Freud - Complete Works (519 page)
Introductory Lectures On Psycho-Analysis
3148
A still more impressive example
has been discovered by Otto Rank in Shakespeare. It is from
The
Merchant of Venice
, in the famous scene in which the fortunate
lover chooses between the three caskets, and perhaps I cannot do
better than read you Rank’s short account of it:
‘A slip of the tongue
occurs in Shakespeare’s
Merchant of Venice
(Act III,
Scene 2), which is from the dramatic point of view extremely subtly
motivated and which is put to brilliant technical use. Like the
slip in
Wallenstein
to which Freud has drawn attention, it
shows that dramatists have a clear understanding of the mechanism
and meaning of this kind of parapraxis and assume that the same is
true of their audience. Portia, who by her father’s will has
been bound to the choice of a husband by lot, has so far escaped
all her unwelcome suitors by a fortunate chance. Having at last
found in Bassanio the suitor who is to her liking, she has cause to
fear that he too will choose the wrong casket. She would very much
like to tell him that even so he could rest assured of her love;
but she is prevented by her vow. In this internal conflict the poet
makes her say to the suitor she favours:
I pray you tarry; pause a day or two
Before you hazard: for, in choosing wrong,
I lose your company; therefore forbear a while:
There’s something tells me (
but it is not
love
)
I would not lose you . . . .
. . . . I could teach you
How to choose right, but then I am forsworn;
So will I never be; so may you miss me;
But if you do you’ll make me wish a sin,
That I have been forsworn. Beshrew your eyes,
They have o’erlooked me, and divided me;
One half of me is yours, the other half is yours
,
-
Mine own, I would say
; but if mine, then yours,
And so all yours.
The thing of which she wanted to give him only
a very subtle hint, because she should have concealed it from him
altogether, namely, that even before he made his choice she was
wholly
his and loved him - it is precisely this that the
poet, with a wonderful psychological sensitivity, causes to break
through openly in her slip of the tongue; and by this artistic
device he succeeds in relieving both the lover’s unbearable
uncertainty and the suspense of the sympathetic audience over the
outcome of his choice.’
Observe, too, how skilfully
Portia in the end reconciles the two statements contained in her
slip of the tongue, how she solves the contradiction between them
and yet finally shows that it was the slip that was in the
right:
‘But if mine, then yours,
And so all yours.’
Introductory Lectures On Psycho-Analysis
3149
It has occasionally happened that
a thinker whose field lies outside medicine has, by something he
says, revealed the sense of a parapraxis and anticipated our
efforts at explaining them. You all know of the witty satirist
Lichtenberg (1742-99), of whom Goethe said: ‘Where he makes a
jest a problem lies concealed.’ Sometimes the jest brings the
solution
of the problem to light as well. In
Lichtenberg’s
Witzige und Satirische Einfälle
[Witty and Satirical Thoughts] we find this: ‘He had read so
much Homer that he always read "
Agamemnon
" instead
of "
angenommen
[supposed]".’ Here we have
the whole theory of misreading.
We must see next time whether we
can go along with these writers in their view of parapraxes.
Introductory Lectures On Psycho-Analysis
3150
LECTURE III
PARAPRAXES (
continued
)
LADIES AND
GENTLEMEN
, - We arrived last time at the idea of considering
parapraxes not in relation to the intended function which they
disturbed but on their own account; and we formed an impression
that in particular cases they seemed to be betraying a sense of
their own. We then reflected that if confirmation could be obtained
on a wider scale that parapraxes have a sense, their sense would
soon become more interesting than the investigation of the
circumstances in which they come about.
Let us once more reach an
agreement upon what is to be understood by the ‘sense’
of a psychical process. We mean nothing other by it than the
intention it serves and its position in a psychical continuity. In
most of our researches we can replace ‘sense’ by
‘intention’ or ‘purpose’. Was it, then,
merely a deceptive illusion or a poetic exaltation of parapraxes
when we thought we recognized an intention in them?
We will continue to take slips of
the tongue as our examples. If we now look through a considerable
number of observations of that kind, we shall find whole categories
of cases in which the intention, the sense, of the slip is plainly
visible. Above all there are those in which what was intended is
replaced by its contrary. The President of the Lower House said in
his opening speech: ‘I declare the sitting closed.’
That is quite unambiguous. The sense and intention of his slip was
that he wanted to close the sitting. ‘Er sagt es ja
selbst’¹ we are tempted to quote: we need only take him
at his word. Do not interrupt me at this point by objecting that
that is impossible, that we know that he did not want to close the
sitting but to open it, and that he himself, whom we have just
recognized as the supreme court of appeal, could confirm the fact
that he wanted to open it. You are forgetting that we have come to
an agreement that we will begin by regarding parapraxes on their
own account; their relation to the intention which they have
disturbed is not to be discussed till later. Otherwise you will be
guilty of a logical error by simply evading the problem that is
under discussion - by what is called in English ‘begging the
question’.
¹
[‘He says so
himself.’]
Introductory Lectures On Psycho-Analysis
3151
In other cases, where the slip
does not express the precise contrary, an opposite sense can
nevertheless be brought out by it. ‘I am not
geneigt
[inclined] to appreciate the services of my predecessor’.
