Autobiographical note 57 страница

The continuation of the analysis brought further confirmation. On the previous day the dreamer had for the first time inspected the Mark Antony monument by Strasser, which stood in the vicinity of her home. This then was the second exciting cause of the dream (the first having been the lecture on snake bites). In the continuation of the dream she was rocking a child in her arms. This scene reminded her of Gretchen. Further ideas which occurred to her brought reminiscences of Arria und Messalina. From the fact that the names of so many plays made their appearance in the dream-thoughts we may already have a suspicion that in her earlier years the dreamer had cherished a secret passion for the profession of actress. The beginning of the dream -’A child had resolved to put an end to its life by means of a snake-bite’ - had in fact no other meaning than that when she was a child she had made up her mind to become a famous actress one day. Finally, from the name ‘Messalina’ the path of thoughts branched off which led to the essential content of the dream. Certain recent events had made her apprehensive that her only brother might make a socially unsuitable marriage, a mésalliance with a non-Aryan [the latter from the ‘Arria’ part of the tragedy’s title]

(11) I will reproduce here an entirely innocent example (of perhaps one whose motives were insufficiently elucidated), because it displays a transparent mechanism.

A German who was travelling in Italy needed a strap to tie up his damaged trunk. For ‘strap’ the dictionary gave him the Italian word ‘corregia’. It will be easy, he thought, to remember the word by thinking of the painter Corregio. After that he went into a shop and asked for ‘una ribera’.

He had apparently not been successful in replacing the German word by the Italian one in his memory but his efforts were nevertheless not entirely unsuccessful. He knew he had to keep in mind the name of a painter, and in this way he hit upon the name not of the painter who sounded much the same as the Italian word, but of another one who resembled the German word ‘Riemen’. I could of course have quoted the present case just as appropriately as an example of the for getting of a name rather than of a slip of the tongue.

When I was collecting slips of the tongue for the first edition of this book I proceeded by subjecting to analysis every case I was able to observe, and accordingly included the less impressive ones. Since then a number of other people have undertaken the amusing task of collecting and analysing slips of the tongue, and have thus enabled me to select from a richer material.

(12) A young man said to his sister: ‘I’ve completely fallen out with the D.’s now. We’re not on speaking terms any longer.’ ‘Yes indeed!’ she answered, ‘they’re a fine Lippschaft.’¹ She meant to say ‘Sippschaft’ [lot, crew]’, but in the slip she compressed two ideas: viz. that her brother had himself once begun a flirtation with the daughter of this family, and that this daughter was said to have recently become involved in a serious and irregular Liebschaft [love-affair].

¹ [A non-existent word.]9

(13) A young man addressed a lady in the street in the following words: ‘If you will permit me, madam, I should like to "begleit-digen" you.’ It was obvious what his thoughts were: he would like to ‘begleiten ' her, but was afraid his offer would ‘beleidigen ' her. That these two conflicting emotional impulses found expression in one word - in the slip of the tongue, in fact - indicates that the young man’s real intentions were at any rate not of the purest, and were bound to seem, even to himself, insulting to the lady. But while he attempted to conceal this from her, his unconscious played a trick on him by betraying his real intentions. But on the other hand he in this way, as it were, anticipated the lady’s conventional retort: ‘Really! What do you take me for? How dare you insult me!’ (Reported by O. Rank.)

I will next quote a number of examples from an article by Stekel, entitled ‘Unconscious Admissions’, in the Berliner Tageblatt of January 4, 1904.

(14) ‘An unpleasant part of my unconscious thoughts is disclosed by the following example. I may start by stating that in my capacity as a doctor I never consider my remuneration but only have the patient’s interest in mind: that goes without saying. I was with a woman patient to whom I was giving medical attention in a period of convalescence after a serious illness. We had been though hard days and nights together. I was happy to find her improved; I painted a picture for her benefit of the delights of a stay in Abbazia, and concluded by saying: "If, as I hope, you will not leave your bed soon...." This obviously owed its origin to an egoistic motive in the unconscious, namely that I should be able to continue treating this well-to-do patient some time longer - a wish that is entirely foreign to my waking consciousness and which I would indignantly repudiate.’

