PARAPRAXES 2 страница

This does not appear to promise much for our psycho-analytic interest. We might feel tempted to drop the subject. If, however, we examine the observations more closely, what we find does not tally entirely with this attention theory of parapraxes, or at least does not follow from it naturally. We discover that parapraxes of this kind and forgetting of this kind occur in people who are not fatigued or absent-minded or excited, but who are in all respects in their normal state - unless we choose to ascribe ex post facto to the people concerned, purely on account of their parapraxis, an excitement which, however, they themselves do not admit to. Nor can it be simply the case that a function is ensured by an increase in the attention directed upon it and endangered if that attention is reduced. There are a large number of procedures that one carries out purely automatically, with very little attention, but nevertheless performs with complete security. A walker, who scarcely knows where he is going, keeps to the right path for all that, and stops at his destination without having gone astray [vergangen]. Or at all events this is so as a rule. An expert pianist strikes the right keys without thinking. He may, of course, make an occasional mistake; but if automatic playing increased the danger of bungling, that danger would be at its greatest for a virtuoso, whose playing, as a result of prolonged practice, has become entirely automatic. We know, on the contrary, that many procedures are carried out with quite particular certainty if they are not the object of a specially high degree of attention, and that the mishap of a parapraxis is liable to occur precisely if special importance is attached to correct functioning and there has therefore certainly been no distraction of the necessary attention. It could be argued that this is the result of ‘excitement’, but it is difficult to see why the excitement should not on the contrary increase the attention directed to what is so earnestly intended. If by a slip of the tongue someone says the opposite of what he intends in an important speech or oral communication, it can scarcely be explained by the psycho-physiological or attention theory.

There are, moreover, a number of small subsidiary phenomena in the case of parapraxes, which we do not understand and on which the explanations so far given shed no light. For instance, if we have temporarily forgotten a name, we are annoyed about it, do all we can to remember it and cannot leave the business alone. Why in such cases do we so extremely seldom succeed in directing our attention, as we are after all anxious to do, to the word which (as we say) is ‘on the tip of our tongue’ and which we recognize at once when we are told it? Or again: there are cases in which the parapraxes multiply, form chains, and replace one another. On a first occasion one has missed an appointment. On the next occasion, when one has firmly decided not to forget this time, it turns out that one has made a note of the wrong hour. Or one tries to arrive at a forgotten word by roundabout ways and thereupon a second name escapes one which might have helped one to find the first. If one searches for this second name, a third disappears, and so on. As is well known, the same thing can happen with misprints, which are to be regarded as the parapraxes of the compositor. An obstinate misprint of this kind, so it is said, once slipped into a social-democrat newspaper. Its report of some ceremonial included the words: ‘Among those present was to be noticed His Highness the Kornprinz.’ Next day an attempt was made at a correction. The paper apologized and said: ‘We should of course have said "the Knorprinz".’¹ People speak in such cases of a ‘demon of misprints’ or a ‘type-setting fiend’ - terms which at least go beyond any psycho-physiological theory of misprints.

¹ [What was intended was the ‘Kronprinz (Crown Prince)'. ‘Korn’ means ‘corn’ and ‘Knorr’ ‘protuberance’.]1

Perhaps you are familiar, too, with the fact that it is possible to provoke slips of the tongue, to produce them, as it were, by suggestion. An anecdote illustrates this. A stage neophyte had been cast for the important part in Die Jungfrau von Orleans of the messenger who announces to the King that ‘der Connétable schickt sein Schwert zurück [the Constable sends back his sword]’. A leading actor amused himself during the rehearsal by repeatedly inducing the nervous young man to say, instead of the words of the text: ‘der Komfortabel schickt sein Pferd zurück [the cab-driver sends back his horse].’ He achieved his aim: the wretched beginner actually made his debut at the performance with the corrupt version, in spite of having been warned against it, or perhaps because he had been warned.

No light is thrown on these small features of parapraxes by the theory of withdrawal of attention. The theory need not on that account be wrong, however; it may merely lack something, some addition, before it is entirely satisfying. But some of the parapraxes, too, can themselves be looked at from another point of view.

Let us take slips of the tongue as the most suitable sort of parapraxis for our purpose - though we might equally well have chosen slips of the pen or misreading. We must bear in mind that so far we have only asked when - under what conditions - people make slips of the tongue, and it is only to that question that we have had an answer. But we might direct our interest elsewhere and enquire why it is that the slip occurred in this particular way and no other; and we might take into account what it is that emerges in the slip itself. You will observe that, so long as this question is unanswered and no light thrown on the product of the slip, the phenomenon remains a chance event from the psychological point of view, even though it may have been given a physiological explanation. If I make a slip of the tongue, I might obviously do so in an infinite number of ways, the right word might be replaced by any of a thousand others, it might be distorted in countless different directions. Is there something, then, that compels me in the particular case to make the slip in one special way, or does it remain a matter of chance, of arbitrary choice, and is the question perhaps one to which no sensible answer at all can be given?

