Freud - Complete Works (205 page)

   (23) A gentleman was offering his
condolences to a young lady whose husband had recently died, and he
intended to add: ‘You will find consolation in
devoting
yourself entirely to your children.’ Instead
he said ‘
widwen
’.¹ The suppressed thought
referred to consolation of another kind: a young and pretty widow
will soon enjoy fresh sexual pleasures.

   (24) At an evening party the same
gentleman was having a conversation with the same lady about the
extensive preparations being made in Berlin for Easter, and asked:
‘Have you seen today’s display at Wertheim’s? The
place is completely
decollated
.’ He had not dared to
express his admiration for the beautiful lady’s
décolletage
, while the word
‘
Auslage
’ was used unconsciously in two
senses.

   The same condition applies to
another case, observed by Dr. Hanns Sachs, of which he has tried to
give an exhaustive account:

   (25) ‘A lady was telling me
about a common acquaintance. The last time she saw him, he was, she
said, as elegantly dressed as ever: in particular he was wearing
strikingly beautiful brown
Halbschuhe
. When I asked where
she had met him she replied: "He rang at the door of my house
and I saw him through the blinds, which were down. But I
didn’t open the door or give any other sign of life, as I
didn’t want him to know I was already back in town."
While I was listening to her I had an idea that she was concealing
something from me, most probably the fact that her reason for not
opening the door was that she was not alone and not properly
dressed to receive visitors; and I asked her somewhat ironically:
"So you were able to admire his
Hausschuhe
  -
Halbschuhe
, I mean - through the blinds when they were
drawn?" In
Hausschuhe
I was giving expression to the
thought of her
Hauskleid
which I had refrained from
uttering. There was on the other hand a temptation to set rid of
the word "
Halb
" for the reason that it was
precisely this word which contained the core of the forbidden
answer: "You are only telling me
half
the truth and are
hiding the fact that you were
half
dressed." The slip
of the tongue was encouraged by the additional circumstance that we
had been talking directly before about this particular
gentleman’s married life, about his
häuslich
happiness; this no doubt helped to determine the displacement on to
him. Finally, I must confess that envy on my part may perhaps have
contributed to my placing this elegant gentleman in the street in
house shoes; only recently I myself bought a pair of brown low
shoes, which are certainly not "strikingly beautiful" any
longer.’

  
¹
[A non-existent word.]

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1162

   Times of war like the present
produce numerous slips of the tongue which there is not much
difficulty in understanding.

   (26) ‘What regiment is your
son with?’ a lady was asked. She replied: ‘With the
42nd murderers’.

   (27) Lieutenant Henrik Haiman
writes from the front (1917): ‘While I was reading an
absorbing book, I was torn away to act temporarily as
reconnaissance telephone operator. When the artillery post gave the
signal to test the line I reacted with: "Duly tested and in
order;
Ruhe
."¹ According to regulations the
message should have run: "Duly tested and in order;
Schluss
." My aberration is to be explained by my
annoyance at being interrupted while I was reading.’

   (28) A sergeant instructed his
men to give their people at home their correct addresses, so that
‘
Gespeckstücke
’ should not go
astray.²

  
¹
[‘Quiet’; often used as an
exclamation: ‘Silence!’]

  
²
[He meant to say
‘
Gepäckstücke
’
(‘parcels’). ‘
Gespeckstücke
’ is
a non-existent word; but ‘
Speckstücke
’
would mean ‘bits of bacon’. The vowel after the
‘p’ has practically the same sound in each case
(whether written ‘e’ or
‘ä').]