(15) Here is another example from Stekel. ‘My wife was engaging a French governess for the afternoons, and after agreement had been reached on the terms, wanted to retain her testimonials. The Frenchwoman asked to be allowed to keep them, giving as her reason: Je cherche encore pour les après-midis, pardon, pour le avant-midis [I am still looking for work in the afternoons - I mean, in the forenoons]. She obviously had the intention of looking round elsewhere and perhaps finding better terms - an intention which she in fact carried out.’

(16) From Stekel: ‘I had to give a stiff lecture to a wife; and her husband, at whose request I did it, stood outside the door listening. At the end of my sermon, which had made a visible impression, I said: "Good-bye, sir." To any well-informed person I was thus betraying the fact that my words were addressed to the husband and that I had spoken them for his benefit.’

(17) Stekel reports of himself that at one time he had two patients from Trieste in treatment whom he always used to address the wrong way round. ‘Good morning, Herr Peloni’, he would say to Askoli, and ‘Good morning, Herr Askoli’ to Peloni. He was at first inclined not to attribute any deeper motive to this confusion but to explain it as being due to the numerous points of resemblance between the two gentlemen. However it was easy for him to convince himself that the interchanging of the names corresponded in this case to a kind of boastfulness: he was able in this way to let each of his Italian patients know that he was not the only visitor from Trieste who had come to Vienna in search of his medical advice.

(18) Stekel reports that during a stormy General Meeting he said: ‘We shall now streiten ' (instead of ‘schreiten ') ‘to point four on the agenda.’

(19) A professor declared in his inaugural lecture: ‘I am not geneigt ' (instead of ‘geeignet ') ‘to describe the services of my most esteemed predecessor.’

(20) To a lady whom he suspected of having Graves’ disease Stekel said: ‘You are about a Kropf ' (instead of ‘Kopf ') ‘taller than your sister.’

(21) Stekel reports: ‘Someone wanted to describe the relationship of two friends and to bring out the fact that one of them was Jewish. He said: "They lived together like Castor and Pollak."¹ This was certainly not said as a joke; the speaker did not notice the slip himself until I drew his attention to it.’

¹ [Castor and Pollux were the ‘heavenly twins’ of Greek mythology. Pollak is a common Jewish name in Vienna.]1

(22) Occasionally a slip of the tongue takes the place of a detailed characterization. A young woman who wore the breeches in her home told me that her sick husband had been to the doctor to ask what diet he ought to follow for his health. The doctor, however, had said that a special diet was not important. She added: ‘He can eat and drink what I want.’

The following two examples given by Reik (1915) have their origin in situations where slips of the tongue occur especially easily - situations in which more must be kept back than can be said.

(23) A gentleman was offering his condolences to a young lady whose husband had recently died, and he intended to add: ‘You will find consolation in devoting yourself entirely to your children.’ Instead he said ‘

widwen’.¹ The suppressed thought referred to consolation of another kind: a young and pretty widow will soon enjoy fresh sexual pleasures.

(24) At an evening party the same gentleman was having a conversation with the same lady about the extensive preparations being made in Berlin for Easter, and asked: ‘Have you seen today’s display at Wertheim’s? The place is completely decollated.’ He had not dared to express his admiration for the beautiful lady’s décolletage, while the word ‘Auslage’ was used unconsciously in two senses.

