Freud - Complete Works (517 page)

Introductory Lectures On Psycho-Analysis

3137

   It is to these phenomena, then,
that I now propose to draw your attention. But you will protest
with some annoyance: ‘There are so many vast problems in the
wide universe, as well as within the narrower confines of our
minds, so many marvels in the field of mental disorders, which
require and deserve to have light thrown upon them, that it does
really seem gratuitous to waste labour and interest on such
trivialities. If you could make us understand why a person with
sound eyes and ears can see and hear in broad daylight things that
are not there, why another person suddenly thinks he is being
persecuted by the people of whom he has hitherto been most fond, or
puts forward the cleverest arguments in support of delusional
beliefs which any child could see were nonsensical, then we should
have some opinion of psycho-analysis. But if it can do no more than
ask us to consider why a speaker at a banquet uses one word instead
of another or why a housewife has mislaid her keys, and similar
futilities, then we shall know how to put our time and interest to
better uses.’

   I should reply: Patience, Ladies
and Gentlemen! I think your criticism has gone astray. It is true
that psycho-analysis cannot boast that it has never concerned
itself with trivialities. On the contrary, the material for its
observations is usually provided by the inconsiderable events which
have been put aside by the other sciences as being too unimportant
- the dregs, one might say, of the world of phenomena. But are you
not making a confusion in your criticism between the vastness of
the problems and the conspicuousness of what points to them? Are
there not very important things which can only reveal themselves,
under certain conditions and at certain times, by quite feeble
indications? I should find no difficulty in giving you several
examples of such situations. If you are a young man, for instance,
will it not be from small pointers that you will conclude that you
have won a girl’s favour? Would you wait for an express
declaration of love or a passionate embrace? Or would not a glance,
scarcely noticed by other people, be enough? a slight movement, the
lengthening by a second of the pressure of a hand? And if you were
a detective engaged in tracing a murder, would you expect to find
that the murderer had left his photograph behind at the place of
the crime, with his address attached? or would you not necessarily
have to be satisfied with comparatively slight and obscure traces
of the person you were in search of? So do not let us
under-estimate small indications; by their help we may succeed in
getting on the track of something bigger. Furthermore, I think like
you that the great problems of the universe and of science have the
first claim on our interest. But it is as a rule of very little use
to form an express intention of devoting oneself to research into
this or that great problem. One is then often at a loss to know the
first step to take. It is more promising in scientific work to
attack whatever is immediately before one and offers an opportunity
for research. If one does so really thoroughly and without
prejudice or preconception, and if one has luck, then, since
everything is related to everything, including small things to
great, one may gain access even from such unpretentious work to a
study of the great problems. That is what I should say in order to
retain your interest, when we deal with such apparent trivialities
as the parapraxes of healthy people.

Introductory Lectures On Psycho-Analysis

3138

   Let us now call in someone who
knows nothing of psycho-analysis, and ask him how he explains such
occurrences. His first reply will certainly be: ‘Oh!
that’s not worth explaining: they’re just small chance
events.’ What does the fellow mean by this? Is he maintaining
that there are occurrences, however small, which drop out of the
universal concatenation of events - occurrences which might just as
well not happen as happen? If anyone makes a breach of this kind in
the determinism of natural events at a single point, it means that
he has thrown overboard the whole
Weltanschauung
of science.
Even the
Weltanschauung
of religion, we may remind him,
behaves much more consistently, since it gives an explicit
assurance that no sparrow falls from the roof without God’s
special will. I think our friend will hesitate to draw the logical
conclusion from his first reply; he will change his mind and say
that after all when he comes to study these things he can find
explanations of them. What is in question are small failures of
functioning, imperfections in mental activity, whose determinants
can be assigned. A man who can usually speak correctly may make a
slip of the tongue (1) if he is slightly indisposed and tired, (2)
if he is excited and (3) if he is too much occupied with other
things. It is easy to confirm these statements. Slips of the tongue
do really occur with particular frequency when one is tired, has a
headache or is threatened with migraine. In the same circumstances
proper names are easily forgotten. Some people are accustomed to
recognize the approach of an attack of migraine when proper names
escape them in this way. When we are excited, too, we often make
mistakes over words - and over
things
as well, and a
‘bungled action’ follows. Intentions are forgotten and
a quantity of other undesigned actions become noticeable if we are
absent-minded - that is, properly speaking, if we are concentrated
on something else. A familiar example of this absent-mindedness is
the Professor in
Fliegende Blätter
who leaves his
umbrella behind and takes the wrong hat because he is thinking
about the problems he is going to deal with in his next book. All
of us can recall from our own experience instances of how we can
forget intentions we have formed and promises we have made because
in the meantime we have had some absorbing experience.

Introductory Lectures On Psycho-Analysis

3139

   This sounds quite reasonable and
seems safe from contradiction, though it may not be very
interesting, perhaps, and not what we expected. Let us look at
these explanations of parapraxes more closely. The alleged
preconditions for the occurrence of these phenomena are not all of
the same kind. Being ill and disturbances of the circulation
provide a physiological reason for the impairment of normal
functioning; excitement, fatigue and distraction are factors of
another sort, which might be described as psycho-physiological.
These last admit of easy translation into theory. Both fatigue and
distraction, and perhaps also general excitement, bring about a
division of attention which may result in insufficient attention
being directed to the function in question. If so, the function can
be disturbed with especial ease, or carried out inaccurately.
Slight illness or changes in the blood-supply to the central
nervous organ can have the same effect, by influencing the
determining factor, the division of attention, in a similar manner.
In all these cases, therefore, it would be a question of the
effects of a disturbance of attention, whether from organic or
psychical causes.

