Freud - Complete Works (524 page)

Introductory Lectures On Psycho-Analysis

3175

  
Slips of the pen
, to which
I now pass, are so closely akin to slips of the tongue that we have
nothing new to expect from them. Perhaps we may glean one little
further point. The extremely common small slips of the pen,
contractions and anticipations of later words (especially of final
words) point, once again, to a general dislike of writing and
impatience to be done with it. More marked products of miswriting
enable one to recognize the nature and aim of the disturbing
purpose. If one finds a slip of the pen in a letter, one knows in
general that there was something the matter with its author, but
one cannot always discover what was going on in him. A slip of the
pen is just as often overlooked by the person responsible as is a
slip of the tongue. The following is a noteworthy observation.
There are, as we know, people who are in the habit of reading
through every letter they write before sending it off. Others do
not do this as a rule; but if, as an exception, they do so they
always come across some conspicuous slip of the pen, which they can
then correct. How is this to be explained? It looks as though these
people knew that they had made a mistake in writing the letter. Are
we really to believe this?

   An interesting problem attaches
to the
practical
importance of slips of the pen. You may
perhaps remember the case of a murderer, H., who found the means of
obtaining cultures of highly dangerous pathogenic organisms from
scientific institutes by representing himself as a bacteriologist.
He then used these cultures for the purpose of getting rid of his
near connections by this most modern of methods. Now on one
occasion this man complained to the Directors of one of these
institutes that the cultures that had been sent to him were
ineffective; but he made a slip of the pen, and instead of writing
‘in my experiments on mice or guinea-pigs’ he wrote
quite clearly ‘in my experiments on men’¹. The
doctors at the institute were struck by the slip, but, so far as I
know, drew no conclusions from it. Well, what do you think? Should
not the doctors, on the contrary, have taken the slip of the pen as
a confession and started an investigation which would have put an
early stop to the murderer’s activities? Was not ignorance of
our view of parapraxes responsible in this case for an omission of
practical significance? Well, I think a slip of the pen like this
would certainly have seemed to me most suspicious; but something of
great importance stands in the way of using it as a confession. The
matter is not as simple as all that. The slip was certainly a piece
of circumstantial evidence; but it was not enough in itself to
start an investigation. It is true that the slip of the pen said
that he was concerned with thoughts of infecting men, but it did
not make it possible to decide whether these thoughts were to be
taken as a clear intention to injure or as a phantasy of no
practical importance. It is even possible that a man who had made a
slip like this would have every subjective justification for
denying the phantasy and would repudiate it as something entirely
foreign to him. You will understand these possibilities still
better when later on we come to consider the distinction between
psychical and material reality. But this is another instance of a
parapraxis acquiring importance from subsequent events.

  
¹
[‘
Menschen
’ instead of
‘
Mäusen oder Meerschweinchen
’.]

Introductory Lectures On Psycho-Analysis

3176

   With
misreading
we come to
a psychical situation which differs sensibly from that in slips of
the tongue or pen. Here one of the two mutually competing purposes
is replaced by a sensory stimulation and is perhaps on that account
less resistant. What one is going to read is not a derivative of
one’s own mental life like something one proposes to write.
In a great majority of cases, therefore, a misreading consists in a
complete substitution. One replaces the word that is to be read by
another, without there necessarily being any connection of content
between the text and the product of the misreading, which depends
as a rule on verbal similarity. The best member of this group is
Lichtenberg’s ‘
Agamemnon
’ for
‘
angenommen
’. If we want to discover the
disturbing purpose which produced the misreading we must leave the
text that has been misread entirely aside and we may begin the
analytic investigation with the two questions: what is the first
association to the product of the misreading? and in what situation
did the misreading occur? Occasionally a knowledge of the latter is
alone enough to explain the misreading. For instance, a man under
the pressure of an imperious need was wandering about in a strange
town when he saw the word ‘
Closet-House
’ on a
large notice board on the first storey of a building. He had just
enough time to feel surprised at the notice-board being placed so
high up before discovering that, strictly speaking, what he should
have read was ‘
Corset-House
’. In other cases a
misreading precisely of the kind which is quite independent of the
content of the text may call for a detailed analysis which cannot
be carried through without practice in the technique of
psycho-analysis and without reliance on it. As a rule, however, it
is not so hard to find the explanation of a misreading: the word
substituted immediately betrays, as in the Agamemnon example, the
circle of ideas from which the disturbance has arisen. In this time
of war, for instance, it is a very usual thing for the names of
towns and generals and the military terms that are constantly
buzzing around us to be read wherever a similar word meets our
eyes. Whatever interests and concerns us puts itself in the place
of what is strange and still uninteresting. After-images of
thoughts trouble new perceptions.

