Freud - Complete Works (202 page)

  
¹
[
Footnote added
1924:] Anyone who is
interested in the mental life of these years of childhood will find
it easy to guess the deeper determinant of the demand made on the
big brother. The child of not yet three had understood that the
little sister who had recently arrived had grown inside his mother.
He was very far from approving of this addition to the family, and
was full of mistrust and anxiety that his mother’s inside
might conceal still more children. The wardrobe or cupboard was a
symbol for him of his mother’s inside. So he insisted on
looking into this cupboard, and turned for this to his big brother,
who (as is clear from other material) had taken his father’s
place as the child’s rival. Besides the well-founded
suspicion that this brother had had the lost nurse ‘boxed
up’, there was a further suspicion against him - namely that
he had in some way introduced the recently born baby into his
mother’s inside. The affect of disappointment when the
cupboard was found to be empty derived, therefore, from the
superficial motivation for the child’s demand. As regards the
deeper
trend of thought, the affect was in the wrong place.
On the other hand, his great satisfaction over his mother’s
slimness on her return can only be fully understood in the light of
this deeper layer.

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1144

CHAPTER V

SLIPS
OF THE TONGUE

The ordinary material which we use for talking
in our native language appears to be protected against being
forgotten; but it succumbs all the more frequently to another
disturbance, which is known as a ‘slip of the tongue’.
The slips of the tongue that we observe in normal people give an
impression of being the preliminary stages of the so-called
‘paraphasias’ that appear under pathological
conditions. This is a subject on which I find myself in the
exceptional position of being able to acknowledge the value of a
previous work. In 1895 Meringer and C. Mayer published a study on
‘Slips in Speaking and Reading’. Their lines of
approach differ widely from my own. One of the authors, who acts as
spokesman in the text, is in fact a philologist, and it was his
linguistic interests which led him to attempt to discover the rules
that govern the making of slips of the tongue. He hoped to be able
to conclude from these rules that there exists ‘a certain
mental mechanism, in which the sounds of a word, or of a sentence,
and the words as well, are mutually linked and connected in a quite
peculiar way’ (10).¹

  
¹
[Page references in this chapter, unless
otherwise specified, are to Meringer and Mayer (1895).]

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1145

   The examples of slips of the
tongue collected by the authors are first grouped by them in purely
descriptive categories. They are classed as
transpositions
(e. g. ‘the Milo of Venus’ instead of ‘the Venus
of Milo’);
pre-sonances
or
anticipations
(e. g.
‘es war mir auf der Schwest . . . auf der
Brust so schwer’¹);
post-sonances
or
perseverations
(e. g. ‘Ich fordere Sie
auf
;
auf
das Wohl unseres Chefs
auf
zustossen’
instead of ‘
an
zustossen’);²
contaminations
(e. g. ‘er setzt sich auf den
Hinterkopf’, combined from ‘er setzt sich einen Kopf
auf’ and ‘er stellt sich auf die
Hinterbeine’);³ and
substitutions
(e. g.
‘ich gebe die Präparate in den Briefkasten’
instead of ‘Brütkasten’).
⁴
There are in addition to these
main categories a few others which are less important (or less
significant from our own point of view). In the above arrangement
into groups it makes no difference whether the transposition,
distortion, amalgamation, etc., is concerned with single sounds in
a word, with syllables, or with complete words forming part of the
intended sentence.

   To explain the various kinds of
slips of the tongue he had observed, Meringer postulates that
different spoken sounds hare a different psychical valency. When we
innervate the first sound in a word or the first word in a
sentence, the excitatory process already extends to the later
sounds and the following words, and in so far as these innervations
are simultaneous with one another they can exercise a modifying
influence on one another. The excitation of the sound that is
psychically more intense anticipates other excitations or
perseverates after them, and in this way disturbs the less valent
process of innervation. The question has therefore to be decided
which sounds in a word have the highest valency. Here is
Meringer’s view: ‘If we want to know which sound in a
word has the highest intensity, we must observe ourselves when we
are searching for a forgotten word, e. g. for a name. Whichever is
the first to come back into consciousness is in every case the one
that had the greatest intensity before the word was
forgotten’ (160). ‘The sounds which are of high valency
are the initial sound in the root syllable, and the initial sound
in the word, and the accentuated vowel or vowels’ (162).

