Autobiographical note 56 страница

CHAPTER V SLIPS OF THE TONGUE

The ordinary material which we use for talking in our native language appears to be protected against being forgotten; but it succumbs all the more frequently to another disturbance, which is known as a ‘slip of the tongue’. The slips of the tongue that we observe in normal people give an impression of being the preliminary stages of the so-called ‘paraphasias’ that appear under pathological conditions. This is a subject on which I find myself in the exceptional position of being able to acknowledge the value of a previous work. In 1895 Meringer and C. Mayer published a study on ‘Slips in Speaking and Reading’. Their lines of approach differ widely from my own. One of the authors, who acts as spokesman in the text, is in fact a philologist, and it was his linguistic interests which led him to attempt to discover the rules that govern the making of slips of the tongue. He hoped to be able to conclude from these rules that there exists ‘a certain mental mechanism, in which the sounds of a word, or of a sentence, and the words as well, are mutually linked and connected in a quite peculiar way’ (10).¹

¹ [Page references in this chapter, unless otherwise specified, are to Meringer and Mayer (1895).]5

The examples of slips of the tongue collected by the authors are first grouped by them in purely descriptive categories. They are classed as transpositions (e. g. ‘the Milo of Venus’ instead of ‘the Venus of Milo’); pre-sonances or anticipations (e. g. ‘es war mir auf der Schwest... auf der Brust so schwer’¹); post-sonances or perseverations (e. g. ‘Ich fordere Sie auf; auf das Wohl unseres Chefs aufzustossen’ instead of ‘an

zustossen’);² contaminations (e. g. ‘er setzt sich auf den Hinterkopf’, combined from ‘er setzt sich einen Kopf auf’ and ‘er stellt sich auf die Hinterbeine’);³ and substitutions (e. g. ‘ich gebe die Präparate in den Briefkasten’ instead of ‘Brütkasten’).4 There are in addition to these main categories a few others which are less important (or less significant from our own point of view). In the above arrangement into groups it makes no difference whether the transposition, distortion, amalgamation, etc., is concerned with single sounds in a word, with syllables, or with complete words forming part of the intended sentence.

To explain the various kinds of slips of the tongue he had observed, Meringer postulates that different spoken sounds hare a different psychical valency. When we innervate the first sound in a word or the first word in a sentence, the excitatory process already extends to the later sounds and the following words, and in so far as these innervations are simultaneous with one another they can exercise a modifying influence on one another. The excitation of the sound that is psychically more intense anticipates other excitations or perseverates after them, and in this way disturbs the less valent process of innervation. The question has therefore to be decided which sounds in a word have the highest valency. Here is Meringer’s view: ‘If we want to know which sound in a word has the highest intensity, we must observe ourselves when we are searching for a forgotten word, e. g. for a name. Whichever is the first to come back into consciousness is in every case the one that had the greatest intensity before the word was forgotten’ (160). ‘The sounds which are of high valency are the initial sound in the root syllable, and the initial sound in the word, and the accentuated vowel or vowels’ (162).

¹ [The intended phrase was: ‘it lay so heavily on my breast (Brust).’ The substituted ‘Schwest’ is a non-existent word.]

² [‘I call on you to hiccough to the health of our Principal’ instead of ‘drink to’.]

³ [‘He stands on the back of his head’ (a meaningless phrase) combined from ‘He is obstinate’ (Iiterally, ‘he puts on a head’) and ‘He gets on his hind legs’.]

4 [‘I put the preparation into the letter-box’ instead of ‘incubator’, literally ‘hatching-box’.]

I cannot help contradicting him here. Whether the initial sound of the name is one of the elements of highest valency: a word or not, it is certainly untrue that in a forgotten word; is the first to return to consciousness. The rule stated above is therefore inapplicable. If we observe ourselves while searching for a forgotten name, we are comparatively often obliged to express a conviction that it begins with a particular letter. This conviction proves to be unfounded just as often as not. Indeed I should like to assert that in the majority of cases the initial sound which we announce is a wrong one. In our example of ‘Signorelli’, in fact, the substitute names had lost the initial sound and the essential syllables: it was precisely the less valent pair of syllables - elli - which returned to memory in the substitute name Botticelli.