Introductory Lectures On Psycho-Analysis

3177

   With misreading, too, there is no
lack of cases of another sort, in which the text of what is read
itself arouses the disturbing purpose, which thereupon, as a rule,
turns it into its opposite. What we ought to read is something
unwished-for, and analysis will convince us that an intense wish to
reject what we have read must be held responsible for its
alteration.

   In the more frequent cases of
misreading which we mentioned first, we miss two factors to which
we have assigned an important role in the mechanism of parapraxes:
a conflict between two purposes and a forcing-back of one of them
which takes its revenge by producing a parapraxis. Not that
anything contrary to this occurs in misreading. But the prominence
of the thought that leads to the misreading is far more noticeable
than the forcing-back which it may have experienced previously.

   It is these two factors which we
meet with most markedly in the different situations in which
parapraxes of forgetting occur.
The forgetting of intentions
is quite unambiguous; as we have already seen, its interpretation
is not disputed even by laymen. The purpose which disturbs the
intention is in every instance a counter-intention, an
unwillingness; and all that remains for us to learn about it is why
it has not expressed itself in some other and less disguised
manner. But the presence of this counter-will is unquestionable.
Sometimes, too, we succeed in guessing something of the motives
which compel this counter-will to conceal itself; acting
surreptitiously by means of the parapraxis it always achieves its
aim, whereas it would be sure of repudiation if it emerged as an
open contradiction. If some important change in the psychical
situation takes place between the forming of the intention and its
carrying-out, as a result of which there is no longer any question
of the intention being carried out, then the forgetting of the
intention drops out of the category of parapraxes. It no longer
seems strange to have forgotten it, and we realize that it would
have been unnecessary to remember it: thereafter it becomes
permanently or temporarily extinct. The forgetting of an intention
can only be called a parapraxis if we cannot believe that the
intention has been interrupted in this latter way.

Introductory Lectures On Psycho-Analysis

3178

   The instances of forgetting an
intention are in general so uniform and so perspicuous that for
that very reason they are of no interest for our investigation.
Nevertheless there are two points at which we can learn something
new from a study of these parapraxes. Forgetting - that is, failure
to carry out an intention - points, as we have said, to a
counter-will that is hostile to it. This is no doubt true; but our
enquiries show that the counter-will can be of two kinds - direct
or indirect. What I mean by the latter will best appear from one or
two examples. If a patron forgets to put in a word with a third
person on behalf of his
protégé
this may
happen because he is not really very much interested in the
protégé
and therefore has no great desire to
speak on his behalf. In any case, that is how the
protégé
will understand the patron’s
forgetting. But things may be more complicated. The counter-will in
the patron against carrying out the intention may come from another
direction and may be aimed at quite a different point. It may have
nothing to do with the
protégé
but may perhaps
be directed against the third person to whom the recommendation was
to have been made. So you see from this once more the doubts that
stand in the way of a practical application of our interpretations.
In spite of the correct interpretation of the forgetting, the
protégé
is in danger of being too distrustful
and of doing his patron a grave injustice. Or, supposing someone
forgets an appointment which he has promised someone else to keep,
the most frequent reason for it will be, no doubt, a direct
disinclination to meeting this person. But in such a case analysis
might show that the disturbing purpose did not relate to him but
was directed against the place at which the meeting was planned to
happen and was avoided on account of a distressing memory attaching
to it. Or, again, if someone forgets to post a letter, the
counter-purpose may be based on the contents of the letter; but it
is by no means out of the question that the letter may be harmless
in itself and may only be subject to the counter-purpose because
something about it recalls another letter which had been written on
some earlier occasion and which offered the counter-will a direct
point of attack. It can be said, therefore, that here the
counter-will was transferred from the earlier letter, which
justified it, to the present one, which it had in fact no grounds
for concern about. You see, then, that we must practise restraint
and foresight in applying our interpretations, justified as they
are: things that are psychologically equivalent may in practice
have a great variety of meanings.