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1163

   (29) The following exceedingly
fine example, which is also significant in view of its most unhappy
background, I owe to Dr. L. Czeszer, who observed it while he was
living in neutral Switzerland during the war and who analysed it
exhaustively. I quote his letter verbatim with some inessential
omissions:

   ‘I am taking the liberty of
sending you an account of a slip of the tongue of which Professor
M. N. of O. University was the victim in one of the lectures that
he gave on the psychology of feelings during the summer term which
has just ended. I must start by saying that these lectures took
place in the Aula of the University before a great crowd of
interned French prisoners-of-war as well as of students, most of
whom were French-Swiss whose sympathies lay strongly on the side of
the
Entente
. In the town of O., as in France itself,
"
boche
" is the name in universal and exclusive use
for the Germans. But in public announcements, and in lectures and
the like, senior public servants, professors and other persons in
responsible positions make an effort, for the sake of neutrality,
to avoid the ominous word.

   ‘Professor N, was in the
middle of discussing the practical significance of affects, and
intended to quote an example illustrating how an affect can be
deliberately exploited in such a way that a muscular activity which
is uninteresting in itself becomes charged with pleasurable
feelings, and so made more intense. He accordingly told a story -
he was, of course, speaking in French - which had just then been
reproduced in the local papers from a German one. It concerned a
German schoolmaster who had put his pupils to work in the garden,
and in order to encourage them to work with greater intensity
invited them to imagine that with every clod of earth that they
broke up they were breaking a French skull. Every time the word for
"German" came up in the course of his story N. of course
said "
allemand
" quite correctly and not
"
boche
". But when he came to the point of the
story he gave the school-master’s words in the following
form:
Imaginez-vous qu’en chaque moche vous écrasez
le cráne d’un Français
. That is to say,
instead of
motte
[the French word for ‘clod’] -
moche
!

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1164

   ‘One can see very clearly
how this scrupulous scholar took a firm grip on himself at the
beginning of his story, to prevent himself from yielding to habit -
perhaps even to temptation and from permitting a word that had
actually been expressly proscribed by a federal decree to fall from
the rostrum of the University Aula! And at the precise moment at
which he had successfully said "
instituteur allemand
" with perfect correctness for what was the last time, and was
hurrying with an inward sigh of relief to the conclusion, which
seemed to offer no pitfalls - the word which had been suppressed
with so much effort caught hold of the similar-sounding
‘
motte
", and the damage was done. Anxiety about
committing a political indiscretion, perhaps a suppressed desire to
employ the usual word in spite of everything - the word that
everyone expected - and the resentment of one who was born a
republican and a democrat at every restriction on the free
expression of opinion - all these interfered with his main
intention of giving a punctilious rendering of the illustration.
The interfering trend was known to the speaker and he had, as we
cannot but suppose, thought of it directly before he made the slip
of the tongue.

   ‘Professor N. did not
notice his slip: at least he did not correct it, which is something
one usually does quite automatically. On the other hand the slip
was received by the mainly French audience with real satisfaction
and its effect was exactly as though it had been an intentional
play upon words. I myself followed this seemingly innocent
occurrence with real inner excitement. For although I had for
obvious reasons to forgo asking the professor the questions
prompted by the psycho-analytic method, I nevertheless took his
slip of the tongue as conclusive evidence of the correctness of
your theory about the determining of parapraxes and the deep-lying
analogies and connections between slips of the tongue and
jokes.’

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1165

   (30) The following slip of the
tongue, which was reported by an Austrian officer, Lieutenant T.,
on his return home, also had its origin among the melancholy
impressions of war-time:

   ‘For several months of the
time that I was a prisoner-of-war in Italy I was one of two hundred
officers accommodated in a small villa. During this time one of our
number died of influenza. The impression made by this event was
naturally a deep one, for the circumstances in which we found
ourselves, the lack of medical assistance and the helplessness of
our condition at the time made it more than probable that an
epidemic would break out. - We had laid out the dead man in a
cellar-room. In the evening, after I had taken a walk around our
house with a friend, we both expressed a wish to see the dead body.
The sight which greeted me on entering the cellar (I was the one in
front) startled me violently, for I had not expected to find the
bier so near the entrance and to be confronted at such close
quarters with a face transformed by the play of the candle light
into something set in movement. While the effects of this scene
were still on us we continued our walk around the house. When we
came to a place from where there was a view of the park bathed in
the light of a full moon, a brightly-lit meadow and beyond it a
thing veil of mist, I described the picture that it conjured up; it
was as if I saw a ring of elves dancing under the fringe of the
neighbouring pine trees.