  
¹
[The intended phrase was: ‘it lay so
heavily on my breast (
Brust
).’ The substituted
‘
Schwest
’ is a non-existent word.]

  
²
[‘I call on you to
hiccough to
the health of our Principal’ instead of ‘
drink
to
’.]

  
³
[‘He stands on the back of his
head’ (a meaningless phrase) combined from ‘He is
obstinate’ (Iiterally, ‘he puts on a head’) and
‘He gets on his hind legs’.]

  
⁴
[‘I put the preparation into the
letter-box’ instead of ‘incubator’, literally
‘hatching-box’.]

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1146

   I cannot help contradicting him
here. Whether the initial sound of the name is one of the elements
of highest valency: a word or not, it is certainly untrue that in a
forgotten word; is the first to return to consciousness. The rule
stated above is therefore inapplicable. If we observe ourselves
while searching for a forgotten name, we are comparatively often
obliged to express a conviction that it begins with a particular
letter. This conviction proves to be unfounded just as often as
not. Indeed I should like to assert that in the majority of cases
the initial sound which we announce is a wrong one. In our example
of ‘Signorelli’, in fact, the substitute names had lost
the initial sound and the essential syllables: it was precisely the
less valent pair of syllables -
elli
- which returned to
memory in the substitute name Botticelli.

   How little attention is paid by
the substitute names to the initial sound of the missing name may
be learned, for instance, from the following case:

   One day I found it impossible to
recall the name of the small country of which
Monte Carlo
is
the chief town. The substitute names for it ran:
Piedmont
,
Albania
,
Montevideo
,
Colico
.
Albania
was soon replaced in my mind by
Montenegro
; and it then
occurred to me that the syllable ‘Mont’ (pronounced
‘Mon’) was found in all the substitute names except the
last. Thus it was easy for me, starting from the name of Prince
Albert, to find the forgotten name
Monaco
.
Colico
gives a pretty close imitation of the sequence of syllables and the
rhythm of the forgotten name.

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1147

   If we allow ourselves to suppose
that a mechanism similar to that which has been demonstrated for
the forgetting of names could also play a part in the phenomena of
slips of the tongue, we are led to form a more deeply based
judgement of instances of the latter. The disturbance in speaking
which is manifested in a slip of the tongue can in the first place
be caused by the influence of another component of the same speech
- by an anticipatory sound, that is, or by a perseveration - or by
another formulation of the ideas contained within the sentence or
context that it is one’s intention to utter. This is the type
to which all the above examples borrowed from Meringer and Mayer
belong. The disturbance could, however, be of a second kind,
analogous to the process in the Signorelli case; it could result
from influences
outside
this word, sentence or context, and
arise out of elements which are not intended to be uttered and of
whose excitation we only learn precisely through the actual
disturbance. What these two ways in which slips of the tongue arise
have in common would be the simultaneity of the interfering
excitation; what differentiates them would be the position of the
excitation inside or outside the sentence or context. The
difference does not at first appear great in so far as it concerns
certain deductions that can be made from the symptomatology of
slips of the tongue. It is clear, however, that only in the former
case is there any prospect of drawing conclusions from the
phenomena of slips of the tongue about a mechanism which links
sounds and words with one another so that they mutually influence
their articulation - conclusions, that is, such as the philologist
hoped to arrive at from studying slips of the tongue. In the case
of interference from influences
outside
the same sentence or
context of what is being said, it would be above all a matter of
getting to know that the interfering elements are - after which the
question would arise whether the mechanism of this disturbance,
too, can reveal the supposed laws of speech formation.

