that the two factors become merely
different ways of regarding the same process. What happens is that,
with the relaxation of the inhibiting attention - in still plainer
terms,
as a result of
this relaxation - the uninhibited
stream of associations comes into action.

   Among the slips of the tongue
that I have collected myself I can find hardly one in which I
should be obliged to trace the disturbance of speech simply and
solely to what Wundt calls the ‘contact effect of
sounds’. I almost invariably discover a disturbing influence
in addition which comes from something
outside
the intended
utterance; and the disturbing element is either a single thought
that has remained unconscious, which manifests itself in the slip
of the tongue and which can often be brought to consciousness only
by means of searching analysis, or it is a more general psychical
motive force which is directed against the entire utterance.

   (1) My daughter had made an ugly
face when she took a bite at an apple, and I wanted to quote to
her:

                                               
Der Affe gar possierlich ist,

                                               
Zumal wenn er vom Apfel frisst.
¹

   But I began: ‘Der Apfe . .
.’ [a non-existent word]. This looks like a contamination of
‘
Affe
[ape]’ and ‘
Apfel
[apple]’ (a compromise-formation), or it might be regarded as
an anticipation of the word ‘Apfel’ that was in
preparation. The circumstances were, however, more precisely as
follows. I had already begun the quotation once before and had not
made a slip of the tongue the first time. I only made a slip when I
repeated it. The repetition was necessary because the person I was
addressing had had her attention distracted from another quarter
and she had not been listening to me. I must include the fact of
the repetition, together with my impatience to have done with my
sentence, among the motives of the slip which made its appearance
as a product of condensation.

  
¹
[The ape’s a very comic sight when
from an apple he takes a bite.]

The Psychopathology Of Everyday Life

1153

   (2) My daughter said: ‘I am
writing to Frau Sch
r
esinger . . .’ The
lady’s name is Sch
l
esinger. This slip of the tongue is
probably connected with a trend towards making articulation easier,
for an
l
is difficult to pronounce after a repeated
r
. I must add, however, that my daughter made this slip a
few minutes after I had said ‘
Apfe
’ for
‘
Affe
’. Now slips of the tongue are in a high
degree contagious, like the forgetting of names - a peculiar fact
which Meringer and Mayer have noticed in the case of the latter. I
cannot suggest any reason for this psychical contagiousness.

   (3) ‘I shut up like a
Tassenmescher
- I mean
Taschenmesser
', said a
woman patient at the start of the hour of treatment. Here again a
difficulty in articulation (cf. ‘Wiener Weiber
Wäscherinnen waschen weisse Wäsche’,
‘Fischflosse’ and similar tongue-twisters) could
serve as an excuse for her interchanging the sounds. When her
attention was drawn to her slip, she promptly replied: ‘Yes,
that’s only because you said "
Ernscht
"
to-day.’ I had in fact received her with the remark:
‘To-day we shall really be in earnest ' (because it was
going to be the last session before the holidays), and had jokingly
broadened ‘
Ernst
’ into
‘
Ernscht
’. In the course of the hour she
repeatedly made further slips of the tongue, and I finally observed
that she was not merely imitating me but had a special reason for
dwelling in her unconscious on the word ‘
Ernst
’
in its capacity as a name.¹

  
¹
In fact she turned out to be under the
influence of unconscious thoughts about pregnancy and
contraception. By the words ‘shut up like a
pocket-knife’, which she uttered consciously as a complaint,
she wanted to describe the position of a child in the womb. The
word ‘
Ernst
’ in my opening remark had reminded
her of the name (S. Ernst) of a well known Viennese firm in the
Kärntnerstrasse which used to advertise the sale of
contraceptives.

The Psychopathology Of Everyday Life

1154

   (4) ‘I’ve got such a
cold, I can’t
durch die Ase natmen
- I mean,
Nase
atmen
’,¹ the same patient happened to say another
time. She knew immediately how she had come to make the slip.
‘Every day I get on the tram in Hasenauer Street, and while I
was waiting for one to come along this morning it struck me that if
I was French I should say "
Asenauer
", as the
French always drop their aitches at the beginning of a word.’
She then brought a series of reminiscences about French people of
her acquaintance, and came in a very roundabout manner to a memory
of having played the part of Picarde in the short play
Kürmarker und Picarde
when she was a girl of fourteen,
and of having spoken broken German in the part. The chance arrival
at her boarding house of a guest from Paris had awoken the whole
series of memories. The interchanging of the sounds was therefore
the result of a disturbance by an unconscious thought from an
entirely different context.

   (5) A slip of the tongue had a
similar mechanism in the case of another woman patient, whose
memory failed her in the middle of reproducing a long-lost
recollection of childhood. Her memory would not tell her what part
of her body had been grasped by a prying and lascivious hand.
Immediately afterwards she called on a friend with whom she
discussed summer residences. When she was asked where her cottage
at M. was situated she answered: ‘on the
Berglende
[hill-thigh]’ instead of
Berglehne
[hill-side].

   (6) When I asked another woman
patient at the end of the session how her uncle was, she answered:
‘I don’t know, nowadays I only see him
in
flagranti
.’ Next day she began: ‘I am really
ashamed of myself for having given you such a stupid answer. You
must of course have thought me a very uneducated person who is
always getting foreign words mixed up. I meant to say:
en
passant
.’ We did not as yet know the source of the
foreign phrase which she had wrongly applied. In the same session,
however, while continuing the previous day’s topic, she
brought up a reminiscence in which the chief role was played by
being caught
in flagranti
. The slip of the tongue of the day
before had therefore anticipated the memory which at the time had
not yet become conscious.

  
¹
[She meant to say: ‘I can’t
breathe through my nose.’ Her actual last two words,
‘
Ase natmen
’, have no meaning.]

The Psychopathology Of Everyday Life

1155

   (7) At a certain point in the
analysis of another woman patient I had to tell her that I
suspected her of having been ashamed of her family during the
period we were just then concerned with, and of having reproached
her father with something we did not yet know about. She remembered
nothing of the kind and moreover declared it was unlikely. However,
she continued the conversation with some remarks about her family:
‘One thing must be granted them: they are certainly unusual
people, they all possess
Geiz
  - I meant to say
"
Geist
".’ And this was in fact the reproach
which she had repressed from her memory. It is a frequent
occurrence for the idea one wants to withhold to be precisely the
one which forces its way through in the form of a slip of the
tongue. We may compare Meringer’s case of ‘zum
Vorschwein gekommen’. The only difference is that
Meringer’s speaker wanted to keep back something that was in
his consciousness, whereas my patient did not know what was being
kept back, or, to put it in another way, did not know she was
keeping something back and what that something was.