Freud - Complete Works (214 page)

The Psychopathology Of Everyday Life

1208

   ‘Third instance: The doctor
wanted to prescribe a mixture of
Tinct. belladonnae
and
Tinct. Opii
in a harmless dose for his old aunt, his
mother’s sister. The prescription was immediately taken to
the chemist by the maid. A very short time later it occurred to the
doctor that instead of "tincture" he had written
"extract", and immediately afterwards the chemist
telephoned to question him about the error. The doctor gave as an
excuse the untruthful explanation that he had not completed the
prescription - it had been carried off from his table with
unexpected suddenness, so it was not his fault.

   ‘These three errors in
making out prescriptions have the following striking points of
resemblance. Up to now it has only happened to the doctor with this
one drug; each time it involved a woman patient of advanced years,
and each time the dose was
too strong
. From the brief
analysis it emerged that the doctor’s relation to his mother
must have been of decisive importance. For he recalled that on one
occasion - one, moreover, which most probably occurred
before
these symptomatic acts - he had made out the same
prescription for his mother, who was also an old woman; he had
ordered a dose of 0.03, although he was more familiar with the
usual dose of 0.02. This, as he told himself, was in order to give
her radical help. His frail mother reacted to the drug with
congestion in the head and an unpleasant dryness of the throat. She
complained of this, alluding half-jokingly to the risks that could
come from a consultation with a son. There were in fact other
occasions when his mother, who was, incidentally, a doctor’s
daughter, raised similar critical and half jocular objections to
drugs recommended at various times by her doctor son, and spoke of
being poisoned.

   ‘So far as the present
writer can fathom this son’s relations with his mother, there
is no doubt that he is an instinctively affectionate child, but his
mental estimate of his mother and his personal respect for her are
by no means exaggerated. He shares a household with a brother a
year younger than himself and with his mother, and has felt for
years that this arrangement was inhibiting his erotic freedom. We
have, of course, learnt from psycho-analytic experience that such
reasons are readily misused as an excuse for an internal
attachment. The doctor accepted the analysis, being fairly well
satisfied with the explanation, and laughingly suggested that the
word ‘
belladonna
’ (i.e., beautiful woman) could
also have an erotic reference. He had also occasionally used the
drug himself in the past.’

   In my judgement serious
parapraxes like the present ones are brought about in exactly the
same way as the innocent ones that we normally investigate.

The Psychopathology Of Everyday Life

1209

   (11) The next slip of the pen,
reported by Sándor Ferenczi, will be thought quite
especially innocent. It can he understood as being an act of
condensation, resulting from impatience (compare the slip of the
tongue, ‘Der Apfe’, above,
p. 1152
); and this view might have been
maintained if a penetrating analysis of the occurrence had not
revealed a stronger disturbing factor:

   ‘"I am reminded of the
Anektode
",¹ I once wrote in my note book.
Naturally I meant "
Anekdote
"; actually it was the
one about a gipsy who had been sentenced to death, and who asked as
a favour to be allowed himself to choose the tree from which he was
to be hanged. (In spite of a keen search he failed to find any
suitable tree.)'

   (12) On the other hand there are
times when the most insignificant slip in writing can serve to
express a dangerous secret meaning. An anonymous correspondent
reports:

   ‘I ended a letter with the
words: "Herzlichste Grüsse an Ihre Frau Gemahlin und
ihren
Sohn."² Just before I put the sheet in the
envelope I noticed the error I had made in the first letter of
"ihren" and corrected it. On the way home from my last
visit to this married couple the lady who was with me had remarked
that the son bore a striking resemblance to a family friend and was
in fact undoubtedly his child.’

  
¹
[A non-existent word; but the last part of
it, ‘
Tode
’, means
‘death’.]

  
²
[‘Warmest greetings to your wife and
her son.’ The German possessive adjective
‘
ihr
’, as spelt with a small ‘i’,
means ‘her’; when spelt with a capital ‘I’,
it means ‘your’.]