   Meringer and Mayer cannot be said
to have overlooked the possibility that disturbances of speech may
be the result of ‘complicated psychical influences’, of
elements outside the same word, sentence or sequence of spoken
words. They were bound to observe that the theory which asserts
that sounds are of unequal psychical valency is strictly speaking
only adequate for explaining sound-disturbances, together with
sound-anticipations and perseverations. Where word-disturbances
cannot be reduced to sound-disturbances (as, for instance, in
substitutions and contaminations of words), they have not hesitated
to look
outside
the intended context for the cause of the
slip - a procedure which they justify by some good examples. I
quote the following passages:

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1148

   ‘Ru. was speaking of
occurrences which, within himself he pronounced to be
"
Schweinereien
[disgusting, literally piggish]".
He tried, however, to express himself mildly, and began: "But
then facts came to ‘
Vorschwein
’
 
. . ."¹ Mayer and I were present and Ru.
confirmed his having thought "
Schweinereien
". The
fact of this word which he thought being betrayed in
"Vorschwein" and suddenly becoming operative is
sufficiently explained by the similarity of the words.’
(62)

   Just as in contaminations, so
also - and probably to a much higher degree - in substitutions an
important role is played by ‘floating" or
"wandering" speech images. Even if they are beneath the
threshold of consciousness they are still near enough to be
operative, and can easily be brought into play by any resemblance
they may have to the complex that is to be spoken. When this is so
they cause a deviation in the train of words or cut across it.
"Floating" or "wandering" speech images are
often, as we have said, stragglers following after speech processes
which have recently terminated (perseverations).’ (73)

   ‘Resemblance can also cause
a deviation when another, similar word lies a short way below the
threshold of consciousness,
without a decision to speak it
having been reached
. This is the case with substitutions. -
Thus I hope that my rules will of necessity be confirmed when they
are tested. But for this it is necessary (if the speaker is someone
else)
that we should obtain a clear notion of everything that
was in the speaker’s thoughts
.² Here is an
instructive case. Li., a schoolmaster, said in our presence:
"Die Frau würde mir Furcht ein
l
agen."³ I
was taken aback, for the
l
struck me as inexplicable. I
ventured to draw the speaker’s attention to his slip in
saying "ein
l
agen" for "ein
j
agen",
upon which he at once replied: "Yes, the reason was that I
thought: I should not be ‘in der
Lage
[in a
position]’, etc."

  
¹
[Ru. intended to say ‘came to
“
light
”’ and should have used the word
‘Vor
schein
’. Instead he used the meaningless
word ‘Vor
schwein
’.]

  
²
My italics.

  
³
[He intended to say: ‘The lady would
strike (
einjagen
) terror into me.’ But instead of
‘
einjagen
’ he said
‘
einlagen
’, which is a non-existent verb -
though ‘
Lage
’ is a familiar noun meaning
‘position’.]

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1149

   ‘Here is another case. I
asked R. von Schid. how his sick horse was getting on. He replied:
"Ja, das
draut 
. . . dauert vielleicht
noch einen Monat."¹ I could not understand the
"
draut
", with an
r
, for the
r
in
"
dauert
" could not possibly had had this result.
So I drew his attention to it, whereupon he explained that his
thought had been: "das ist eine
traurige
Geschichte
[it’s a
sad
story]." Thus the speaker had two
answers in his mind and they had been intermixed.’ (97)

   It is pretty obvious that the
consideration of ‘wandering’ speech images which lie
below the threshold of consciousness and are not intended to be
spoken, and the demand for information about everything that had
been in the speaker’s mind, are procedures which constitute a
very close approach to the state of affairs in our
‘analyses’. We too are looking for unconscious
material; and we even look for it along the same path, except that,
in proceeding from the ideas that enter the mind of the person who
is being questioned to the discovery of the disturbing element, we
have to follow a longer path, through a complicated series of
associations.

   I shall dwell for a moment on
another interesting process, to which Meringer’s examples
bear witness. The author himself holds that it is some sort of
similarity between a word in the sentence intended to be spoken and
another word not so intended which permits the latter to make
itself felt in consciousness by bringing about a distortion, a
composite figure, or a compromise‑formation
(contamination):