How little attention is paid by the substitute names to the initial sound of the missing name may be learned, for instance, from the following case:

One day I found it impossible to recall the name of the small country of which Monte Carlo is the chief town. The substitute names for it ran: Piedmont, Albania, Montevideo, Colico. Albania was soon replaced in my mind by Montenegro; and it then occurred to me that the syllable ‘Mont’ (pronounced ‘Mon’) was found in all the substitute names except the last. Thus it was easy for me, starting from the name of Prince Albert, to find the forgotten name Monaco. Colico gives a pretty close imitation of the sequence of syllables and the rhythm of the forgotten name.

If we allow ourselves to suppose that a mechanism similar to that which has been demonstrated for the forgetting of names could also play a part in the phenomena of slips of the tongue, we are led to form a more deeply based judgement of instances of the latter. The disturbance in speaking which is manifested in a slip of the tongue can in the first place be caused by the influence of another component of the same speech - by an anticipatory sound, that is, or by a perseveration - or by another formulation of the ideas contained within the sentence or context that it is one’s intention to utter. This is the type to which all the above examples borrowed from Meringer and Mayer belong. The disturbance could, however, be of a second kind, analogous to the process in the Signorelli case; it could result from influences outside this word, sentence or context, and arise out of elements which are not intended to be uttered and of whose excitation we only learn precisely through the actual disturbance. What these two ways in which slips of the tongue arise have in common would be the simultaneity of the interfering excitation; what differentiates them would be the position of the excitation inside or outside the sentence or context. The difference does not at first appear great in so far as it concerns certain deductions that can be made from the symptomatology of slips of the tongue. It is clear, however, that only in the former case is there any prospect of drawing conclusions from the phenomena of slips of the tongue about a mechanism which links sounds and words with one another so that they mutually influence their articulation - conclusions, that is, such as the philologist hoped to arrive at from studying slips of the tongue. In the case of interference from influences outside the same sentence or context of what is being said, it would be above all a matter of getting to know that the interfering elements are - after which the question would arise whether the mechanism of this disturbance, too, can reveal the supposed laws of speech formation.

Meringer and Mayer cannot be said to have overlooked the possibility that disturbances of speech may be the result of ‘complicated psychical influences’, of elements outside the same word, sentence or sequence of spoken words. They were bound to observe that the theory which asserts that sounds are of unequal psychical valency is strictly speaking only adequate for explaining sound-disturbances, together with sound-anticipations and perseverations. Where word-disturbances cannot be reduced to sound-disturbances (as, for instance, in substitutions and contaminations of words), they have not hesitated to look outside the intended context for the cause of the slip - a procedure which they justify by some good examples. I quote the following passages:

‘Ru. was speaking of occurrences which, within himself he pronounced to be "Schweinereien [disgusting, literally piggish]". He tried, however, to express himself mildly, and began: "But then facts came to ‘Vorschwein’

..."¹ Mayer and I were present and Ru. confirmed his having thought "Schweinereien". The fact of this word which he thought being betrayed in "Vorschwein" and suddenly becoming operative is sufficiently explained by the similarity of the words.’ (62)

Just as in contaminations, so also - and probably to a much higher degree - in substitutions an important role is played by ‘floating" or "wandering" speech images. Even if they are beneath the threshold of consciousness they are still near enough to be operative, and can easily be brought into play by any resemblance they may have to the complex that is to be spoken. When this is so they cause a deviation in the train of words or cut across it. "Floating" or "wandering" speech images are often, as we have said, stragglers following after speech processes which have recently terminated (perseverations).’ (73)

‘Resemblance can also cause a deviation when another, similar word lies a short way below the threshold of consciousness, without a decision to speak it having been reached. This is the case with substitutions. - Thus I hope that my rules will of necessity be confirmed when they are tested. But for this it is necessary (if the speaker is someone else) that we should obtain a clear notion of everything that was in the speaker’s thoughts.² Here is an instructive case. Li., a schoolmaster, said in our presence: "Die Frau würde mir Furcht einlagen."³ I was taken aback, for the l struck me as inexplicable. I ventured to draw the speaker’s attention to his slip in saying "einlagen" for "einjagen", upon which he at once replied: "Yes, the reason was that I thought: I should not be ‘in der Lage [in a position]’, etc."

