Freud - Complete Works (206 page)

  
¹
[‘
Wir könnten ins Grab
sinken
’ - ‘we could sink in the grave’. The
order of the words, on which the present point turns, is different
in English and in German.]

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1167

   (32) Here is a quite especially
instructive slip of the tongue which I should not like to omit,
although according to my authority it is some twenty years old.
‘A lady once advanced the following opinion at a social
gathering - and the words show that they were uttered with fervour
and under the pressure of a host of secret impulses: "Yes, a
woman must be pretty if she is to please men. A man is much better
off; as long as he has his
five
straight limbs he needs
nothing more!" This example allows us a good view of the
intimate mechanism of a slip of the tongue that results from
condensation
or from a
contamination
(cf.
p. 1144
). It is plausible to suppose
that we have here a fusion of two turns of phrase with similar
meanings:

                                               
as long as he has his
four straight limbs

                                               
as long as he has his
five wits
about him.

Or the element
straight
[‘
gerade
’] may have been common to two intended
expressions which ran:

                                               
as long as he has his
straight
limbs

                                               
to treat all
five(s)
as
even numbers
¹

   ‘There is nothing in fact
to prevent us from assuming that
both
turns of phrase, the
one about his five wits and the one about ‘the even number
five’, played their separate parts in causing first a number,
and then the mysterious five instead of the simple four, to be
introduced into the sentence dealing with the straight limbs. But
this fusion would certainly not have come about if, in the form
that appeared in the slip of the tongue, it had not had a good
meaning of its own - one expressing a cynical truth which could not
of course be admitted to undisguised, coming as it did from a
woman. - Finally we should not omit to draw attention to the fact
that the lady’s remark, as worded, could pass just as well
for a capital joke as for an amusing slip of the tongue. It is
simply a question of whether she spoke the words with a conscious
or an unconscious intention. In our case the way the speaker
behaved certainly ruled out any notion of conscious intention and
excluded the idea of its being a joke.’

  
¹
[‘Alle
fünf gerade
sein
lassen.’ The German ‘
gerade
’ means both
‘straight and ‘even’. The meaning of the phrase,
literally translated in the text, is: ‘To close one’s
eyes to irregularities.’]

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1168

   How closely a slip of the tongue
can approximate to a joke is shown in the following case, reported
by Rank (1913), in which the woman responsible for the slip
actually ended by herself treating it as a joke and laughing at
it.

   (33) ‘A recently married
man, whose wife was concerned about preserving her girlish
appearance and only with reluctance allowed him to have frequent
sexual intercourse, told me the following story which in retrospect
both he and his wife found extremely funny. After a night in which
he had once again disobeyed his wife’s rule of abstinence, he
was shaving in the morning in the bedroom which they shared, while
his wife was still in bed; and, as he had often done to save
trouble, he made use of his wife’s powder-puff which was
lying on the bedside table. His wife, who was extremely concerned
about her complexion, had several times told him not to, and
therefore called out angrily: "There you go again, powdering
me
with
your
puff!" Her husband’s laughter
drew her attention to her slip (she had meant to say: "you are
powdering
yourself
again with
my
puff") and she
herself ended by joining in his laughter. "To powder" is
an expression familiar to every Viennese for "to
copulate"; and a powder-puff is an obvious phallic
symbol.’

The Psychopathology Of Everyday Life

1169

   (34) In the following example,
too - supplied by Storfer - it might be thought that a joke was
intended:

   Frau B., who was suffering from
an affection of obviously psychogenic origin, was repeatedly
recommended to consult a psycho-analyst, Dr. X. She persistently
declined to do so, saying that such treatment could never be of any
value, as the doctor would wrongly trace everything back to sexual
things. A day finally came, however, when she was ready to follow
the advice, and she asked: ‘Nun gut, wann
ordinärt
also dieser Dr. X.?’¹

   (35) The connection between jokes
and slips of the tongue is also shown in the fact that in many
cases a slip of the tongue is nothing other than an
abbreviation:

   On leaving school, a girl had
followed the ruling fashion of the time by taking up the study of
medicine. After a few terms she had changed over from medicine to
chemistry. Some years later she described her change of mind in the
following words: ‘I was not on the whole squeamish about
dissecting, but when I once had to pull the finger-nails off a dead
body, I lost my pleasure in the whole of -
chemistry
.’

   (36) At this point I insert
another slip of the tongue which it needs little skill to
interpret. ‘In an anatomy lesson the professor was
endeavouring to explain the nasal cavities, which are notoriously a
very difficult department of enterology. When he asked whether his
audience had understood his presentation of the subject, he
received a general reply in the affirmative. Whereupon the
professor, who was known for his high opinion of himself,
commented: ‘I can hardly believe that, since, even in Vienna
with its millions of inhabitants, those who understand the nasal
cavities can be counted on
one finger
, I mean on the fingers
of one hand.’

   (37) On another occasion the same
professor said: ‘In the case of the female genitals, in spite
of many
Versuchungen
[temptations] - I beg you pardon,
Versuche
[experiments] . . .’

  
¹
[What she meant to say was: ‘All
right, then, when does this Dr. X. have his consulting
hours?’ She should have used the word
‘
ordiniert
’ for ‘has his consulting
hours’. Instead she said ‘
ordinärt
’,
which is a non-existent word. ‘
Ordinär
’,
however, means ‘common’,
‘vulgar’.]