The same condition applies to another case, observed by Dr. Hanns Sachs, of which he has tried to give an exhaustive account:

(25) ‘A lady was telling me about a common acquaintance. The last time she saw him, he was, she said, as elegantly dressed as ever: in particular he was wearing strikingly beautiful brown Halbschuhe. When I asked where she had met him she replied: "He rang at the door of my house and I saw him through the blinds, which were down. But I didn’t open the door or give any other sign of life, as I didn’t want him to know I was already back in town." While I was listening to her I had an idea that she was concealing something from me, most probably the fact that her reason for not opening the door was that she was not alone and not properly dressed to receive visitors; and I asked her somewhat ironically: "So you were able to admire his Hausschuhe - Halbschuhe, I mean - through the blinds when they were drawn?" In Hausschuhe I was giving expression to the thought of her Hauskleid which I had refrained from uttering. There was on the other hand a temptation to set rid of the word "Halb " for the reason that it was precisely this word which contained the core of the forbidden answer: "You are only telling me half the truth and are hiding the fact that you were half dressed." The slip of the tongue was encouraged by the additional circumstance that we had been talking directly before about this particular gentleman’s married life, about his häuslich happiness; this no doubt helped to determine the displacement on to him. Finally, I must confess that envy on my part may perhaps have contributed to my placing this elegant gentleman in the street in house shoes; only recently I myself bought a pair of brown low shoes, which are certainly not "strikingly beautiful" any longer.’

¹ [A non-existent word.]2

Times of war like the present produce numerous slips of the tongue which there is not much difficulty in understanding.

(26) ‘What regiment is your son with?’ a lady was asked. She replied: ‘With the 42nd murderers’.

(27) Lieutenant Henrik Haiman writes from the front (1917): ‘While I was reading an absorbing book, I was torn away to act temporarily as reconnaissance telephone operator. When the artillery post gave the signal to test the line I reacted with: "Duly tested and in order; Ruhe."¹ According to regulations the message should have run: "Duly tested and in order; Schluss." My aberration is to be explained by my annoyance at being interrupted while I was reading.’

(28) A sergeant instructed his men to give their people at home their correct addresses, so that ‘Gespeckstücke’ should not go astray.²

¹ [‘Quiet’; often used as an exclamation: ‘Silence!’]

² [He meant to say ‘Gepäckstücke’ (‘parcels’). ‘Gespeckstücke’ is a non-existent word; but ‘Speckstücke’ would mean ‘bits of bacon’. The vowel after the ‘p’ has practically the same sound in each case (whether written ‘e’ or ‘ä').]

(29) The following exceedingly fine example, which is also significant in view of its most unhappy background, I owe to Dr. L. Czeszer, who observed it while he was living in neutral Switzerland during the war and who analysed it exhaustively. I quote his letter verbatim with some inessential omissions:

‘I am taking the liberty of sending you an account of a slip of the tongue of which Professor M. N. of O. University was the victim in one of the lectures that he gave on the psychology of feelings during the summer term which has just ended. I must start by saying that these lectures took place in the Aula of the University before a great crowd of interned French prisoners-of-war as well as of students, most of whom were French-Swiss whose sympathies lay strongly on the side of the Entente. In the town of O., as in France itself, "boche" is the name in universal and exclusive use for the Germans. But in public announcements, and in lectures and the like, senior public servants, professors and other persons in responsible positions make an effort, for the sake of neutrality, to avoid the ominous word.

‘Professor N, was in the middle of discussing the practical significance of affects, and intended to quote an example illustrating how an affect can be deliberately exploited in such a way that a muscular activity which is uninteresting in itself becomes charged with pleasurable feelings, and so made more intense. He accordingly told a story - he was, of course, speaking in French - which had just then been reproduced in the local papers from a German one. It concerned a German schoolmaster who had put his pupils to work in the garden, and in order to encourage them to work with greater intensity invited them to imagine that with every clod of earth that they broke up they were breaking a French skull. Every time the word for "German" came up in the course of his story N. of course said "allemand" quite correctly and not "boche". But when he came to the point of the story he gave the school-master’s words in the following form: Imaginez-vous qu’en chaque moche vous écrasez le cráne d’un Français. That is to say, instead of motte [the French word for ‘clod’] - moche!

