Freud - Complete Works (209 page)
The effect produced by the
following slip of the tongue, which I would not report had not the
magistrate himself made a note of it for this collection during the
court proceedings, is anything but innocent:
A soldier charged with
housebreaking stated in evidence: ‘Up to now I’ve not
been discharged from military
Diebsstellung
;¹ so at the
moment I’m still in the army.’
¹
[He meant to say
‘
Dienststellung
’, ‘service’,
literally ‘service position '. Instead he said
‘
Diebsstellung
’, which would mean literally
‘thief position’.]
The Psychopathology Of Everyday Life
1183
A slip of the tongue has a more
cheering effect during psycho-analytic work, when it serves as a
means of providing the doctor with a confirmation that may be very
welcome to him if he is engaged in a dispute with the patient. I
once had to interpret a patient’s dream in which the name
‘Jauner’ occurred. The dreamer knew someone of that
name, but it was impossible to discover the reason for his
appearing in the context of the dream; I therefore ventured to
suggest that it might be merely because of his name, which sounds
like the term of abuse ‘
Gauner
’. My patient
hastily and vigorously contested this; but in doing so he made a
slip of the tongue which confirmed my guess, since he confused the
same letters once more. His answer was: ‘That seems to me too
jewagt
.’¹ When I had drawn his attention to his
slip, he accepted my interpretation.
If one of the parties involved in
a serious argument makes a slip of the tongue which reverses the
meaning of what he intended to say, it immediately puts him at a
disadvantage with his opponent, who seldom fails to make the most
of his improved position.
This makes it clear that people
give slips of the tongue and other parapraxes the same
interpretation that I advocate in this book, even if they do not
endorse theoretically the view I put forward, and even if they are
disinclined, so far as it applies to themselves, to renounce the
convenience that goes along with tolerating parapraxes. The
amusement and derision which such oral slips are certain to evoke
at the crucial moment can be taken as evidence against what
purports to be the generally accepted convention that a mistake in
speaking is a
lapsus linguae
and of no psychological
significance. It was no less a person than the German Imperial
Chancellor Prince Bülow who protested on these lines in an
effort to save the situation, when the wording of his speech in
defence of his Emperor (in November, 1907) was given the opposite
meaning by a slip of the tongue. ‘As for the present, the new
epoch of the Emperor Wilhelm II, I can only repeat what I said a
year ago, namely that
it would be unfair and unjust to speak of
a coterie of responsible advisors round our Emperor
. . .’ (loud cries of ‘irresponsible’)
‘ . . .
irresponsible advisors
. Forgive
the
lapsus linguae
.’ (Laughter.)
¹
[In vulgar speech, particularly in North
Germany, ‘g’ at the beginning of a word is often
pronounced like the German ‘i’ (English
‘y’) instead of like the hard English
‘g’.]
The Psychopathology Of Everyday Life
1184
In this case, as a result of the
accumulation of negatives, Prince Bülow’s sentence was
somewhat obscure; sympathy for the speaker and consideration for
his difficult position prevented this slip from being put to any
further use against him. A year later another speaker in the same
place was not so fortunate. He wished to appeal for a demonstration
with no reserves
in support of the Emperor, and in doing so
was warned by a bad slip of the tongue that other emotions were to
be found within his loyal breast. ‘Lattmann (German National
Party): On the question of the Address our position is based on the
standing orders of the Reichstag. According to them the Reichstag
is entitled to tender such an address to the Emperor. It is our
belief that the united thoughts and wishes of the German people are
bent on achieving a
united demonstration
in this matter as
well, and if we can do so in a form that takes the Emperor’s
feelings fully into account, then we should do so
spinelessly
as well.’ (Loud laughter which continued
for some minutes.) ‘Gentlemen, I should have said not
"
rückgratlos
" but
"
rückhaltlos
"' (laughter), ‘and at
this difficult time even our Emperor accepts a manifestation by the
people - one made without reserve - such as we should like to
see.’
The
Vorwärts
of
November 12, 1908, did not miss the opportunity of pointing to the
psychological significance of this slip of the tongue:
‘Probably never before in any parliament has a member,
through an involuntary self-accusation, characterized his own
attitude and that of the parliamentary majority towards the Emperor
so exactly as did the anti-Semitic Lattmann, when, speaking with
solemn emotion on the second day of the debate, he slipped into an
admission that he and his friends wished to express their opinion
to the Emperor
spinelessly
. Loud laughter from all sides
drowned the remaining words of this unhappy man, who thought it
necessary explicitly to stammer out by way of apology that he
really meant "
unreservedly
".’