The Psychopathology Of Everyday Life

1170

   (38) I am indebted to Dr. Alfred
Robitsek of Vienna for drawing my attention to two slips of the
tongue which were recorded by an old French writer. I reproduce
them without translating them:

   Brantôme (1527-1614),
Vies des Dames galantes
, Discours second: ‘Si ay-je
cogneu une très-belle et honneste dame de par le monde, qui,
devisant avec un honneste gentilhomme de la cour des affaires de la
guerre durant ces civiles, elle luy dit: "J’ay ouy dire
que le roy a faict rompre tous les c . . . de
ce pays là." Elle vouloit dire
les ponts
. Pensez
que, venant de coucher d’avec son mary, ou songeant à
son amant, elle avoit encor ce nom frais en la bouche; et le
gentilhomme s’en eschauffa en amours d’elle pour ce
mot.

   ‘Une autre dame que
i’ai cogneue, entretenant une autre grand’ dame plus
qu’elle, et luy louant et exaltant ses beautez, elle luy dit
après: "Non, madame, ce que je vous en dis, ce
n’est point pour vous
adultérer
"; voulant
dire
adulater
comme elle le rhabilla ainsi: pensez
qu’elle songeoit à adultérer.’¹

   (39) There are of course more
modern examples as well of sexual
doubles entendres
originating in a slip of the tongue. Frau F. was describing her
first hour in a language course. ‘It is very interesting; the
teacher is a nice young Englishman. In the very first hour he gave
me to understand "
durch die Bluse
" [through the
blouse] - I mean, "
durch die Blume
" [literally,
‘through flowers’, i.e. ‘indirectly’] that
he would rather take me for individual tuition.’ (From
Storfer.)

  
¹
[‘Thus I knew a very beautiful and
virtuous lady of the world who, discoursing with a virtuous
gentleman on the court on the affairs of the war during those civil
disturbances, said to him: "I have heard tell that the king
had a breach made in all the c . . . of that
region." She meant to say the ‘ponts’. One may
suppose that, having just lain with her husband, or thinking of her
lover, she had this word freshly on her tongue; and the gentleman
was fired with love of her on account of this word.

  
‘Another lady whom I knew, entertaining another lady of
higher rank than herself, and praising her and extolling her
beauties, she said after to her: "No, madame, what I say to
you is not in order to
adulterate
you"; meaning to say
adulate
, as she clad the word thus anew, one may suppose
that she was thinking of adultery.’]

The Psychopathology Of Everyday Life

1171

   In the psychotherapeutic
procedure which I employ for resolving and removing neurotic
symptoms I am very often faced with the task of discovering, from
the patient’s apparently casual utterances and associations,
a thought-content which is at pains to remain concealed but which
cannot nevertheless avoid unintentionally betraying its existence
in a whole variety of ways. Slips of the tongue often perform a
most valuable service here, as I could show by some highly
convincing and at the same time very singular examples. Thus, for
instance, a patient will be speaking of his aunt and, without
noticing the slip, will consistently call her ‘my
mother’; or another will refer to her husband as her
‘brother’. In this way they draw my attention to the
fact that they have ‘identified’ these persons with one
another - that they have put them into a series which implies a
recurrence of the same type in their emotional life. To give
another example: a young man of twenty introduced himself to me
during my consulting hours in these words: ‘I am the father
of So-and-so who came to you for treatment. I beg your pardon, I
meant to say I am his brother: he is four years older than I
am.’ I inferred that he intended this slip to express the
view that, like his brother, he had fallen ill through the fault of
his father; that, like his brother, he wished to be cured; but that
his father was the one who most needed to be cured. - At other
times an arrangement of words that sounds unusual, or an expression
that seems forced, is enough to reveal that a repressed thought is
participating in the patient’s remarks, which had a different
end in view.

   What I find, therefore, both in
grosser disturbances of speech and in those more subtle ones which
can still be subsumed under the heading of ‘slips of the
tongue’, is that it is not the influence of the
‘contact effects of the sounds’ but the influence of
thoughts that lie outside the intended speech which determines the
occurrence of the slip and provides an adequate explanation of the
mistake. It is not my wish to throw doubt on the laws governing the
way in which sounds modify one another; but by themselves these
laws do not seem to me to be sufficiently effective to disturb the
process of correct speaking. In the cases that I have studied and
explored in some detail these laws represent no more than the
preformed mechanism which a more remote psychical motive makes use
of for its convenience, though without becoming subject to the
sphere of influence of these relations.
In a large number of
substitutions
resulting from slips of the tongue such
phonetic laws are completely disregarded
. In this respect I
find myself in full agreement with Wundt, who assumes as I do that
the conditions governing slips of the tongue are complex and extend
far beyond the contact effects of the sounds.

The Psychopathology Of Everyday Life

1172

   If I accept these ‘remoter
psychical influences’ (as Wundt calls them ) as established,
there is nothing, on the other hand, to prevent me at the same time
from allowing that, in situations where speaking is hurried and
attention is to some extent diverted, the conditions governing
slips of the tongue may easily be confined within the limits
defined by Meringer and Mayer. For some of the examples collected
by these authors a more complicated explanation nevertheless seems
more plausible. Take, for instance, one of those quoted above:

                                                               
‘Es war mir auf der
Schwest
. . .

                                                               
Brust
so
schwer.’

   Was what happened here simply
that the sound ‘
schwe
’ forced back the equally
valent sound ‘
bru
’ by ‘anticipating’
it? The idea can hardly be dismissed that the sounds making up
‘
schwe
’ were further enabled to obtrude in this
manner because of a special relation. That could only be the
association
Schwester
  -
Bruder
; perhaps also
Brust der Schwester
, which leads one on to other groups of
thoughts. It is this invisible helper behind the scenes which lends
the otherwise innocent ‘schwe’ the strength to produce
a mistake in speaking.