‘One can see very clearly how this scrupulous scholar took a firm grip on himself at the beginning of his story, to prevent himself from yielding to habit - perhaps even to temptation and from permitting a word that had actually been expressly proscribed by a federal decree to fall from the rostrum of the University Aula! And at the precise moment at which he had successfully said "instituteur allemand " with perfect correctness for what was the last time, and was hurrying with an inward sigh of relief to the conclusion, which seemed to offer no pitfalls - the word which had been suppressed with so much effort caught hold of the similar-sounding ‘

motte", and the damage was done. Anxiety about committing a political indiscretion, perhaps a suppressed desire to employ the usual word in spite of everything - the word that everyone expected - and the resentment of one who was born a republican and a democrat at every restriction on the free expression of opinion - all these interfered with his main intention of giving a punctilious rendering of the illustration. The interfering trend was known to the speaker and he had, as we cannot but suppose, thought of it directly before he made the slip of the tongue.

‘Professor N. did not notice his slip: at least he did not correct it, which is something one usually does quite automatically. On the other hand the slip was received by the mainly French audience with real satisfaction and its effect was exactly as though it had been an intentional play upon words. I myself followed this seemingly innocent occurrence with real inner excitement. For although I had for obvious reasons to forgo asking the professor the questions prompted by the psycho-analytic method, I nevertheless took his slip of the tongue as conclusive evidence of the correctness of your theory about the determining of parapraxes and the deep-lying analogies and connections between slips of the tongue and jokes.’

(30) The following slip of the tongue, which was reported by an Austrian officer, Lieutenant T., on his return home, also had its origin among the melancholy impressions of war-time:

‘For several months of the time that I was a prisoner-of-war in Italy I was one of two hundred officers accommodated in a small villa. During this time one of our number died of influenza. The impression made by this event was naturally a deep one, for the circumstances in which we found ourselves, the lack of medical assistance and the helplessness of our condition at the time made it more than probable that an epidemic would break out. - We had laid out the dead man in a cellar-room. In the evening, after I had taken a walk around our house with a friend, we both expressed a wish to see the dead body. The sight which greeted me on entering the cellar (I was the one in front) startled me violently, for I had not expected to find the bier so near the entrance and to be confronted at such close quarters with a face transformed by the play of the candle light into something set in movement. While the effects of this scene were still on us we continued our walk around the house. When we came to a place from where there was a view of the park bathed in the light of a full moon, a brightly-lit meadow and beyond it a thing veil of mist, I described the picture that it conjured up; it was as if I saw a ring of elves dancing under the fringe of the neighbouring pine trees.

‘The next afternoon we buried our dead comrade. The course of our walk from our prison to the cemetery of the small neighbouring village was both bitter and humiliating for us; for a mocking, jeering crowd made up of shouting half-grown lads and rough, noisy villagers took advantage of the occasion to give open vent to their emotions, which were a mixture of curiosity and hatred. My feeling that even in this defenceless condition we could not escape insults and my disgust at the demonstration of coarseness overwhelmed me with bitterness until the evening. At the same hour as on the previous day and with the same companion, I began to walk along the gravel path around our house, just as I had done before; and as we passed by the grating of the cellar behind which the dead body had lain I was seized by the memory of the impression which the sight of it had made on me. At the place where the brightly lit park once more lay before me, in the light of the same, full moon, I stopped and said to my companion: "We could sit down here in the grave - grass and sink a serenade." My attention was not caught until I made the second slip; I had corrected the first one without having become conscious of the meaning it contained. I now reflected on them and put them together: "in the grave - to sink!" The following pictures flashed through my mind with lightning rapidity: elves dancing and hovering in the moonlight; our comrade lying on his bier, the impression of movement; some scenes from the burial, the sensation of the disgust I had felt and of the disturbance of our mourning; the memory of some conversations about the infectious illness that had appeared, and the forebodings expressed by several of the officers. Later I remembered that it was the date of my father’s death; in view of my usually very poor memory for dates I found this striking.

