Freud - Complete Works (522 page)

  
¹
See also similar collections by Maeder (in
French), Brill (in English), Jones (in English) and J. Stärcke
(in Dutch), etc.

Introductory Lectures On Psycho-Analysis

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   Accumulated and combined
parapraxes are without doubt the finest flower of their kind. If we
had only been concerned to prove that parapraxes have a sense we
should have confined ourselves to them from the first, for in their
case the sense is unmistakable even to the dull-witted and forces
itself on the most critical judgement. An accumulation of these
phenomena betrays an obstinacy that is scarcely ever a
characteristic of chance events but fits in well with something
intentional. Finally, the mutual interchangeability between
different species of parapraxes demonstrates what it is in
parapraxes that is important and characteristic: not their form or
the method which they employ but the purpose which they serve and
which can be achieved in the most various ways. For this reason I
will give you an instance of repeated forgetting. Ernest Jones
tells us that once, for reasons unknown to him, he left a letter
lying on his desk for several days. At last he decided to send it
off, but he had it returned to him by the Dead Letter Office¹
since he had forgotten to address it. After he had addressed it he
took it to the post, but this time it had no stamp. And then at
last he was obliged to admit his reluctance to sending the letter
off at all.

   In another case a bungled action
is combined with an instance of mislaying. A lady travelled to Rome
with her brother-in-law, who was a famous artist. The visitor was
received with great honour by the German community in Rome, and
among other presents he was given an antique gold medal. The lady
was vexed that her brother-in-law did not appreciate the lovely
object sufficiently. When she returned home (her place in Rome
having been taken by her sister) she discovered while unpacking
that she had brought the medal with her - how, she did not know.
She at once sent a letter with the news to her brother-in-law, and
announced that she would send the article she had walked off with
back to Rome next day. But next day the medal had been so cleverly
mislaid that it could not be found and sent of; and it was at this
point, that the meaning of her ‘absent-mindedness’
dawned on the lady: she wanted to keep the object for
herself.²

  
¹
[In English in the original.]

  
²
Reported by R. Reitler.

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   I have already given you an
example of a combination of a forgetting with an error, the case of
someone forgetting an appointment and on a second occasion, having
firmly decided not to forget
this
time, turning up at the
wrong hour. An exactly similar case was reported to me from his own
experience by a friend with literary as well as scientific
interests. ‘Some years ago’, he told me, ‘I
allowed myself to be elected to the committee of a certain literary
society, as I thought that the organization might one day be able
to help me to have my play produced; and I took a regular part,
though without being much interested, in the meetings which were
held every Friday. Then, a few months ago, I was given the promise
of a production at the theatre at F.; and since then I have
regularly
forgotten
the meetings of the society. When I read
your book on the subject I felt ashamed of my forgetfulness. I
reproached myself with the thought that it was shabby behaviour on
my part to stay away now that I no longer needed these people, and
resolved on no account to forget the next Friday. I kept on
reminding myself of this resolution until I carried it into effect
and stood at the door of the room where the meetings were held. To
my astonishment it was locked; the meeting was over. I had in fact
made a mistake over the day; it was now Saturday!’

   It would be agreeable to add
further, similar examples. But I must proceed, and give you a
glimpse of the cases in which our interpretation has to wait for
the future for confirmation. The governing condition of these
cases, it will be realized, is that the present psychical situation
is unknown to us or inaccessible to our enquiries. Our
interpretation is consequently no more than a suspicion to which we
ourselves do not attach too much importance. Later, however,
something happens which shows us how well-justified our
interpretation had been. I was once the guest of a young married
couple and heard the young woman laughingly describe her latest
experience. The day after her return from the honeymoon she had
called for her unmarried sister to go shopping with her as she used
to do, while her husband went to his business. Suddenly she noticed
a gentleman on the other side of the street, and nudging her sister
had cried: ‘Look, there goes Herr L.’ She had forgotten
that this gentleman had been her husband for some weeks. I
shuddered as I heard the story, but I did not dare to draw the
inference. The little incident only occurred to my mind some years
later when the marriage had come to a most unhappy end.

Introductory Lectures On Psycho-Analysis

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   Maeder tells of a lady who, on
the eve of her wedding had forgotten to try on her wedding-dress
and, to her dressmaker’s despair, only remembered it late in
the evening. He connects this forgetfulness with the fact that she
was soon divorced from her husband. I know a lady now divorced from
her husband, who in managing her money affairs frequently signed
documents in her maiden name, many years before she in fact resumed
it. - I know of other women who have lost their wedding-rings
during the honeymoon, and I know too that the history of their
marriages has given a sense to the accident. - And now here is one
more glaring example, but with a happier ending. The story is told
of a famous German chemist that his marriage did not take place,
because he forgot the hour of his wedding and went to the
laboratory instead of to the church. He was wise enough to be
satisfied with a single attempt and died at a great age
unmarried.

   The idea may possibly have
occurred to you that in these examples parapraxes have taken the
place of the omens or auguries of the ancients. And indeed some
omens were nothing else than parapraxes, as, for instance, when
someone stumbled or fell down. Others of them, it is true, had the
character of objective happenings and not of subjective acts. But
you would hardly believe how difficult it sometimes is to decide
whether a particular event belongs to the one group or to the
other. An act so often understands how to disguise itself as a
passive experience.

