Freud - Complete Works (211 page)

   ‘The meaning of the
parapraxis would accordingly be:

   ‘"The uncle shall die,
these abnormal children shall die (the whole of this abnormal
family, as it were), and I will get their money."

   ‘This parapraxis bears, in
my view, several indications of an unusual structure:

   ‘(
a
) Two
determinants were present in it, condensed in a single element.

   ‘(
b
) The presence of
the two determinants was reflected in the doubling of the slip of
the tongue (twelve nails, twelve fingers).

   ‘(
c
) It is a
striking point that one of the meanings of "twelve",
viz., the twelve fingers which expressed the children’s
abnormality, stood for an indirect form of representation; the
psychical abnormality was here represented by the physical
abnormality, and the highest part of the body by the
lowest.’

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CHAPTER VI

MISREADINGS AND SLIPS OF THE PEN

When we come to mistakes in reading and
writing, we find that our general approach and our observations in
regard to mistakes in speaking hold good here too - not
surprisingly, in view of the close kinship between these functions.
I shall confine myself here to reporting a few carefully analysed
examples, and shall make no attempt to cover every aspect of the
phenomena.

(A)
MISREADINGS

   (1) I was sitting in a
café, turning over the pages of a copy of the
Leipziger
Illustrierte
  (which I was holding up at an angle), when I
read the following legend under a picture that stretched across the
page: ‘A Wedding Celebration in the
Odysee
.’ It
caught my attention; in surprise I took hold of the paper in the
proper way and then corrected my error: ‘A Wedding
Celebration on the
Ostee
.’  How did I come to
make this absurd mistake in reading? My thoughts at once turned to
a book by Ruths (1898),
Experimentaluntersuchungen über
Musikphantome
. . . , which had occupied me a good deal
recently since it trenches on the psychological problems that I
have been concerned with. The author promised that he would shortly
be bringing out a book to be called ‘Analysis and Principles
of Dream Phenomena’. Seeing that I have just published an
Interpretation of Dreams
it is not surprising that I should
await this book with the keenest interest. In Ruths’ work on
music phantoms I found at the beginning of the list of contents an
announcement of a detailed inductive proof that the ancient Greek
myths and legends have their main source of origin in phantoms of
sleep and music, in the phenomena of dreams and also in deliria.
Thereupon I at once plunged into the text to find out whether he
also realized that the scene in which Odysseus appears before
Nausicaä was derived from the common dream of being naked. A
friend had drawn my attention to the fine passage in Gottfried
Keller’s
Der Grüne Heinrich
which explains this
episode in the Odyssey as an objective representation of the dreams
of a sailor wandering far from home; and I had pointed out the
connection with exhibitionist dreams of being naked.¹ I found
nothing on the subject in Ruths’ book. In this instance it is
obvious that my thoughts were occupied with questions of
priority.

  
¹
The Interpretation of Dreams
(1900
a
),
p. 725-6
.

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   (2) How did I come to read in a
newspaper one day: ‘
Im Fass
across Europe’,
instead of ‘
Zu Fuss
'? Solving this problem caused
me prolonged difficulties. The first associations, it is true,
indicated that it must have been the tub of Diogenes that I had in
mind; and I had recently been reading about the art of the age of
Alexander in a history of art. From there it was easy to recall
Alexander’s celebrated remark: ‘If I were not Alexander
I should like to be Diogenes.’ I also had some dim
recollection of a certain Hermann Zeitung¹ who had set out on
his travels packed in a trunk. But the train of associations
declined to run on further, and I did not succeed in rediscovering
the page in the history of art on which the remark had caught my
eye. It was not till months later that the problem, which I had
meanwhile set aside, suddenly sprang to my mind once more; and this
time it brought its solution with it. I recalled the comment of a
newspaper article on the strange means of
transport
that
people were then choosing in order to go to Paris for the
International Exhibition; and the passage, I believe, went on with
a joking account of now one gentleman intended to get himself
rolled in a tub to Paris by another gentleman. Needless to say the
only motive of these people would be to draw attention to
themselves by such folly. Hermann Zeitung was in fact the name of
the man who had provided the first instance of such extraordinary
methods of transport. It then struck me that I once treated a
patient whose pathological anxiety about reading newspapers was to
be explained as a reaction against his pathological
ambition
to see himself in print and to read of his fame in the newspapers.
Alexander of Macedon was undoubtedly one of the most ambitious men
that ever lived. He even complained that he would find no Homer to
sing of his exploits. But how could I possibly have
failed to
recall
that there is another Alexander who is closer to me,
that Alexander is the name of my younger brother? I now immediately
found the objectionable thought about this other Alexander that had
had to be repressed, and what it was that had given rise to it at
the present time. My brother is an authority on matters connected
with tariffs and
transport
, and at a certain date he was due
to receive the title of professor for his work in teaching at a
commercial college. Several years ago my own name had been
suggested at the University for the same
promotion
, without
my having obtained it. At the time, our mother expressed her
surprise that her younger son was to become a professor before her
elder. This had been the situation when I was unable to solve my
mistake in reading. Subsequently my brother too met with
difficulties; his prospects of becoming professor sank even lower
than my own. But at that point the meaning of the misreading
suddenly became clear to me; it was as though the fading of my
brother’s prospects had removed an obstacle. I had behaved as
if I was reading of my brother’s appointment in the newspaper
and was saying to myself: ‘How curious that a person can
appear in the newspaper (i.e. can be appointed professor) on
account of such stupidities (which is what his profession amounts
to)!’ Afterwards I had no difficulty in finding the passage
about Hellenistic art in the age of Alexander, and to my
astonishment convinced myself that in my previous search I had
repeatedly read parts of the same page and had each time passed
over the relevant sentence as if I was under the dominance of a
negative hallucination. However, this sentence did not contain
anything at all to enlighten me - anything that would have deserved
to be forgotten. I suspect that the symptom consisting of my
failure to find the passage in the book was only formed with the
purpose of leading me astray. I was intended to search for a
continuation of the train of thought in the place where my
enquiries encountered an obstacle - that is, in some idea connected
with Alexander of Macedon; in this way I was to be more effectively
diverted from my brother of the same name. In fact the device was
entirely successful; all my efforts were directed towards
rediscovering the lost passage in the history of art.

