Autobiographical note 58 страница

‘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.’]1

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.

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.

There are other slips of the tongue where we may assume that the true disturbing factor is some similarity in sound to obscene words and meanings. Deliberate distortion and deformation of words and expressions, which is so dear to vulgar minds, has the sole purpose of exploiting innocent occasions for hinting at forbidden topics; and this playing with words is so frequent that there would be nothing remarkable in its occurring even when not intended and against one’s wishes. To this category no doubt belong such examples as Eischeissweibchen (for Eiweissscheibchen),¹ Apopos Fritz (for à propos),² Lokuskapitäl (for Lotuskapitäl),³ etc.; and perhaps also the Alabüsterbachse (Alabasterbüchse)4 of St. Mary Magdalen.5 -’Ich fordere Sie auf, auf das Wohl unseres Chefs auf zustossen’ can hardly be anything other than an unintentional parody which is a perseveration of an intended one. If I were the Principal who was being honoured at the ceremony to which the speaker contributed this slip, I should probably reflect on the cleverness of the Romans in permitting the soldiers of a general who was enjoying a Triumph openly to express in the form of satirical songs their inner criticisms of the man who was being honoured. - Meringer relates that he himself once said to someone, who by reason of being the eldest member of the company was addressed familiarly by the honorific title of ‘Senexl’ or ‘altes Senexl’: ‘Prost, Senex altesl!’ He was himself shocked at this mistake (Meringer and Mayer, 1895, 50). We can perhaps interpret his emotion if we reflect how close ‘Altesl’ comes to the insulting phrase ‘alter Esel’. There are powerful internal punishments for any breach of the respect due to age (that is, reduced to childhood terms, of the respect due to the father).

¹ [A meaningless term (literally: ‘egg-shit-female’), for ‘small slices of white of egg’.]

² [‘Apopos’ is a non-existent word; but ‘Popo’ is the nursery word for ‘buttocks’.]

³ [A meaningless word, literally: ‘W.C. capital’, for ‘lotus capital’, an architectural term] ‘,

4 [A non-existent word (though the middle part of it ‘Büste’ means ‘breast’), for ‘alabaster box’.]

5 Making slips of the tongue was a symptom of a woman patient of mine which persisted until it was traced back to the childhood joke of replacing ‘ruinieren [ruin]’ by ‘urinieren [urinate]’. - [Added 1924:] The temptation to employ the artifice of a slip of the tongue for enabling improper and forbidden words to be freely used forms the basis of Abraham’s observations on parapraxes ‘with an overcompensating purpose’ (Abraham, 1922a). A woman patient was very liable to duplicate the first syllable of proper names by stammering. She changed the name ‘Protagoras’ to ‘Protragoras’, shortly after having said ‘A-alexander’ instead of ‘AIexander’. Inquiry revealed that in childhood she had been especially fond of the vulgar joke of repeating the syllables ‘a’ and ‘po’ when they occurred at the beginnings of words, a form of amusement which quite commonly leads to stammering in children. [‘A-a’ and ‘Popo’ are the German nursery words for ‘faeces’ and ‘buttocks’.] On approaching the name ‘Protagoras’ she became aware of the risk that she might omit the ‘r’ in the first syllable and say ‘Po-potagoras’. As a protection against this danger she held on firmly to this ‘r’, and inserted another ‘r’ in the second syllable. She acted in the same way on other occasions, distorting the words ‘Parterre [ground floor]’ and ‘Kondolenz [condolence]’ so as to avoid ‘Pater (father)' and ‘Kondom [condom]’ which were closely linked to them in her associations. Another of Abraham’s patients confessed to an inclination to say ‘Angora’ every time for ‘angina’ - very probably because of a fear of being tempted to replace ‘angina’ by ‘vagina’. These slips of the tongue owed their existence therefore to the fact that a defensive trend had retained the upper hand instead of the distorting one; and Abraham justly draws attention to the analogy between this process and the formation of symptoms in obsessional neurosis.