   ‘The next afternoon we
buried our dead comrade. The course of our walk from our prison to
the cemetery of the small neighbouring village was both bitter and
humiliating for us; for a mocking, jeering crowd made up of
shouting half-grown lads and rough, noisy villagers took advantage
of the occasion to give open vent to their emotions, which were a
mixture of curiosity and hatred. My feeling that even in this
defenceless condition we could not escape insults and my disgust at
the demonstration of coarseness overwhelmed me with bitterness
until the evening. At the same hour as on the previous day and with
the same companion, I began to walk along the gravel path around
our house, just as I had done before; and as we passed by the
grating of the cellar behind which the dead body had lain I was
seized by the memory of the impression which the sight of it had
made on me. At the place where the brightly lit park once more lay
before me, in the light of the same, full moon, I stopped and said
to my companion: "We could sit down here in the
grave
-
grass and
sink
a serenade." My attention was not caught
until I made the second slip; I had corrected the first one without
having become conscious of the meaning it contained. I now
reflected on them and put them together: "in the grave - to
sink!" The following pictures flashed through my mind with
lightning rapidity: elves dancing and hovering in the moonlight;
our comrade lying on his bier, the impression of movement; some
scenes from the burial, the sensation of the disgust I had felt and
of the disturbance of our mourning; the memory of some
conversations about the infectious illness that had appeared, and
the forebodings expressed by several of the officers. Later I
remembered that it was the date of my father’s death; in view
of my usually very poor memory for dates I found this striking.

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1166

   ‘Subsequent reflection
brought home to me the sameness of the external circumstances on
the two evenings: the same time of day and lighting conditions, the
identical place and companion. I recalled my uneasy feelings when
there had been an anxious discussion of the possibility of the
influenza spreading; and I remembered at the same time my inner
prohibition against letting myself be overcome by fear. I also
became conscious of the significance attaching to the order of the
words "we could - in the grave - sink",¹ and I
realized that only the initial correction of "grave" into
"grass", which had taken place unobtrusively, had led to
the second slip ("sink" for "sing") in order to
ensure that the suppressed complex should have its full
expression.

   ‘I may add that I suffered
at the time from alarming dreams about a very close relative. I
repeatedly saw her ill and once actually dead. Just before I was
taken prisoner I had received news that the influenza was raging
with particular virulence in her part of the world, and I had
expressed my lively fears to her about it. Since then I had been
out of touch with her. Some months later I received news that she
had fallen a victim to the epidemic a fortnight before the episode
I have described!’

   (31) The next example of a slip
of the tongue throws a flash of light on one of those painful
conflicts which fall to the lot of a doctor. A man whose illness
was in all probability a fatal one, though the diagnosis had not as
yet been confirmed, had come to Vienna to await the solution of his
problem, and had begged a friend whom he had known since his youth,
and who had become a well-known physician, to undertake his
treatment. This the friend had with some reluctance finally agreed
to do. It was intended that the sick man should stay in a nursing
home and the doctor proposed that it should be the
‘Hera’ sanatorium. ‘Surely’, objected the
patient, ‘that is a home for a special type of case only (a
maternity home).’ ‘Oh no!’ replied the doctor
hastily, ‘in the "Hera" they can
umbringen
  - I mean,
unterbringen
  - every
type of patient.’ He then violently disputed the
interpretation of his slip. ‘Surely you won’t believe I
have hostile impulses against you?’ A quarter of an hour
later, as the doctor was going out with the lady who had undertaken
to nurse the invalid, he said: ‘I can’t find anything,
and I still don’t believe in it. But if it should be so, I am
in favour of a strong dose of morphia and a peaceful finish.’
It emerged that his friend had stipulated that he (the doctor)
should shorten his sufferings by means of a drug as soon as it was
confirmed that he was past helping. Thus the doctor had in fact
undertaken to put an end to his friend.