The Psychopathology Of Everyday Life

1210

   (13) A lady sent her sister a
message of good wishes on the occasion of her taking up residence
in a new and spacious house. A friend who was present noticed that
the writer had put the wrong address on the letter. She had not
even addressed it to the house that her sister had just left, but
to her first house which she had moved into immediately after her
marriage and had given up long before. This friend drew the
lady’s attention to the slip. ‘You’re
right’, she was forced to confess; ‘but how did the
idea come into my head? Why did I do it?’ ‘I
think’, said her friend, ‘you probably grudge her the
fine large home which will now be hers, while you feel yourself
cramped for space; and therefore you put her back in her first home
where she was no better off than you are.’ ‘I certainly
grudge her her new home’, the other frankly admitted, and
added: ‘What a pity one’s always so petty in such
things!’

   (14) Ernest Jones reports the
following slip of the pen, which was supplied to him by A. A.
Brill:

   ‘A patient wrote to him on
the subject of his sufferings, which he tried to attribute to worry
about his financial affairs induced by a cotton crisis: "My
trouble is all due to that d---d frigid wave; there isn’t
even any seed." (By "wave" he meant of course a
trend in the money market.) What he really wrote, however, was not
"wave" but "wife". In the bottom of his heart
he cherished half-avowed reproaches against his wife on account of
her sexual anaesthesia and childlessness, and he dimly realized,
with right, that his life of enforced abstinence played a
considerable part in the genesis of his symptoms.’

   (15) Dr. R. Wagner (1911) relates
of himself:

   ‘In reading through an old
lecture note-book I found that I had made a small slip in the hurry
of taking down the notes. Instead of "
Epithel
[epithelium]", I had written "
Edithel
". If we
stress the first syllable we have the diminutive form of a
girl’s name.¹ The retrospective analysis is simple
enough. At the time I made the slip I was only very superficially
acquainted with the lady of this name; it was not till much later
that our relations became intimate. The slip of the pen is
therefore a neat indication of the break-through of the unconscious
attraction I felt to her at a time when I myself actually had no
inkling of it, and my choice of the diminutive form at the same
time showed the nature of the accompanying feelings.’

  
¹
[In Austria ‘l’ is the common
diminutive termination.]

The Psychopathology Of Everyday Life

1211

   (16) From Frau Dr. von
Hug-Hellmuth (1912):

   ‘A doctor prescribed
"
Leviticowasser
" for a woman patient instead of
"
Levicowasser
". This error, which gave a chemist a
welcome opportunity for passing adverse comments, may very well be
viewed in a milder light if one looks out for the possible
motivations arising from the unconscious and is prepared at any
rate to concede them a certain plausibility - even though they are
merely the subjective conjectures of someone who is not closely
acquainted with the doctor. In spite of his habit of using somewhat
harsh language to scold his patients for their far-from-rational
diet - to read them a lecture, so to speak - the doctor enjoyed
great popularity, so that his waiting-room was crowded before and
during his consulting hour; and this provided a justification for
his wish that the patients he had seen should dress as quickly as
possible - "
vite, vite
". If I remember correctly,
his wife was French by birth: this lends some support to my
seemingly rather bold assumption that he used
French
in his
wish for greater speed from his patients. It is in any case a habit
of many people to draw on foreign words to express such wishes: my
own father hurried us along as children on our walks by calling out
"
avanti gioventù
" [Italian for
"forward, youth"] or "
marchez au pas
"
[French for "forward march"]; while a very elderly
physician, with whom I was in treatment for a throat complaint as a
girl, used to try to inhibit my movements, which seemed much too
hasty to him, by murmuring a soothing "
piano,
piano
" [Italian for "gently, gently"]. Thus I
can very easily imagine that the other doctor had the same habit
too, and so made the slip of writing
"
Leviticowasser
" instead of
"
Levicowasser
".’

