Freud - Complete Works (523 page)

   In the instances already familiar
to you which give an impression of being contractions or
abbreviations, what we have before us are corrections, additions or
continuations, by means of which a second purpose makes itself felt
alongside of the first. ‘Facts came to
Vorschein
[light] - better to say it straight out - they were
Schweinereien
[disgusting]; well then, facts came to
Vorschwein
.’ ‘Those who understand this can be
counted
on the fingers of one hand
- no, there’s
really only
one
person who understands it, so: can be
counted
on one finger
.’ Or: ‘My husband can eat
and drink what he wants. But, as you know,
I
don’t put
up with his wanting anything at all, so: he can eat and drink what
I
want.’ In all these cases, then, the slip of the
tongue arises from the content of the disturbed intention itself or
is connected with it.

  
¹
This was in the German Reichstag in
November 1908.

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   The other sort of relation
between the two mutually interfering intentions seems puzzling. If
the disturbing intention has nothing to do with the disturbed one,
where can it have come from and why is it that it makes itself
noticeable as a disturbance at this particular point? The
observation which can alone give us the answer to this shows that
the disturbance arises from a train of thought which has occupied
the person concerned a short time before and, whether it has
already been expressed in speech or not, produces this subsequent
effect. It must in fact, therefore, be described as a
perseveration, though not necessarily as the perseveration of
spoken words. In this case too an associative link between the
disturbing and the disturbed intentions is present; but it does not
lie in their content but is artificially constructed, often along
extremely forced associative paths.

   Here is a simple example of this,
derived from my own observation. I once met two Viennese ladies in
the lovely Dolomites, who were dressed in walking clothes. I
accompanied them part of the way, and we discussed the pleasures
and also the trials of spending a holiday in that way. One of the
ladies admitted that spending the day like that entailed a good
deal of discomfort. ‘It is certainly not at all
pleasant’, she said, ‘if one has been tramping all day
in the sun and has perspired right through one’s blouse and
chemise.’ In this sentence she had to overcome a slight
hesitation at one point. Then she continued: ‘But then when
one gets "nach
Hose
" and can
change. . . .’ This slip of the tongue was not
analysed but I expect you can understand it easily. The
lady’s intention had obviously been to give a more complete
list of her clothes: blouse, chemise and
Hose
[drawers].
Reasons of propriety led her to omit any mention of the
‘
Hose
’. But in the next sentence, with its quite
independent content, the unspoken word emerged as a distortion of
the similar-sounding ‘nach
Hause
[home]’.

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   We can now turn, however, to the
main question, which we have long postponed, of what sort of
intentions these are, which find expression in this unusual fashion
as disturbers of other intentions. Well, they are obviously of very
different sorts, among which we must look for the common factor. If
we examine a number of examples with this in view, they will soon
fall into three groups. The first group contains those cases in
which the disturbing purpose is known to the speaker and moreover
had been noticed by him before he made the slip of the tongue.
Thus, in the ‘
Vorschwein
’ slip the speaker
admitted not only that he had formed the judgement
‘
Schweinereien
’ about the events in question,
but also that he had had the intention, from which he afterwards
drew back, of expressing his judgement in words. A second group is
made up of other cases in which the disturbing purpose is equally
recognized as his by the speaker, but in which he was unaware that
it was active in him just before he made the slip. Thus, he accepts
our interpretation of his slip, but nevertheless remains to some
extent surprised at it. Instances of this kind of attitude can
perhaps be found in other sorts of parapraxes more easily than in
slips of the tongue. In a third group the interpretation of the
disturbing intention is vigorously rejected by the speaker; he not
only denies that it was active in him before he made the slip, but
seeks to maintain that it is entirely foreign to him. You will
recall the example of the ‘hiccough’ and the positively
rude denial which I brought on myself from the speaker by
uncovering his disturbing intention. As you know, we have not yet
come to any agreement in our views on these cases.
I
should
pay no attention to the denial put forward by the proposer of the
toast and should persist in my interpretation unruffled, while
you
, I suppose, are still affected by his protest and raise
the question of whether we ought not to give up interpreting
parapraxes of this kind and regard them as purely physiological
acts in the pre-analytic sense. I can well imagine what it is that
deters you. My interpretation carries with it the hypothesis that
intentions can find expression in a speaker of which he himself
knows nothing but which I am able to infer from circumstantial
evidence. You are brought up short in the face of such a novel and
momentous hypothesis. I can understand that, and I see your point
so far as that goes. But one thing is certain. If you want to apply
consistently the view of parapraxes which has been confirmed by so
many examples, you will have to make up your mind to accept the
strange hypothesis I have mentioned. If you cannot do that, you
will have once more to abandon the understanding of parapraxes
which you have only just achieved.