   All those of us who can look back
on a comparatively long experience of life will probably admit that
we should have spared ourselves many disappointments and painful
surprises if we had found the courage and determination to
interpret small parapraxes experienced in our human contacts as
auguries and to make use of them as indications of intentions that
were still concealed. As a rule we dare not do so; it would make us
feel as though, after a detour through science, we were becoming
superstitious again. Nor do all auguries come true, and you will
understand from our theories that they do not all need to come
true.

Introductory Lectures On Psycho-Analysis

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LECTURE IV

PARAPRAXES (
concluded
)

LADIES AND
GENTLEMEN
, - We may take it as the outcome of our efforts so
far and the basis of our further investigations that parapraxes
have a sense. Let me insist once again that I am not asserting -
and for our purposes there is no need to do so - that every single
parapraxis that occurs has a sense, even though I regard that as
probably the case. It is enough for us if we can point to such a
sense relatively often in the different forms of parapraxis.
Moreover, in this respect these different forms behave differently.
Cases of slips of the tongue and of the pen, etc., may occur on a
purely physiological basis. I cannot believe that this is so in the
types depending on
forgetting
(forgetting names or
intentions, mislaying, etc.). It is very probable that there are
cases of
losing
which can be regarded as unintended. It is
in general true that only a certain proportion of the
errors
that occur in ordinary life can be looked at from our point of
view. You should bear these limitations in mind when henceforward
we start from the assumption that parapraxes are psychical acts and
arise from mutual interference between two intentions.

   This is the first product of
psycho-analysis. Psychology has hitherto known nothing of the
occurrence of such mutual interferences or of the possibility that
they might result in such phenomena. We have made a quite
considerable extension to the world of psychical phenomena and have
won for psychology phenomena which were not reckoned earlier as
belonging to it.

   Let us pause a moment longer over
the assertion that parapraxes are ‘psychical acts’.
Does this imply more than what we have said already - that they
have a sense? I think not. I think, rather, that the former
assertion is more indefinite and more easily misunderstood.
Anything that is observable in mental life may occasionally be
described as a mental phenomenon. The question will then be whether
the particular mental phenomenon has arisen immediately from
somatic, organic and material influences - in which case its
investigation will not be part of psychology - or whether it is
derived in the first instance from other mental processes,
somewhere behind which the series of organic influences begins. It
is this latter situation that we have in view when we describe a
phenomenon as a mental process, and for that reason it is more
expedient to clothe our assertion in the form: ‘the
phenomenon has a sense.’ By ‘sense’ we understand
‘meaning’, ‘intention,’
‘purpose’ and ‘position in a continuous psychical
context’.

Introductory Lectures On Psycho-Analysis

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   There are a number of other
phenomena which are closely akin to parapraxes but to which that
name is no longer appropriate. We call them chance and symptomatic
actions. Like the others, they have the character of being without
a motive, insignificant and unimportant; but they have in addition,
more clearly, that of being unnecessary. They are distinguished
from parapraxes by their lack of another intention with which they
are in collision and which is disturbed by them. On the other hand,
they merge insensibly into the gestures and movements which we
regard as expressions of the emotions. These chance actions include
all sorts of manipulations with our clothing, or parts of our body
or objects within our reach, performed as though in play and
apparently with no purpose, or, again, the omission of these
manipulations; or, further, tunes that we hum to ourselves. I
suggest that all these phenomena have a sense and can be
interpreted in the same way as parapraxes, that they are small
indications of more important mental processes and are fully valid
psychical acts. But I do not propose to linger over this fresh
extension of the field of mental phenomena; I shall return to the
parapraxes, in connection with which problems important for
psycho-analysis can be worked out with far greater clarity.

   The most interesting questions
which we have raised about parapraxes and not yet answered are
perhaps these. We have said that parapraxes are the product of
mutual interference between two different intentions, of which one
may be called the disturbed intention and the other the disturbing
one. The disturbed intentions give no occasion for further
questions, but concerning the latter we should like to know, first,
what sort of intentions emerge as a disturbance to others, and
secondly what is the relation of the disturbing intentions to the
disturbed ones?

Introductory Lectures On Psycho-Analysis

3169

   If you will allow me, I will once
more take slips of the tongue as representatives of the whole class
and I will reply to the second question before the first.

   In a slip of the tongue the
disturbing intention may be related in its content to the disturbed
one, in which case it will contradict it or correct it or
supplement it. Or - the more obscure and more interesting case -
the content of the disturbing intention may have nothing to do with
that of the disturbed one.

   We shall have no difficulty in
finding evidence of the former relation in instances we already
know and in similar ones. In almost every case in which a slip of
the tongue reverses the sense, the disturbing intention expresses
the contrary to the disturbed one and the parapraxis represents a
conflict between two incompatible inclinations. ‘I declare
the sitting opened, but I should prefer it to be already
closed’ is the sense of the President’s slip of the
tongue. A political periodical which had been accused of corruption
defended itself in an article the climax of which should have been:
‘Our readers will bear witness to the fact that we have
always acted in the most
unself-seeking
manner for the good
of the community.’ But the editor entrusted with the
preparation of the article wrote ‘in the most
self-seeking
manner’. That is to say, he was thinking:
‘This is what I am obliged to write; but I have different
ideas.’ A member of parliament who was insisting that the
truth should be told to the Emperor ‘
rückhaltloss
[unreservedly]’ evidently heard an inner voice that was
shocked at his boldness and, by a slip of the tongue, changed the
word into ‘
rückgratloss
[spinelessly]’.¹