¹ [Ru. intended to say ‘came to “light”’ and should have used the word ‘Vorschein’. Instead he used the meaningless word ‘Vorschwein’.]

² My italics.

³ [He intended to say: ‘The lady would strike (einjagen) terror into me.’ But instead of ‘einjagen’ he said ‘einlagen’, which is a non-existent verb - though ‘Lage’ is a familiar noun meaning ‘position’.]9

‘Here is another case. I asked R. von Schid. how his sick horse was getting on. He replied: "Ja, das draut... dauert vielleicht noch einen Monat."¹ I could not understand the "draut", with an r, for the r in "dauert" could not possibly had had this result. So I drew his attention to it, whereupon he explained that his thought had been: "das ist eine traurige Geschichte [it’s a sad story]." Thus the speaker had two answers in his mind and they had been intermixed.’ (97)

It is pretty obvious that the consideration of ‘wandering’ speech images which lie below the threshold of consciousness and are not intended to be spoken, and the demand for information about everything that had been in the speaker’s mind, are procedures which constitute a very close approach to the state of affairs in our ‘analyses’. We too are looking for unconscious material; and we even look for it along the same path, except that, in proceeding from the ideas that enter the mind of the person who is being questioned to the discovery of the disturbing element, we have to follow a longer path, through a complicated series of associations.

I shall dwell for a moment on another interesting process, to which Meringer’s examples bear witness. The author himself holds that it is some sort of similarity between a word in the sentence intended to be spoken and another word not so intended which permits the latter to make itself felt in consciousness by bringing about a distortion, a composite figure, or a compromise-formation (contamination):

jagen, dauert, Vorschein

lagen, traurig,... schwein.

Now in my Interpretation of Dreams (1900a) I have demonstrated the part played by the work of condensation in forming what is called the manifest dream-content out of the latent dream-thoughts. A similarity of any sort between two elements of the unconscious material - a similarity between the things themselves or between their verbal presentations - is taken as an opportunity for creating a third, which is a composite or compromise idea. In the dream-content this third element represents both its components; and it is as a consequence of its originating in this way that it so frequently has various contradictory characteristics. The formation of substitutions and contaminations which occurs in slips of the tongue is accordingly a beginning of the work of condensation which we find taking a most vigorous share in the construction of dreams.

¹ [What he intended to say was: ‘Well, it will last (dauerti) another month perhaps.’ Instead of ‘dauert’ he used the meaningless word ‘draut’]0

In a short essay designed for a wider circle of readers Meringer (1900) has claimed that a special practical significance attaches to particular cases in which one word is put for another - viz. to those cases in which a word is replaced by another that has the opposite meaning. ‘You probably still recall’, he writes, ‘the way in which the President of the Lower House of the Austrian Parliament opened the sitting a short while ago: "Gentlemen: I take notice that a full quorum of members is present and herewith declare the sitting closed!" His attention was only drawn by the general merriment and he corrected his mistake. In this particular case the explanation no doubt was that the President secretly wished he was already in a position to close the sitting, from which little good was to be expected. But this accompanying idea, as frequently happens, broke through, at least partially, and the result was "closed" instead of "open" - the opposite, that is, of what was intended to be expressed. Now extensive observations have taught me that words with opposite meanings are, quite generally, very often interchanged; they are already associated in our linguistic consciousness, they lie very close to each other and it is easy for the wrong one to be evoked.’