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   Let us consider for a moment what
it is that unites the three groups, what it is that the three
mechanisms of slips of the tongue have in common. It is fortunately
unmistakable. In the first two groups the disturbing purpose is
recognized by the speaker; furthermore, in the first group that
purpose announce: itself immediately before the slip. But in both
cases
it is forced back. The speaker decides not to put it into
words, and after that the slip of the tongue occurs; after that,
that is to say, the purpose which has been forced back is put into
words against the speaker’s will, either by altering the
expression of the intention which he has permitted, or by mingling
with it, or by actually taking its place
. This, then, is the
mechanism of a slip of the tongue.

   On my view, I can bring what
happens in the
third
group into complete harmony with the
mechanism I have described. I have only to assume that what
distinguishes these three groups from one another is the differing
extent to which the intention is forced back. In the first group
the intention is there and makes itself noticed before the
speaker’s remark; only then is it rejected; and it takes its
revenge in the slip of the tongue. In the second group the
rejection goes further: the intention has already ceased to be
noticeable before the remark is made. Strangely enough, this does
not in the least prevent it from playing its part in causing the
slip. But this behaviour makes it easier for us to explain what
happens in the third group. I shall venture to assume that a
purpose can also find expression in a parapraxis when it has been
forced back and not noticed for a considerable time, for a very
long time perhaps, and can for that reason be denied straight out
by the speaker. But even if you leave the problem of the third
group on one side, you are bound to conclude from the observations
we have made in the other cases that
the suppression of the
speaker’s intention to say something is the indispensable
condition for the occurrence of a slip of the tongue
.

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   We may now claim to have made
further advances in our understanding of parapraxes. We know not
only that they are mental acts, in which we can detect sense and
intention, not only that they come about through mutual
interference between two different intentions, but beyond this we
know that one of these intentions must have been in some way forced
back from being put into effect before it can manifest itself as a
disturbance of the other intention. It must itself have been
disturbed before it can become a disturber. This does not mean, of
course, that we have yet achieved a complete explanation of the
phenomena which we call parapraxes. We see further questions
immediately cropping up, and we suspect in general that the further
our understanding goes the more occasions there will be for raising
fresh questions. We may ask, for instance, why things should not be
much simpler. If the intention is to force back a particular
purpose instead of carrying it into effect, the forcing back should
be successful, so that the purpose does not manifest itself at all;
or on the other hand the forcing back might fail, so that the
purpose that was to have been forced back would manifest itself
completely. But parapraxes are the outcome of a compromise: they
constitute a half-success and a half-failure for each of the two
intentions; the intention which is being challenged is neither
completely suppressed nor, apart from special cases, carried
through quite unscathed. We may conclude that special conditions
must prevail in order that an interference or compromise of this
kind shall come about, but we can form no conception of what they
can be. Nor do I think that we could discover these unknown factors
by going deeper into the study of parapraxes. It will be necessary,
rather, to examine first yet other obscure regions of mental life:
it is only from analogies which we shall meet with there that we
shall find the courage to set up the hypotheses necessary for
throwing a more penetrating light upon parapraxes. And one thing
more. Working from small indications, as we are constantly in the
habit of doing in the present field, brings its own dangers. There
is a mental disease, ‘combinatory paranoia’, in which
the exploitation of small indications like these is carried to
unlimited lengths; and I will not of course claim that conclusions
built on such foundations are invariably correct. We can only be
guarded against these risks by the broad basis of our observations,
the repetition of similar impressions from the most varied spheres
of mental life.