   In this case the ambiguity of the
word ‘
Beförderung
’  forms the
associative bridge between the two complexes, the unimportant one
which was aroused by the newspaper article, and the more
interesting but objectionable one which asserted itself here in the
form of a disturbance of what was to be read. It can be seen from
this example that it is not always easy to explain occurrences such
as this mistake in reading. At times one is even forced to postpone
solving the problem to a more favourable time. But the harder the
work of solving it proves to be, the more certainly can one
anticipate that the disturbing thought which is finally disclosed
will be judged by our conscious thinking as something alien and
opposed to it.

 ¹
[‘
Zeitung
’, here a
proper name, is also the German for
‘newspaper’.]

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   (3) One day I received a letter
from the neighbourhood of Vienna which brought me a piece of news
that shocked me. I immediately called my wife and broke the news to
her that ‘
die
arme¹ Wilhelm M.’ had fallen
very seriously ill and been given up by the doctors. There must,
however, have been a false ring about the words I chose to express
my sorrow, for my wife grew suspicious, asked to see the letter,
and declared she was certain it could not read as I had said it
did, since no one called a wife by her husband’s first name,
and in any case the lady who wrote the letter knew the wife’s
first name perfectly well. I obstinately defended my assertion and
referred to the very common use of visiting cards on which a woman
styles herself by her husband’s first name. I was finally
compelled to pick up the letter, and what we in fact read in it was
‘
der
² arme W. M.’, or rather something even
plainer: ‘der arme
Dr.
W. M.’, which I had
entirely overlooked. My mistake in reading therefore amounted to a
kind of convulsive attempt to shift the sad news from the husband
to the wife. The title that stood between the article, adjective
and name did not fit in well with my requirement that the wife
should be the one referred to. For this reason it was simply done
away with in the process of reading. My motive for falsifying the
message was not, however, that my feelings for the wife were less
warm than those I had for her husband, but that the poor
man’s fate had excited my fears for another person in close
contact with me. This person shared with him what I knew to be one
of the determinants of the illness.

  
¹
[The use of ‘
die
’, the
feminine form of the definite article, implied that the person
concerned was a woman.]

  
² [The masculine form of the definite article.]

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   (4) There is one misreading which
I find irritating and laughable and to which I am prone whenever I
walk through the streets of a strange town on my holidays. On these
occasions I read every shop sign that resembles the word in any way
as ‘Antiquities’. This betrays the questing spirit of
the collector.

   (5) Bleuler relates in his
important book,
Affektivität, Suggestibilität,
Paranoia
(1906, 121): ‘Once while I was reading I had an
intellectual feeling that I saw my name two lines further down. To
my astonishment I only found the word
"
Blutkörperchen
". I have analysed many
thousands of misreadings in the peripheral as well as the central
visual field; but this is the grossest instance. Whenever I
imagined I saw my name, the word that gave rise to the notion
usually resembled my name much more, and in most cases every single
letter of my name had to be found close together before I could
make such an error. In this case, however, the delusion of
reference and the illusion could be explained very easily: what I
had just read was the end of a comment on a type of bad style found
in scientific works, from which I did not feel free.’

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   (6) Hanns Sachs reports having
read: ‘The things that strike other people are passed over by
him in his "
Steifleinenheit
".’ ‘This
last word’, Sachs proceeds, ‘surprised me, and on
looking more closely I discovered that it was
"
Stilfeinheit
". The passage occurred in the
course of some remarks by an author whom I admired, which were in
extravagant praise of a historian whom I do not find sympathetic
because he exhibits the "German professorial manner" in
too marked a degree.’

   (7) Dr. Marcell Eibenschütz
(1911) describes an instance of misreading in the course of his
philological studies. ‘I was engaged in studying the literary
tradition of the
Book of Martyrs
, a Middle High German
legendary which I had undertaken to edit in the series of
"German Mediaeval Texts" published by the Prussian
Akademie der Wissenschaften. Very little was known about the work,
which had never seen print. There was a single essay on it in
existence, by Joseph Haupt (1872, 101 ff.). Haupt based his work
not on an old manuscript but on a copy of the principal source,
Manuscript C (Klosterneuburg). This copy had been made at a
comparatively recent date (in the nineteenth century ). It is
preserved in the Hofbibliothek. At the end of the copy the
following subscription¹ is to be found:

   ‘"Anno Domini MDCCCL
in vigilia exaltacionis sancte crucis ceptus est iste liber et in
vigilia pasce anni subsequentis finitus cum adiutorio omnipotentis
per me Hartmanum de Krasna tunc temporis ecclesie niwenburgensis
custodem."²

   ‘Now in his essay Haupt
quotes this subscription in the belief that it comes from the
writer of C himself, and supposes C to have been written in 1350 -
a view involving a consistent misreading of the date 1850 in Roman
numerals - in spite of his having copied the subscription
perfectly correctly and in spite of its having been printed
perfectly correctly (i.e. as MDCCCL) in the essay, in the passage
referred to.