It cannot be said that in all cases where words are replaced by their opposites it is as easy as in this instance of the President to show the probability of the slip being a consequence of a contradiction arising in the speaker’s mind against the uttered sentence. We found an analogous mechanism in our analysis of the aliquis example. There the internal contradiction expressed itself in a word being forgotten, instead of its being replaced by its opposite. But in order to soften the distinction we may note that the word aliquis is in fact incapable of having an opposite like ‘to close’ and ‘to open’, and that ‘to open’ is a word that cannot be forgotten as it is too familiar a part of our vocabulary.

If the last examples of Meringer and Mayer show that the disturbance of speech can arise on the one hand from the influence of anticipatory or perseverating sounds and words of the same sentence which are intended to be spoken, and on the other hand from the effect of words outside the intended sentence whose excitation would not otherwise have been revealed, the first thing we shall want to know is whether the two classes of slips of the tongue can be sharply divided, and how an example of one class can be distinguished from a case of the other. At this point in the discussion one must however bear in mind the views expressed by Wundt, who deals with the phenomena of slips of the tongue in the course of his comprehensive discussion of the laws of the development of speech.

According to him, a feature that is never missing from these and other related phenomena is the activity of certain psychical influences. ‘First of all they have a positive determinant in the form of the uninhibited stream of sound-associations and word-associations evoked by the spoken sounds. In addition there is a negative factor in the form of the suppression or relaxation of the inhibitory effects of the will on this current, and of the attention which is also active here as a function of the will. Whether this play of association manifests itself by a coming sound being anticipated, or by the preceding sounds being reproduced, or by a habitually practised sound being intercalated between others, or finally by quite different words, which stand in an associative relation to the sounds that are spoken, having an effect upon them - all these indicate only differences in the direction and at the most in the scope of the associations taking place, and not differences in their general nature. In some cases, too, it may be doubtful to which form a certain disturbance is to be assigned, or whether it would not be more justifiable, in accordance with the principle of the complication of causes,¹ to trace it back to a concurrence of several motive forces.’ (Wundt, 1900, 380-1.)

¹ My italics.2

I consider these observations of Wundt’s fully justified and very instructive. Perhaps it would be possible to emphasize more definitely than Wundt does that the positive factor favouring the slip of the tongue (the uninhibited stream of associations) and the negative factor (the relaxation of the inhibiting attention) invariably achieve their effect in combination, so that the two factors become merely different ways of regarding the same process. What happens is that, with the relaxation of the inhibiting attention - in still plainer terms, as a result of this relaxation - the uninhibited stream of associations comes into action.

Among the slips of the tongue that I have collected myself I can find hardly one in which I should be obliged to trace the disturbance of speech simply and solely to what Wundt calls the ‘contact effect of sounds’. I almost invariably discover a disturbing influence in addition which comes from something outside the intended utterance; and the disturbing element is either a single thought that has remained unconscious, which manifests itself in the slip of the tongue and which can often be brought to consciousness only by means of searching analysis, or it is a more general psychical motive force which is directed against the entire utterance.

(1) My daughter had made an ugly face when she took a bite at an apple, and I wanted to quote to her:

Der Affe gar possierlich ist,

Zumal wenn er vom Apfel frisst.¹

But I began: ‘Der Apfe...’ [a non-existent word]. This looks like a contamination of ‘Affe [ape]’ and ‘Apfel [apple]’ (a compromise-formation), or it might be regarded as an anticipation of the word ‘Apfel’ that was in preparation. The circumstances were, however, more precisely as follows. I had already begun the quotation once before and had not made a slip of the tongue the first time. I only made a slip when I repeated it. The repetition was necessary because the person I was addressing had had her attention distracted from another quarter and she had not been listening to me. I must include the fact of the repetition, together with my impatience to have done with my sentence, among the motives of the slip which made its appearance as a product of condensation.

¹ [The ape’s a very comic sight when from an apple he takes a bite.]3

(2) My daughter said: ‘I am writing to Frau Schresinger...’ The lady’s name is Schlesinger. This slip of the tongue is probably connected with a trend towards making articulation easier, for an l is difficult to pronounce after a repeated r. I must add, however, that my daughter made this slip a few minutes after I had said ‘Apfe’ for ‘Affe’. Now slips of the tongue are in a high degree contagious, like the forgetting of names - a peculiar fact which Meringer and Mayer have noticed in the case of the latter. I cannot suggest any reason for this psychical contagiousness.