   This does not appear to promise
much for our psycho-analytic interest. We might feel tempted to
drop the subject. If, however, we examine the observations more
closely, what we find does not tally entirely with this attention
theory of parapraxes, or at least does not follow from it
naturally. We discover that parapraxes of this kind and forgetting
of this kind occur in people who are
not
fatigued or
absent-minded or excited, but who are in all respects in their
normal state - unless we choose to ascribe
ex post facto
to
the people concerned, purely on account of their parapraxis, an
excitement which, however, they themselves do not admit to. Nor can
it be simply the case that a function is ensured by an increase in
the attention directed upon it and endangered if that attention is
reduced. There are a large number of procedures that one carries
out purely automatically, with very little attention, but
nevertheless performs with complete security. A walker, who
scarcely knows where he is going, keeps to the right path for all
that, and stops at his destination without having
gone
astray
[
vergangen
]. Or at all events this is so as a
rule. An expert pianist strikes the right keys without thinking. He
may, of course, make an occasional mistake; but if automatic
playing increased the danger of bungling, that danger would be at
its greatest for a virtuoso, whose playing, as a result of
prolonged practice, has become
entirely
automatic. We know,
on the contrary, that many procedures are carried out with quite
particular certainty if they are not the object of a specially high
degree of attention, and that the mishap of a parapraxis is liable
to occur precisely if special importance is attached to correct
functioning and there has therefore certainly been no distraction
of the necessary attention. It could be argued that this is the
result of ‘excitement’, but it is difficult to see why
the excitement should not on the contrary
increase
the
attention directed to what is so earnestly intended. If by a slip
of the tongue someone says the opposite of what he intends in an
important speech or oral communication, it can scarcely be
explained by the psycho-physiological or attention theory.

Introductory Lectures On Psycho-Analysis

3140

   There are, moreover, a number of
small subsidiary phenomena in the case of parapraxes, which we do
not understand and on which the explanations so far given shed no
light. For instance, if we have temporarily forgotten a name, we
are annoyed about it, do all we can to remember it and cannot leave
the business alone. Why in such cases do we so extremely seldom
succeed in directing our attention, as we are after all anxious to
do, to the word which (as we say) is ‘on the tip of our
tongue’ and which we recognize at once when we are told it?
Or again: there are cases in which the parapraxes multiply, form
chains, and replace one another. On a first occasion one has missed
an appointment. On the next occasion, when one has firmly decided
not to forget
this
time, it turns out that one has made a
note of the wrong hour. Or one tries to arrive at a forgotten word
by roundabout ways and thereupon a second name escapes one which
might have helped one to find the first. If one searches for this
second name, a third disappears, and so on. As is well known, the
same thing can happen with misprints, which are to be regarded as
the parapraxes of the compositor. An obstinate misprint of this
kind, so it is said, once slipped into a social-democrat newspaper.
Its report of some ceremonial included the words: ‘Among
those present was to be noticed His Highness the
Kornprinz
.’ Next day an attempt was made at a
correction. The paper apologized and said: ‘We should of
course have said "the
Knorprinz
".’¹
People speak in such cases of a ‘demon of misprints’ or
a ‘type-setting fiend’ - terms which at least go beyond
any psycho-physiological theory of misprints.

  
¹
[What was intended was the
‘
Kronprinz
(Crown Prince)'.
‘
Korn
’ means ‘corn’ and
‘
Knorr
’ ‘protuberance’.]

Introductory Lectures On Psycho-Analysis

3141

   Perhaps you are familiar, too,
with the fact that it is possible to
provoke
slips of the
tongue, to produce them, as it were, by suggestion. An anecdote
illustrates this. A stage neophyte had been cast for the important
part in
Die Jungfrau von Orleans
of the messenger who
announces to the King that ‘der Connétable schickt
sein Schwert zurück [the Constable sends back his
sword]’. A leading actor amused himself during the rehearsal
by repeatedly inducing the nervous young man to say, instead of the
words of the text: ‘der Komfortabel schickt sein Pferd
zurück [the cab-driver sends back his horse].’ He
achieved his aim: the wretched beginner actually made his debut at
the performance with the corrupt version, in spite of having been
warned against it, or perhaps
because
he had been
warned.

   No light is thrown on these small
features of parapraxes by the theory of withdrawal of attention.
The theory need not on that account be wrong, however; it may
merely lack something, some addition, before it is entirely
satisfying. But some of the parapraxes, too, can themselves be
looked at from another point of view.

   Let us take
slips of the
tongue
as the most suitable sort of parapraxis for our purpose
- though we might equally well have chosen slips of the pen or
misreading. We must bear in mind that so far we have only asked
when - under what conditions - people make slips of the tongue, and
it is only to that question that we have had an answer. But we
might direct our interest elsewhere and enquire why it is that the
slip occurred in this particular way and no other; and we might
take into account what it is that emerges in the slip itself. You
will observe that, so long as this question is unanswered and no
light thrown on the product of the slip, the phenomenon remains a
chance event from the psychological point of view, even though it
may have been given a physiological explanation. If I make a slip
of the tongue, I might obviously do so in an infinite number of
ways, the right word might be replaced by any of a thousand others,
it might be distorted in countless different directions. Is there
something, then, that compels me in the particular case to make the
slip in one special way, or does it remain a matter of chance, of
arbitrary choice, and is the question perhaps one to which no
sensible answer at all can be given?