Geneigt
is not the contrary of
geeignet
[qualified],
but it expresses openly something which contrasts sharply with the
situation in which the speech was to be made,
In yet other cases the slip of
the tongue merely adds a second sense to the one intended. The
sentence then sounds like a contraction, abbreviation or
condensation of several sentences. Thus, when the energetic lady
said: ‘He can eat and drink what I want’, it was just
as though she had said: ‘He can eat and drink what he wants;
but what has
he
to do with wanting?
I
will want
instead of him.’ A slip of the tongue often gives the
impression of being an abbreviation of this sort. For instance, a
Professor of Anatomy at the end of a lecture on the nasal cavities
asked whether his audience had understood what he said and, after
general assent, went on: ‘I can hardly believe that, since
even in a city with millions of inhabitants, those who understand
the nasal cavities can be counted
on one
finger
. . . . I beg your pardon, on the fingers
of one hand.’ The abbreviated phrase has a sense too -
namely, that there is only one person who understands them.
In contrast to these groups of
cases, in which the parapraxis itself brings its sense to light,
there are others in which the parapraxis produces nothing that has
any sense of its own, and which therefore sharply contradict our
expectations. If someone twists a proper name about by a slip of
the tongue or puts an abnormal series of sounds together, these
very common events alone seem to give a negative reply to our
question whether all parapraxes have some sort of sense. Closer
examination of such instances, however, shows that these
distortions are easily understood and that there is by no means so
great a distinction between these more obscure cases and the
earlier straightforward ones.
Introductory Lectures On Psycho-Analysis
3152
A man who was asked about the
health of his horse replied: ‘Well, it
draut
[a
meaningless word] . . . it
dauert
[will last]
another month perhaps.’ When he was asked what he had really
meant to say, he explained that he had thought it was a
‘
traurige
[sad]’ story. The combination of
‘
dauert
’ and ‘
traurig
’ had
produced ‘
draut
’.¹
Another man, speaking of some
occurrences he disapproved of, went on: ‘But then facts came
to
Vorschwein
[a non-existent word, instead of
Vorschein
(light)]. . . .’ In reply to
enquiries he confirmed the fact that he had thought these
occurrences ‘
Schweinereien
[‘disgusting’,
literally ‘piggish’]. ‘
Vorschein
’
and ‘
Schweinereien
’ combined to produce the
strange word ‘
Vorschwein
.²
You will recall the case of the
young man who asked the unknown lady if he might
‘
begleitigden
’ her. We ventured to divide up
this verbal form into ‘
begleiten
[accompany]’
and ‘
beleidigen
[insult]’, and we felt certain
enough of this interpretation not to need any confirmation of it.
You will see from these examples that even these obscurer cases of
slips of the tongue can be explained by a convergence, a mutual
‘
interference
’, between two different intended
speeches; the differences between these cases of slips arise merely
from the fact that on some occasions one intention takes the place
of the other completely (becomes a substitute for it), as in slips
of the tongue that express the contrary, whereas on other occasions
the one intention has to be satisfied with distorting or modifying
the other, so that composite structures are produced, which make
sense, to a greater or lesser degree, on their own account.
¹
Meringer and Mayer.
²
Meringer and Mayer.
Introductory Lectures On Psycho-Analysis
3153
We seem now to have grasped the
secret of a large number of slips of the tongue. If we bear this
discovery in mind, we shall be able to understand other groups as
well which have puzzled us hitherto. In cases of distortion of
names, for instance, we cannot suppose that it is always a matter
of competition between two similar but different names. It is not
difficult, however to guess the second intention. The distortion of
a name occurs often enough apart from slips of the tongue; it seeks
to give the name an offensive sound or to make it sound like
something inferior, and it is a familiar practice (or malpractice)
designed as an insult, which civilized people soon learn to
abandon, but which they are
reluctant
to abandon. It is
still often permitted as a ‘joke’, though a pretty poor
one. As a blatant and ugly example of this way of distorting names,
I may mention that in these days the name of the President of the
French Republic, Poincaré, has been changed into
‘
Schweinskarré
.¹ It is therefore plausible
to suppose that the same insulting intention is present in these
slips of the tongue and is trying to find expression in the
distortion of a name. Similar explanations suggest themselves along
the same lines for certain instances of slips of the tongue with
comic or absurd results. ‘I call on you to hiccough
[
aufzustossen
] to the health of our Chief.’ Here a
ceremonial atmosphere is unexpectedly disturbed by the intrusion of
a word which calls up an unsavoury idea, and, on the model of
certain insulting and offensive phrases, we can scarcely avoid a
suspicion that a purpose was trying to find expression which was in
violent contradiction to the ostensibly respectful words. What the
slip seems to have been saying was something like:
‘Don’t you believe it! I don’t mean this
seriously! I don’t care a rap for the fellow!’ Just the
same thing applies to slips of the tongue which turn innocent words
into indecent or obscene ones: thus, ‘
Apopos
’
for ‘
à propos
’ or
‘
Eischeissweibschen
’ for
‘
Eiweissscheibchen
’.²