(3) ‘I shut up like a Tassenmescher - I mean Taschenmesser ', said a woman patient at the start of the hour of treatment. Here again a difficulty in articulation (cf. ‘Wiener Weiber Wäscherinnen waschen weisse Wäsche’, ‘Fischflosse’ and similar tongue-twisters) could serve as an excuse for her interchanging the sounds. When her attention was drawn to her slip, she promptly replied: ‘Yes, that’s only because you said "

Ernscht" to-day.’ I had in fact received her with the remark: ‘To-day we shall really be in earnest ' (because it was going to be the last session before the holidays), and had jokingly broadened ‘Ernst’ into ‘Ernscht’. In the course of the hour she repeatedly made further slips of the tongue, and I finally observed that she was not merely imitating me but had a special reason for dwelling in her unconscious on the word ‘Ernst’ in its capacity as a name.¹

¹ In fact she turned out to be under the influence of unconscious thoughts about pregnancy and contraception. By the words ‘shut up like a pocket-knife’, which she uttered consciously as a complaint, she wanted to describe the position of a child in the womb. The word ‘Ernst’ in my opening remark had reminded her of the name (S. Ernst) of a well known Viennese firm in the Kärntnerstrasse which used to advertise the sale of contraceptives.4

(4) ‘I’ve got such a cold, I can’t durch die Ase natmen - I mean, Nase atmen’,¹ the same patient happened to say another time. She knew immediately how she had come to make the slip. ‘Every day I get on the tram in Hasenauer Street, and while I was waiting for one to come along this morning it struck me that if I was French I should say "Asenauer", as the French always drop their aitches at the beginning of a word.’ She then brought a series of reminiscences about French people of her acquaintance, and came in a very roundabout manner to a memory of having played the part of Picarde in the short play Kürmarker und Picarde when she was a girl of fourteen, and of having spoken broken German in the part. The chance arrival at her boarding house of a guest from Paris had awoken the whole series of memories. The interchanging of the sounds was therefore the result of a disturbance by an unconscious thought from an entirely different context.

(5) A slip of the tongue had a similar mechanism in the case of another woman patient, whose memory failed her in the middle of reproducing a long-lost recollection of childhood. Her memory would not tell her what part of her body had been grasped by a prying and lascivious hand. Immediately afterwards she called on a friend with whom she discussed summer residences. When she was asked where her cottage at M. was situated she answered: ‘on the Berglende [hill-thigh]’ instead of Berglehne [hill-side].

(6) When I asked another woman patient at the end of the session how her uncle was, she answered: ‘I don’t know, nowadays I only see him in flagranti.’ Next day she began: ‘I am really ashamed of myself for having given you such a stupid answer. You must of course have thought me a very uneducated person who is always getting foreign words mixed up. I meant to say: en passant.’ We did not as yet know the source of the foreign phrase which she had wrongly applied. In the same session, however, while continuing the previous day’s topic, she brought up a reminiscence in which the chief role was played by being caught in flagranti. The slip of the tongue of the day before had therefore anticipated the memory which at the time had not yet become conscious.

¹ [She meant to say: ‘I can’t breathe through my nose.’ Her actual last two words, ‘Ase natmen’, have no meaning.]5

(7) At a certain point in the analysis of another woman patient I had to tell her that I suspected her of having been ashamed of her family during the period we were just then concerned with, and of having reproached her father with something we did not yet know about. She remembered nothing of the kind and moreover declared it was unlikely. However, she continued the conversation with some remarks about her family: ‘One thing must be granted them: they are certainly unusual people, they all possess Geiz - I meant to say "Geist ".’ And this was in fact the reproach which she had repressed from her memory. It is a frequent occurrence for the idea one wants to withhold to be precisely the one which forces its way through in the form of a slip of the tongue. We may compare Meringer’s case of ‘zum Vorschwein gekommen’. The only difference is that Meringer’s speaker wanted to keep back something that was in his consciousness, whereas my patient did not know what was being kept back, or, to put it in another way, did not know she was keeping something back and what that something was.