I hope that readers will not overlook the difference in value between these interpretations, of which no proof is possible, and the examples that I have myself collected and explained by means of an analysis. But if I still secretly cling to my expectation that even apparently simple slips of the tongue could be traced to interference by a half-suppressed idea that lies outside the intended context, I am tempted to do so by an observation of Meringer’s which is highly deserving of attention. This author says that it is a curious fact that no one is ready to admit having made a slip of the tongue. There are some very sensible and honest people who are offended if they are told they have made one. I would not venture to put it so generally as does Meringer in saying ‘no one’. But the trace of affect which follows the revelation of the slip, and which is clearly in the nature of shame, has a definite significance. It may be compared to the annoyance we feel when we cannot recall a forgotten name, and to our surprise at the tenacity of an apparently indifferent memory; and it invariably indicates that some motive has contributed to the occurrence of the interference.

The twisting round of a name when it is intentional amounts to an insult; and it might well have the same significance in a whole number of cases where it appears in the form of an unintentional slip of the tongue. The person who, as Mayer reports, said ‘Freuder’ on one occasion instead of ‘Freud’ because he had shortly before mentioned Breuer’s name (Meringer and Mayer, 1895, 38), and who another time spoke of the ‘Freuer-Breudian’ method of treatment (ibid., 28), was probably a professional colleague - and one who was not particularly enthusiastic about that method. In the chapter below on slips of the pen I shall report an instance of the distortion of a name which certainly cannot be explained in any other way.¹

In these cases the disturbing factor which intervenes is a criticism which has to be set aside since at the moment it does not correspond to the speaker’s intention.

¹ [Footnote added 1907:] It can in fact be observed that members of the aristocracy in particular are prone to distort the names of the doctors they consult. We may conclude from this that inwardly they despise them, in spite of the courtesy they habitually show them. - [Added 1912:] I quote here some pertinent observations on the forgetting of names which comes from an account of our subject written in English by Dr Ernest Jones, at that time in Toronto (Jones, 1911b):

‘Few people can avoid feeling a twinge of resentment when they find that their name has been forgotten, particularly if it is by some one with whom they had hoped or expected it would be remembered. They instinctively realize that if they had made a greater impression on the person’s mind he would certainly have remembered them again, for the name is an integral part of the personality. Similarly, few things are more flattering to most people than to find themselves addressed by name by a great personage where they could hardly have anticipated it. Napoleon, like most leaders of men, was a master of this art. In the midst of the disastrous Campaign of France, in 1814, he gave an amazing proof of his memory in this direction. When in a town near Craonne he recollected that he had met the mayor, De Bussy, over twenty years ago in the La Fère regiment; the delighted De Bussy at once threw himself into his service with extraordinary zeal. Conversely there is no surer way of affronting some one than by pretending to forget his name; the insinuation is thus conveyed that the person is so unimportant in our eyes that we cannot be bothered to remember his name. This device is often exploited in literature. In Turgenev’s Smoke the following passage occurs. "‘So you still find Baden entertaining, M’sieu-Litvinov.’ Ratmirov always uttered Litvinov’s surname with hesitation, every time, as though he had forgotten it, and could not at once recall it. In this way, as well as by the lofty flourish of his hat in saluting him, he meant to insult his pride." The same author in his Fathers and Sons writes: "The Governor invited Kirsanov and Bazarov to his ball, and within a few minutes invited them a second time, regarding them as brothers, and calling them Kisarov." Here the forgetting that he had spoken to them, the mistake in the names, and the inability to distinguish between the two young men, constitute a culmination of disparagement. Falsification of a name has the same significance as forgetting it; it is only a step towards complete amnesia.’ 5

Conversely, replacing one name by another, assuming some one else’s name, identification by means of a slip over a name, must signify an appreciative feeling which has for some reason to remain in the background for the time being. An experience of this kind from his schooldays is described by Sándor Ferenczi:

‘When I was in the first form at the Gymnasium I had, for the first time in my life, to recite a poem in public (i.e. in front of the whole class). I was well prepared and was dismayed at being interrupted at the very start by a burst of laughter. The teacher subsequently told me why I had met with this strange reception. I gave the title of the poem "Aus der Ferne " quite correctly, but instead of attributing it to its real author I gave my own name. The poet’s name is Alexander (Sándor) Petöfi. The exchange of names was helped by our having the same first name; but the real cause was undoubtedly the fact that at that time I identified myself in my secret wishes with the celebrated hero-poet. Even consciously my love and admiration for him bordered on idolatry. The whole wretched ambition-complex is of course to be found as well behind this parapraxis.’