Introductory Lectures On Psycho-Analysis

3179

   Phenomena such as these last may
seem to you most unusual, and you will perhaps be inclined to
suppose that an ‘indirect’ counter-will already
indicates that the process is a pathological one. But I can assure
you that it occurs as well within the limits of what is normal and
healthy. Moreover you should not misunderstand me. I am far from
admitting that our analytic interpretations are untrustworthy. The
ambiguities in the forgetting of intentions which I have been
mentioning exist only so long as we have not made an analysis of
the case and are only making our interpretations on the basis of
our general assumptions. If we carry out an analysis upon the
person in question, we invariably learn with sufficient certainty
whether the counter-will is a direct one or what other origin it
may have.

   The second point I have in mind
is this. If in a large majority of instances we find confirmation
of the fact that the forgetting of an intention goes back to a
counter-will, we grow bold enough to extend the solution to another
set of instances in which the person under analysis does not
confirm but denies the counter-will we have inferred. Take as
examples of this such extremely common events as forgetting to
return books one has been lent or to pay bills or debts. We shall
venture to insist to the person concerned that an intention exists
in him to keep the books and not to pay the debts, while he will
deny this intention but will not be able to produce any other
explanation of his behaviour. Thereupon we shall go on to say that
he has this intention but knows nothing about it, but that it is
enough for us that it reveals its presence by producing the
forgetting in him. He may repeat to us that he has in fact
forgotten. You will now recognize the situation as one in which we
found ourselves once before. If we want to pursue our
interpretations of parapraxes, which have so frequently proved
justified, to a consistent conclusion, we are forced to the
inescapable hypothesis that there are purposes in people which can
become operative without their knowing about them. But this brings
us into opposition to all the views that dominate both ordinary
life and psychology.

Introductory Lectures On Psycho-Analysis

3180

  
The forgetting of proper names
and foreign names
, as well as of foreign words, can similarly
be traced back to a counter-intention, which is aimed either
directly or indirectly against the name concerned. I have already
given you several instances of direct dislike. But indirect
causation is particularly frequent in these cases and can usually
only be established by careful analyses. For instance, during the
present war, which has obliged us to give up so many of our former
enjoyments, our power of remembering proper names has suffered
greatly as the result of the strangest associations. A short time
ago I found that I was unable to reproduce the name of the innocent
Moravian town of
Bisenz
; and analysis showed that what was
responsible for this was not any direct hostility to it but its
resemblance in sound to the name of the Palazzo
Bisenzi
in
Orvieto which I had repeatedly enjoyed visiting in the past. Here
for the first time, in this reason for objecting to remembering a
name, we come across a principle which will later on reveal its
enormous importance for the causation of neurotic symptoms: the
memory’s disinclination to remembering anything which is
connected with feelings of unpleasure and the reproduction of which
would renew the unpleasure. This intention to avoid unpleasure
arising from a recollection or from other psychical acts, this
psychical flight from unpleasure, may be recognized as the ultimate
operative motive not only for the forgetting of names but for many
other parapraxes, such as omissions, errors, and so on.