‘Subsequent reflection brought home to me the sameness of the external circumstances on the two evenings: the same time of day and lighting conditions, the identical place and companion. I recalled my uneasy feelings when there had been an anxious discussion of the possibility of the influenza spreading; and I remembered at the same time my inner prohibition against letting myself be overcome by fear. I also became conscious of the significance attaching to the order of the words "we could - in the grave - sink",¹ and I realized that only the initial correction of "grave" into "grass", which had taken place unobtrusively, had led to the second slip ("sink" for "sing") in order to ensure that the suppressed complex should have its full expression.

‘I may add that I suffered at the time from alarming dreams about a very close relative. I repeatedly saw her ill and once actually dead. Just before I was taken prisoner I had received news that the influenza was raging with particular virulence in her part of the world, and I had expressed my lively fears to her about it. Since then I had been out of touch with her. Some months later I received news that she had fallen a victim to the epidemic a fortnight before the episode I have described!’

(31) The next example of a slip of the tongue throws a flash of light on one of those painful conflicts which fall to the lot of a doctor. A man whose illness was in all probability a fatal one, though the diagnosis had not as yet been confirmed, had come to Vienna to await the solution of his problem, and had begged a friend whom he had known since his youth, and who had become a well-known physician, to undertake his treatment. This the friend had with some reluctance finally agreed to do. It was intended that the sick man should stay in a nursing home and the doctor proposed that it should be the ‘Hera’ sanatorium. ‘Surely’, objected the patient, ‘that is a home for a special type of case only (a maternity home).’ ‘Oh no!’ replied the doctor hastily, ‘in the "Hera" they can umbringen - I mean, unterbringen - every type of patient.’ He then violently disputed the interpretation of his slip. ‘Surely you won’t believe I have hostile impulses against you?’ A quarter of an hour later, as the doctor was going out with the lady who had undertaken to nurse the invalid, he said: ‘I can’t find anything, and I still don’t believe in it. But if it should be so, I am in favour of a strong dose of morphia and a peaceful finish.’ It emerged that his friend had stipulated that he (the doctor) should shorten his sufferings by means of a drug as soon as it was confirmed that he was past helping. Thus the doctor had in fact undertaken to put an end to his friend.

¹ [‘Wir könnten ins Grab sinken’ - ‘we could sink in the grave’. The order of the words, on which the present point turns, is different in English and in German.]7

(32) Here is a quite especially instructive slip of the tongue which I should not like to omit, although according to my authority it is some twenty years old. ‘A lady once advanced the following opinion at a social gathering - and the words show that they were uttered with fervour and under the pressure of a host of secret impulses: "Yes, a woman must be pretty if she is to please men. A man is much better off; as long as he has his five straight limbs he needs nothing more!" This example allows us a good view of the intimate mechanism of a slip of the tongue that results from condensation or from a contamination (cf. p. 1144). It is plausible to suppose that we have here a fusion of two turns of phrase with similar meanings:

as long as he has his four straight limbs

as long as he has his five wits about him.

Or the element straight [‘gerade’] may have been common to two intended expressions which ran:

as long as he has his straight limbs

to treat all five(s) as even numbers¹

‘There is nothing in fact to prevent us from assuming that both turns of phrase, the one about his five wits and the one about ‘the even number five’, played their separate parts in causing first a number, and then the mysterious five instead of the simple four, to be introduced into the sentence dealing with the straight limbs. But this fusion would certainly not have come about if, in the form that appeared in the slip of the tongue, it had not had a good meaning of its own - one expressing a cynical truth which could not of course be admitted to undisguised, coming as it did from a woman. - Finally we should not omit to draw attention to the fact that the lady’s remark, as worded, could pass just as well for a capital joke as for an amusing slip of the tongue. It is simply a question of whether she spoke the words with a conscious or an unconscious intention. In our case the way the speaker behaved certainly ruled out any notion of conscious intention and excluded the idea of its being a joke.’