A similar identification by means of an exchange of names was reported to me by a young doctor. He had timidly and reverently introduced himself to the famous Virchow as ‘Dr. Virchow’. The professor turned to him in surprise and asked: ‘Ah! is your name Virchow too?’ I do not know how the ambitious young man justified the slip of the tongue he had made - whether he relied upon the flattering excuse that he felt himself so small beside the great name that his own could not fail to slip away from him, or whether he had the courage to admit that he hoped one day to become as great a man as Virchow, and to beg the Professor not to treat him so contemptuously on that account. One of these two thoughts - or perhaps both of them simultaneously - may have confused the young man while he was introducing himself.

From motives of an extremely personal nature I must leave it open whether a similar interpretation is applicable to the following case as well. At the International Congress at Amsterdam in 1907 my theory of hysteria was the subject of lively discussion. In a diatribe against me one of my most vigorous opponents repeatedly made slips of the tongue which took the form of putting himself in my place and speaking in my name. For example, he said: ‘It is well known that Breuer and I have proved...’ where he could only have meant ‘... Breuer and Freud...’ My opponent’s name bears not the least resemblance to my own. This example, together with many other cases where a slip of the tongue results in one name replacing another, may serve to remind us that such slips can entirely dispense with the assistance afforded by similarity in sound and can come about with no more support than is provided by hidden factors in the subject-matter.

In other, far more significant, cases it is self-criticism, internal opposition to one’s own utterance, that obliges one to make a slip of the tongue and even to substitute the opposite of what one had intended. One then observes in astonishment how the wording of an assertion cancels out its own intention, and how the slip has exposed an inner insincerity.¹ The slip of the tongue here becomes a mode of mimetic expression - often, indeed, for the expression of something one did not wish to say: it becomes a mode of self-betrayal. This was the case, for instance, when a man who did not care for what is called normal sexual intercourse in his relations with women broke into a conversation about a girl who was said to be a flirt, with the words: ‘If she had to do with me, she’d soon give up her koëttieren.’ There is no doubt that it can only have been another word, namely ‘koitieren’, whose influence was responsible for making this change in the word that was intended, ‘kokettieren’ [to flirt, coquette]. - Or take the following case: ‘We have an uncle who for months past had been very much offended because we never visited him. We took his move to a new house as an occasion for paying him a long overdue visit. He seemed very glad to see us, and as we were leaving he said with much feeling: "I hope from now on I shall see you still more seldom than in the past."'

¹ Slips of the tongue of this type are used, for instance, by Anzengruber in his Der G’wissenswurm to expose the character of the hypocritical legacy-hunter.7

When the linguistic material happens to be favourable, it often causes slips of the tongue to occur which have the positively shattering result of a revelation, or which produce the full comic effect of a joke. - This is the case in the following example observed and reported by Dr. Reitler:

‘"That smart new hat - I suppose you ‘aufgepatzt’ [instead of ‘aufgeputzt’ (trimmed)] it yourself?" said one lady in a voice of admiration to another. She could proceed no further with her intended praise; for the criticism she had silently felt that the hat’s trimmings were a "Patzerei " had been indicated much too clearly by the unfriendly slip of the tongue for any further phrases of conventional admiration to sound convincing.’

The criticism contained in the following example is milder but none the less unambiguous:

‘A lady who was visiting an acquaintance became very impatient and weary at her tedious and long-winded conversation. When at last she succeeded in tearing herself away and taking her leave she was detained by a fresh deluge of words from her companion, who had meanwhile accompanied her into the front hall and now forced her, as she was on the very point of departing, to stand at the door and listen once more. At last she interrupted her hostess with the question: "Are you at home in the front hall?" It was not till she saw the other’s astonished face that she noticed her slip of the tongue. Weary of being kept standing so long in the front hall she had meant to break off the conversation by asking: "Are you at home in the mornings?", and her slip betrayed her impatience at the further delay.’