   At this point, therefore, we will
leave the analysis of parapraxes. But there is one point more to
which I would draw your attention. I would ask you to bear in mind
as a model the manner in which we have treated these phenomena.
From this example you can learn the aims of our psychology. We seek
not merely to describe and to classify phenomena, but to understand
them as signs of an interplay of forces in the mind, as a
manifestation of purposeful intentions working concurrently or in
mutual opposition. We are concerned with a
dynamic view
of
mental phenomena. On our view the phenomena that are perceived must
yield in importance to trends which are only hypothetical.

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   We shall therefore not enter more
deeply into parapraxes, but we may still undertake a cursory survey
of the extent of this field, in the course of which we shall come
once more upon things we already know but shall also discover some
novelties. In this survey I shall keep to the division into three
groups which I proposed to begin with: slips of the tongue together
with their cognate forms (slips of the pen, misreading and
mishearing); forgetting, subdivided according to the objects
forgotten (proper names, foreign words, intentions or impressions);
and bungled actions, mislaying and losing. Errors, in so far as
they concern us, fall under the headings partly of forgetting and
partly of bungled actions.

   We have already treated
slips
of the tongue
in great detail, but there are a few more points
to be added. Slips of the tongue are accompanied by certain minor
emotional phenomena which are not quite without interest. No one
likes making slips of the tongue, and we often fail to hear our own
slips, though never other people’s. Slips of the tongue are
also in a certain sense contagious; it is not at all easy to talk
about slips of the tongue without making slips of the tongue
oneself. The most trivial forms of such slips, precisely those
which have no special light to throw on hidden mental processes,
have reasons which are nevertheless not hard to penetrate. For
instance, if someone has pronounced a long vowel short on account
of a disturbance affecting the word for some reason or other, he
will soon afterwards pronounce a subsequent short vowel long, thus
making a fresh slip of the tongue to compensate for the earlier
one. In the same way, if he pronounces a diphthong incorrectly and
carelessly (for instance pronouncing an ‘
eu
’ or
‘
oi
’ as ‘
ei
’) he will try to
make up for it by changing a subsequent ‘
ei
’
into an ‘
eu
’ or ‘
oi
’. The
decisive factor here seems to be consideration of the impression
made on the audience, who are not to suppose that it is a matter of
indifference to the speaker how he treats his mother-tongue. The
second, compensating distortion actually has the purpose of
directing the hearer’s attention to the first one and of
assuring him that the speaker has noticed it too. The commonest,
simplest and most trivial slips of the tongue are contractions and
anticipations which occur in insignificant parts of speech. For
instance, in a longish sentence one may make a slip of the tongue
which anticipates the last word of what one intends to say. This
gives an impression of impatience to be finished with the sentence,
and is evidence in general of a certain antipathy against
communicating the sentence or against the whole of one’s
remarks. We thus arrive at marginal cases in which the distinctions
between the psycho-analytic view of slips of the tongue and the
ordinary physiological one melt into one another. It is to be
assumed that a purpose of disturbing the intention of the speech is
present in these cases but that it can only announce its presence
and not what it itself has in view. The disturbance it produces
then proceeds in accordance with certain phonetic influences or
associative attractions and can be regarded as a distraction of the
attention from the intention of the speech. But neither this
disturbance of the attention nor the inclinations to associate
which have become operative touch on the essence of the process.
This remains, in spite of everything, the indication of the
existence of an intention which is disturbing to the intention of
the speech, though the
nature
of this disturbing intention
cannot be guessed from its consequences, as is possible in all the
better defined cases of slips of the tongue.