¹ [‘Alle fünf gerade sein lassen.’ The German ‘gerade’ means both ‘straight and ‘even’. The meaning of the phrase, literally translated in the text, is: ‘To close one’s eyes to irregularities.’]8

How closely a slip of the tongue can approximate to a joke is shown in the following case, reported by Rank (1913), in which the woman responsible for the slip actually ended by herself treating it as a joke and laughing at it.

(33) ‘A recently married man, whose wife was concerned about preserving her girlish appearance and only with reluctance allowed him to have frequent sexual intercourse, told me the following story which in retrospect both he and his wife found extremely funny. After a night in which he had once again disobeyed his wife’s rule of abstinence, he was shaving in the morning in the bedroom which they shared, while his wife was still in bed; and, as he had often done to save trouble, he made use of his wife’s powder-puff which was lying on the bedside table. His wife, who was extremely concerned about her complexion, had several times told him not to, and therefore called out angrily: "There you go again, powdering me with your puff!" Her husband’s laughter drew her attention to her slip (she had meant to say: "you are powdering yourself again with my puff") and she herself ended by joining in his laughter. "To powder" is an expression familiar to every Viennese for "to copulate"; and a powder-puff is an obvious phallic symbol.’

(34) In the following example, too - supplied by Storfer - it might be thought that a joke was intended:

Frau B., who was suffering from an affection of obviously psychogenic origin, was repeatedly recommended to consult a psycho-analyst, Dr. X. She persistently declined to do so, saying that such treatment could never be of any value, as the doctor would wrongly trace everything back to sexual things. A day finally came, however, when she was ready to follow the advice, and she asked: ‘Nun gut, wann ordinärt also dieser Dr. X.?’¹

(35) The connection between jokes and slips of the tongue is also shown in the fact that in many cases a slip of the tongue is nothing other than an abbreviation:

On leaving school, a girl had followed the ruling fashion of the time by taking up the study of medicine. After a few terms she had changed over from medicine to chemistry. Some years later she described her change of mind in the following words: ‘I was not on the whole squeamish about dissecting, but when I once had to pull the finger-nails off a dead body, I lost my pleasure in the whole of - chemistry.’

(36) At this point I insert another slip of the tongue which it needs little skill to interpret. ‘In an anatomy lesson the professor was endeavouring to explain the nasal cavities, which are notoriously a very difficult department of enterology. When he asked whether his audience had understood his presentation of the subject, he received a general reply in the affirmative. Whereupon the professor, who was known for his high opinion of himself, commented: ‘I can hardly believe that, since, even in Vienna with its millions of inhabitants, those who understand the nasal cavities can be counted on one finger, I mean on the fingers of one hand.’

(37) On another occasion the same professor said: ‘In the case of the female genitals, in spite of many Versuchungen [temptations] - I beg you pardon, Versuche [experiments]...’

¹ [What she meant to say was: ‘All right, then, when does this Dr. X. have his consulting hours?’ She should have used the word ‘ordiniert’ for ‘has his consulting hours’. Instead she said ‘ordinärt’, which is a non-existent word. ‘

Ordinär’, however, means ‘common’, ‘vulgar’.]

(38) I am indebted to Dr. Alfred Robitsek of Vienna for drawing my attention to two slips of the tongue which were recorded by an old French writer. I reproduce them without translating them:

Brantôme (1527-1614), Vies des Dames galantes, Discours second: ‘Si ay-je cogneu une très-belle et honneste dame de par le monde, qui, devisant avec un honneste gentilhomme de la cour des affaires de la guerre durant ces civiles, elle luy dit: "J’ay ouy dire que le roy a faict rompre tous les c... de ce pays là." Elle vouloit dire les ponts. Pensez que, venant de coucher d’avec son mary, ou songeant à son amant, elle avoit encor ce nom frais en la bouche; et le gentilhomme s’en eschauffa en amours d’elle pour ce mot.

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