   The same paper contains other
examples recalled from its author’s youth
(‘
frazösisch
’ instead of
‘
französich
’, and a slip in writing the
name ‘Karl’).

The Psychopathology Of Everyday Life

1212

   (17) I have to thank Herr J. G.,
who also contributed an example mentioned above for the following
account of a slip of the pen. In content it is identical with a
notorious bad joke, but in this case the intention of making a joke
could be definitely ruled out:

   ‘While I was a patient in a
(lung-) sanatorium I learnt to my regret that the same illness
which had forced me to seek treatment in an institution had been
diagnosed in a close relative of mine. In a letter to my relative I
recommended him to go to a specialist, a well-known professor, with
whom I was myself in treatment, and of whose authority in medical
matters I was fully satisfied, while having at the same time every
reason to deplore his discourteousness: for, only a short time
before, this same professor had refused to write me a testimonial
which it was very important for me to have. In his reply to my
letter my relative drew my attention to a slip of the pen which,
since I immediately recognized the cause of it, gave me particular
amusement. In my letter I had used the following phrase: "and
so I advise you to
in
sult Professor X. without delay".
I had of course, intended to write "
con
sult". I
should perhaps point out that my knowledge of Latin and French
rules out the possibility of explaining it as a mistake due to
ignorance.’

   (18) Omissions in writing have
naturally a claim to be considered in the same light as slips of
the pen. Dattner (1911) has reported a curious instance of a
‘historical parapraxis’. In one of the sections of the
law dealing with the financial obligations of Austria and Hungary,
settled in the ‘Compromise’ of 1867 between the two
countries, the word ‘actual’ was left out of the
Hungarian translation; and Dattner makes it plausible to suppose
that the unconscious desire of the Hungarian parliamentary
draftsmen to grant Austria the least possible advantages played a
part in causing the omission.

The Psychopathology Of Everyday Life

1213

   We have every reason to suppose,
too, that the very frequent repetitions of the same word in writing
and copying - ‘perseverations’ - are likewise not
without significance. If the writer repeats a word he has already
written, this is probably an indication that it was not so easy for
him to get away from it: that he could have said more at that point
but had omitted to do so, or something of the kind. Perseveration
in copying seems to be a substitute for saying ‘I too’.
I have had lengthy medico-legal ‘opinions’ before me
which show perseverations on the copyist’s part at
particularly important passages. The interpretation I should have
liked to give them would be that, bored with his impersonal role,
the copyist was introducing his own gloss: ‘Just my
case’ or ‘it’s just the same with us.’

   (19) Furthermore, there is
nothing to prevent our treating misprints as ‘writing
mistakes’ on the compositor’s part, and our regarding
them as being in a very great measure motivated. I have not set
about making a systematic collection of such parapraxes, which
could be very amusing and instructive. In the work which I have
already referred to a number of times, Jones has devoted a special
section to misprints.

   The distortions found in the text
of telegrams can also at times be understood as writing mistakes on
the telegraphist’s part. In the summer holidays I received a
telegram from my publishers, the text of which was unintelligible
to me. It ran: ‘Vorräte erhalten, Einladung X.
dringend.’ The solution of the riddle starts from the
name X. mentioned in it. X. was the author of a book to which I was
to write an ‘
Einleitung
'. This
‘
Einleitung
’ was what had been turned into the
‘
Einladung
'. I was then able to recall that some
days earlier I had sent my publishers a ‘
Vorrede
'
to another book; so this was the acknowledgement of its arrival.
The true text had very probably run: ‘Vorrede erhalten,
Einleitung X. dringend.’ We may assume that it had fallen
victim to a revision by the telegraphist’s hunger-complex, in
the course of which, moreover the two halves of the sentence became
linked more closely than the sender had intended. It is,
incidentally, a pretty instance of the ‘secondary
revision’ that can be seen at work in most dreams.¹