I will add a further instance, in
which the slip of the tongue assumed the positively uncanny
characteristics of a prophecy. Early in 1923 there was a great stir
in the world of finance when the very young banker X. - probably
one of the newest of the ‘
nouveaux riches
’ in
W., and at any rate the richest and youngest - obtained possession,
after a short struggle, of a majority of the shares of the -- Bank;
and as a further consequence, a remarkable General Meeting took
place at which the old directors of the bank, financiers of the old
type, were not re-elected, and young X. became president of the
bank. In the valedictory speech which the managing director Dr. Y.
went on to deliver in honour of the old president, who had not been
re-elected, a number of the audience noticed a distressing slip of
the tongue which occurred again and again. He continually spoke of
the
expiring
president instead of the
outgoing
president. As it turned out, the old president who was not
re-elected died a few days after this meeting. He was, however,
over eighty years old! (From Storfer.)
The Psychopathology Of Everyday Life
1185
A good example of a slip of the
tongue whose purpose is not so much to betray the speaker as to
give the listener in the theatre his bearings, is to be found in
Wallenstein
(
Piccolomini
, Act I, Scene 5); and it
shows us that the dramatist, who here availed himself of this
device, was familiar with the mechanism and meaning of slips of the
tongue. In the preceding scene Max Piccolomini has ardently
espoused the Duke’s cause, and has been passionately
describing the blessings of peace, of which he has become aware on
the course of a journey while escorting Wallenstein’s
daughter to the camp. As he leaves the stage, his father and
Questenberg, the emissary from the court, are plunged in
consternation. Scene 5 continues:
QUESTENBERG
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 open’d mine,
And I see more than pleases me.
QUEST.
What is it?
OCT.
Curse on
this journey!
QUEST.
But why so? What is it?
OCT.
Come, come
along, friend! I must follow up
The ominous track immediately. Mine eyes
Are open’d now, and I must use them. Come!
(
Draws Q. on with him
)
QUEST
What now?
Where
go you then?
OCT.
To her herself.
QUEST.
To -
OCT.
(
correcting himself
) To the Duke.
Come let us go.
The small slip of saying
‘to her’ instead of ‘to him’ is meant to
reveal to us that the father has seen through his son’s
motive for espousing the Duke’s cause, while the courtier
complains that he is ‘talking absolute riddles’ to
him.
The Psychopathology Of Everyday Life
1186
Another example in which a
dramatist makes use of a slip of the tongue has been discovered by
Otto Rank (1910) in Shakespeare. I quote Rank’s account:
‘A slip of the tongue
occurs in Shakespeare’s
Merchant of Venice
(Act III,
Scene 2), which is from the dramatic point of view extremely subtly
motivated and which is put to brilliant technical use. Like the
slip in
Wallenstein
to which Freud has drawn attention, it
shows that dramatists have a clear understanding of the mechanism
and meaning of this kind of parapraxis and assume that the same is
true of their audience. Portia, who by her father’s will has
been bound to the choice of a husband by lot, has so far escaped
all her unwelcome suitors by a fortunate chance. Having at last
found in Bassanio the suitor who is to her liking, she has cause to
fear that he too will choose the wrong casket. She would very much
like to tell him that even so he could rest assured of her love;
but she is prevented by her vow. In this internal conflict the poet
makes her say to the suitor she favours:
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 have been forsworn. Beshrew your eyes,
They have o’erlooked 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.
‘The thing of which she
wanted to give him only a very subtle hint, because she should
really have concealed it from him altogether, namely, that even
before he made his choice she was
wholly
his and loved him -
it is precisely this that the poet, with a wonderful psychological
sensitivity, causes to break through openly in her slip of the
tongue; and by this artistic device he succeeds in relieving both
the lover’s unbearable uncertainty and the suspense of the
sympathetic audience over the outcome of his choice.
The Psychopathology Of Everyday Life
1187
In view of the interest that is
lent to our theory of slips of the tongue by support of this nature
from great writers, I feel justified in citing a third such
instance which has been reported by Ernest Jones (1911
b
,
496):
‘In a recently published
article Otto Rank drew our attention to a pretty instance of how
Shakespeare caused one of his characters, Portia, to make a slip of
the tongue which revealed her secret thoughts to an attentive
member of the audience. I propose to relate a similar example from
The Egoist
, the masterpiece of the greatest English
novelist, George Meredith. The plot of the novel is, shortly, as
follows: Sir Willoughby Patterne, an aristocrat greatly admired by
his circle, becomes engaged to a Miss Constantia Durham. She
discovers in him an intense egoism, which he skilfully conceals
from the world, and to escape the marriage she elopes with a
Captain Oxford. Some years later Patterne becomes engaged to a Miss
Clara Middleton, and most of the book is taken up with a detailed
description of the conflict that arises in her mind on also
discovering his egoism. External circumstances, and her conception
of honour, hold her to her pledge, while he becomes more and more
distasteful in her eyes. She partly confides in his cousin and
secretary, Vernon Whitford, the man whom she ultimately marries;
but from loyalty to Patterne and other motives he stands aloof.