The next example, which was witnessed by Dr. Max Graf, is a warning that one should keep a watch on oneself.

‘At the General Meeting of the "Concordia", the Society of Journalists, a young member who was invariably hard-up made a violently aggressive speech, and in his excitement spoke of the "Vorschussmitglieder " (instead of "Vorstandsmitglieder " or "Ausschussmitglieder "). The latter have the authority to sanction loans, and the young speaker had in fact put in an application for a loan.’

We have seen from the example of ‘vorschwein’ that a slip of the tongue can easily occur if an effort has been made to suppress insulting words. In this way one gives vent to one’s feelings:

A photographer who had made a resolution to refrain from zoological terms in dealing with his clumsy employees, addressed an apprentice - who tried to empty out a large dish that was full to the brim and in doing so naturally spilt half the contents on the floor - in the following words: ‘But, man, schöpsen sie¹ some of it off first.’ And soon after this, in the course of a tirade against a female assistant who had nearly spoilt a dozen valuable plates by her carelessness, he said: ‘Are you so hornverbrannt....?’²

¹ [He meant to say ‘draw’, which would have been ‘schöpfen Sie’. Instead he used ‘schöpsen Sie’, which is meaningless. The word ‘Schöps’, however, means ‘sheep’ or ‘silly fellow’.]

² [Here he meant to say ‘hirnverbrannt’, ‘idiotic’, literally ‘with your brain (Hirn) burnt up’. The word he used instead, a non-existent term, would mean ‘with your horn (Horn) burnt up’. The word ‘Hornvieh’, literally ‘horned cattle’, is used in the sense of ‘fool’.]

The next example shows how a slip of the tongue resulted in a serious self-betrayal. Certain details in it justify its repetition in full from the account given by Brill in the Zentralblatt für Psychoanalyse, Volume II.¹

‘I went for a walk one evening with Dr. Frink, and we discussed some of the business of the New York Psychoanalytic Society. We met a colleague, Dr. R., whom I had not seen for years and of whose private life I knew nothing. We were very pleased to meet again, and on my invitation he accompanied us to a café, where we spent two hours in lively conversation. He seemed to know some details about me, for after the usual greetings he asked after my small child and told me that he heard about me from time to time from a mutual friend and had been interested in my work ever since he had read about it in the medical press. To my question as to whether he was married he gave a negative answer, and added: "Why should a man like me marry?"

‘On leaving the café, he suddenly turned to me and said: "I should like to know what you would do in a case like this: I know a nurse who was named as co-respondent in a divorce case. The wife sued the husband and named her as co-respondent, and he got the divorce." I interrupted him, saying: "You mean she got the divorce." He immediately corrected himself saying: "Yes, of course, she got the divorce", and continued to tell how the nurse had been so affected by the divorce proceedings and the scandal that she had taken to drink, had become very nervous, and so on; and he wanted me to advise him how to treat her.

¹ In the Zentralblatt the paper was ascribed in error to Ernest Jones.9

‘As soon as I had corrected his mistake I asked him to explain it, but I received the usual surprised answers: had not everyone a right to make a slip of the tongue? it was only an accident there was nothing behind it, and so on. I replied that there must be a reason for every mistake in speaking, and that, had he not told me earlier that he was unmarried, I would be tempted to suppose he himself was the hero of the story; for in that case the slip could be explained by his wish that he had obtained the divorce rather than his wife, so that he should not have (by our matrimonial laws) to pay alimony, and so that he could marry again in New York State. He stoutly denied my conjecture, but the exaggerated emotional reaction which accompanied it, in which he showed marked signs of agitation followed by laughter, only strengthened my suspicions. To my appeal that he should tell the truth in the interests of science, he answered: "Unless you wish me to lie you must believe that I was never married, and hence your psycho-analytic interpretation is all wrong." He added that someone who paid attention to every triviality was positively dangerous. Then he suddenly remembered that he had another appointment and left us.