(8) The next example of a slip of the tongue is also to be traced back to something intentionally withheld. I once met two old ladies in the Dolomites who were dressed up in walking clothes. I accompanied them part of the way, and we discussed the pleasures and also the trials of spending a holiday in that way. One of the ladies admitted that spending the day like that entailed a good deal of discomfort. ‘It is certainly not at all pleasant’, she said, ‘if one has been tramping all day in the sun and has perspired right through one’s blouse and chemise.’ In this sentence she had to overcome a slight hesitation at one point. Then she continued: ‘But then when one gets "nach Hose" and can change...’ No interpellation, I fancy, was necessary in order to explain this slip. The lady’s intention had obviously been to give a more complete list of her clothes: blouse, chemise and Hose. Reasons of propriety led her to suppress any mention of the third article of linen. But in the next sentence, with its different subject-matter, the suppressed word emerged against her will, in the form of a distortion of the similar word ‘nach Hause '.

(9) ‘If you want to buy carpets,’ a lady said to me, ‘you must go to Kaufmann [a proper name, also meaning ‘merchant’] in the Matthäusgasse [Matthew Street]. I think I can give you recommendation there.’ ‘At Matthäus...’ I repeated, ‘I mean Kaufmann’s.’ My repeating one name in the other’s place looks like a result of my thoughts being distracted. They really were distracted by what the woman said, for she diverted my attention to something much more important to me than carpets. As a matter of fact, the house in which my wife lived when she was my fiancée was in the Matthäusgasse. The entrance to the house was in another street, and I now noticed that I had forgotten its name and could only make it conscious in a round about way. The name Matthäus, which I was lingering over, was therefore a substitute name for the forgotten street-name. It was more suitable for this purpose than the name Kaufmann, for Matthäus is exclusively a personal name, while Kaufmann is not, and the forgotten street also bears the name of a person: Radetzky.

(10) The following case could just as appropriately be included in the chapter below on ‘Errors’, but I quote it here, since the phonetic relations, which were the basis of one word being put in place of another, are quite unusually clear. A woman patient told me a dream: A child had resolved to kill itself by means of a snake-bite. It carried out its resolution. She watched it writhing in convulsions, and so on. She had now to find the impressions of the previous day which the dream had taken as its starting point. She immediately recalled that on the previous evening she had listened to a public lecture on first aid for snake-bites. If an adult and a child were bitten at the same time, the child’s injury should be attended to first. She also remembered what the lecturer had prescribed by way of treatment. It would very much depend, he had said, on what kind of snake caused the bite. I interrupted at this point and asked: Surely he must have said that we have very few poisonous kinds in these parts and he must have told you which are the dangerous ones? ‘Yes, he particularly mentioned the "Klapperschlange [rattlesnake]".’ My laughter drew her attention to her having said something wrong. She did not correct the name, but took back her statement: ‘Yes, of course, they aren’t found here; he was talking of the viper. How can I have got the idea of the rattlesnake?’ I suspected it was due to interference by the thoughts which had hidden behind her dream. Suicide by means of a snake-bite could hardly be anything other than an allusion to the beautiful Cleopatra [in German: ‘Kleopatra’]. The great similarity between the sound of the two words, the occurrence in both of the same letters ‘Kl... p...’ in the same order, and of the same stressed ‘a’, was unmistakable. The close connection between the names ‘Klapperschlange’ and ‘Kleopatra’ resulted in her judgement being momentarily restricted, so that she saw no objection to asserting that the lecturer had given his audience in Vienna instructions on how to treat rattlesnake bites. In the ordinary way she knew as well as I did that that species of snake is not among the fauna of our country. We will not blame her for her equal lack of hesitation in transferring the rattlesnake to Egypt, for it is usual for us to lump together everything which is non-European and exotic, and I had myself to reflect for a moment before declaring that the rattlesnake is confined to the New World.

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