‘Both Dr. Frink and I were still convinced that my interpretation of his slip of the tongue was correct, and I decided to corroborate or disprove it by further investigation. Some days later I visited a neighbour, an old friend of Dr. R., who was able to confirm my explanation in every particular. The divorce proceedings had taken place some weeks before, and the nurse was cited as co-respondent. Dr. R. is to-day thoroughly convinced of the correctness of the Freudian mechanisms.’

The self-betrayal is equally unmistakable in the following case, reported by Otto Rank:

‘A father who was without any patriotic feelings, and who wished to educate his children so that they too should be free from what he regarded as a superfluous sentiment, was criticizing his sons for taking part in a patriotic demonstration; when they protested that their uncle had also taken part in it, he replied: "He is the one person you should not imitate: he is an idiot." On seeing his children’s look of astonishment at their father’s unusual tone, he realized that he had made a slip of the tongue, and added apologetically: "I meant to say ‘patriot’, of course."'

Here is a slip of the tongue which was interpreted as a self-betrayal by the other party to the conversation. It is reported by Stärcke, who adds a pertinent comment, though it goes beyond the task of interpreting the slip.

‘A woman dentist promised her sister that she would have a look some time to see if there was Kontakt between two of her molars (that is, to see if the lateral surfaces of the molars were touching each other so that no fragments of food could lodge in between). Her sister finally complained about having to wait so long for this inspection, and jokingly said: "She’s probably treating a colleague at the moment, but her sister has to go on waiting." The dentist eventually examined her, found there was in fact a small cavity in one of the molars, and said: "I didn’t think it was in such a bad way - I thought it was merely that you had no Kontant - I mean Kontakt." "You see?" laughed her sister; "your greed is the only reason why you made me wait so much longer than your paying patients!"

‘(Obviously I should not add my own associations to hers or base any conclusions on them, but when I heard of this slip of the tongue it at once sprang to my mind that these two pleasant and gifted young ladies are unmarried and have in fact very little to do with young men, and I asked myself whether they would have more contact with young people if they had more ready money.)'

In the following example, too, reported by Reik (1915), the slip of the tongue amounts to a self-betrayal:

‘A girl was to become engaged to a young man whom she did not care for. To bring the two young people closer together, their parents arranged a meeting which was attended by the parties to the intended match. The young girl possessed sufficient self-control to prevent her suitor, who behaved in a very on-coming manner towards her, from detecting her antipathy to him. But when her mother asked her how she liked the young man, she answered politely: "Well enough. He’s most liebenswidrig!"'¹

¹ [She intended to say ‘liebenswürdig’, ‘agreeable’ (literally ‘worthy of love’). The word she actually used, ‘liebenswidrig’, would mean literally ‘repelling to love’.]1

Equally self-revealing is the following, which Rank (1913) describes as a ‘witty slip of the tongue’.

‘A married woman, who enjoyed hearing anecdotes and who was said not to be altogether averse to extra-marital affairs if they were reinforced by adequate gifts, was told the following time-honoured story, not without design on his part, by a young man who was eager to obtain her favours. One of two business friends was trying to obtain the favours of his partner’s somewhat prudish wife. In the end she consented to grant them to him in exchange for a present of a thousand gulden. When, therefore, her husband was about to start on a journey, his partner borrowed a thousand gulden from him and promised to pay them back next day to his wife. He then, of course, paid the sum to the wife, implying that it was the reward for her favours; and she supposed she had been caught at last when her husband on his return asked for the thousand gulden and thus found insult added to injury. When the young man reached the point in his story at which the seducer says: "I’II repay the money to your wife tomorrow", his listener interrupted with the highly revealing words: "Let me see, haven’t you repaid me that - I’m sorry - I mean told me that already?" She could hardly have given a clearer indication, without actually putting it into words, of her willingness to offer herself on the same terms.’

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