Two writers, Meringer and Mayer (a philologist and a psychiatrist), in fact made an attempt in 1895 to attack the problem of parapraxes from this angle. They collected examples and began by treating them in a purely descriptive way. This, of course, provides no explanation as yet, though it might pave the way to one. They distinguish the various kinds of distortions imposed by the slip on the intended speech as ‘transpositions’, pre-sonances’, ‘post-sonances’, ‘fusions (contaminations)' and ‘replacements (substitutions)'. I will give you some examples of these main groups proposed by the authors. An instance of transposition would be to say ‘

the Milo of Venus’ instead of ‘the Venus of Milo’ (a transposition of the order of the words); an instance of a pre-sonance would be: ‘es war mir auf der Schwest... auf der Brust so schwer’;¹ and a post-sonance would be exemplified by the well-known toast that went wrong: ‘Ich fordere Sie auf, auf das Wohl unseres Chefs aufzustossen’ [instead of anzustossen].² These three forms of slip of the tongue are not exactly common. You will come on much more numerous examples in which the slip results from contraction or fusion. Thus, for instance, a gentleman addressed a lady in the street in the following words: ‘If you will permit me, madam, I should like to begleit-digen you.’ The composite word,³ in addition to the ‘begleiten [to accompany]’, evidently has concealed in it ‘beleidigen [to insult]’. (Incidentally, the young man was not likely to have much success with the lady.) As an example of a substitution Meringer and Mayer give the case of someone saying: ‘Ich gebe die Präparate in den Briefkasten’ instead of ‘Brütkasten’.4

¹ [The phrase intended was: ‘it lay on my breast so heavily.’ The meaningless ‘Schwest’ was a distortion of ‘Brust (breast)' owing to an anticipation of the ‘schw’ of ‘schwer (heavily)'.]

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

³ [A meaningless one.]

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

The attempted explanation which these authors base on their collection of instances is quite peculiarly inadequate. They believe that the sounds and syllables of a word have a particular ‘valency’ and that the innervation of an element of high valency may have a disturbing influence on one that is less valent. Here they are clearly basing themselves on the far from common cases of pre-sonance and post-sonance; these preferences of some sounds over others (if they in fact exist) can have no bearing at all on other effects of slips of the tongue. After all, the commonest slips of the tongue are when, instead of saying one word, we say another very much like it; and this similarity is for many people a sufficient explanation of such slips. For instance, a Professor declared in his inaugural lecture: ‘I am not ‘geneigt [inclined]’ (instead of ‘geeignet [qualified]’) to appreciate the services of my highly esteemed predecessor.’ Or another Professor remarked: ‘In the case of the female genitals, in spite of many Versuchungen [temptations] - I beg your pardon, Versuche

[experiments]....’

The most usual, and at the same time the most striking kind of slips of the tongue, however, are those in which one says the precise opposite of what one intended to say. Here, of course, we are very remote from relations between sounds and the effects of similarity; and instead we can appeal to the fact that contraries have a strong conceptual kinship with each other and stand in a particularly close psychological association with each other. There are historical examples of such occurrences. A President of the Lower House of our Parliament once opened the sitting with the words: ‘Gentlemen, I take notice that a full quorum of members is present and herewith declare the sitting closed.’)

Any other familiar association can act in the same insidious fashion as a contrary one, and can emerge in quite unsuitable circumstances. Thus, on the occasion of a celebration in honour of the marriage of a child of Hermann von Helmholtz to a child of Werner von Siemens, the well-known inventor and industrialist, it is said that the duty of proposing the young couple’s health fell to the famous physiologist Du Bois-Reymond. No doubt he made a brilliant speech, but he ended with the words: ‘So, long life to the new firm of Siemens and Halske!’ That was, of course, the name of the old firm. The juxtaposition of the two names must have been as familiar to a Berliner as Fortnum and Mason would be to a Londoner.¹

We must therefore include among the causes of parapraxes not only relations between sounds and verbal similarity, but the influence of word-associations as well. But that is not all. In a number of cases it seems impossible to explain a slip of the tongue unless we take into account something that had been said, or even merely thought, in an earlier sentence. Once again, then, we have here a case of perseveration, like those insisted upon by Meringer, but of more distant origin. - I must confess that I feel on the whole as though after all this we were further than ever from understanding slips of the tongue.

¹ [In the original: ‘as Riedel and Beutel would be to a Viennese’. This last was a well-known outfitter’s shop in Vienna. Siemens and Halske were, of course, the great electrical engineers.]5 Nevertheless I hope I am not mistaken in saying that during this last enquiry we have all of us formed a fresh impression of these instances of slips of the tongue, and that it may be worth while to consider that impression further. We examined the conditions under which in general slips of the tongue occur, and afterwards the influences which determine the kind of distortion which the slip produces. But we have so far paid no attention whatever to the product of the slip considered by itself, without reference to its origin. If we decide to do so, we are bound in the end to find the courage to say that in a few examples what results from the slip of the tongue has a sense of its own. What do we mean by ‘has a sense’? That the product of the slip of the tongue may perhaps itself have a right to be regarded as a completely valid psychical act, pursuing an aim of its own, as a statement with a content and significance. So far we have always spoken of ‘parapraxes’, but it seems now as though sometimes the faulty act was itself quite a normal act, which merely took the place of the other act which was the one expected or intended.

The fact of the parapraxis having a sense of its own seems in certain cases evident and unmistakable. When the President of the Lower House with his first words closed the sitting instead of opening it, we feel inclined, in view of our knowledge of the circumstances in which the slip of the tongue occurred, to recognize that the parapraxis had a sense. The President expected nothing good of the sitting and would have been glad if he could have brought it to an immediate end. We have no difficulty in pointing to the sense of this slip of the tongue, or, in other words, in interpreting it. Or, let us suppose that one lady says to another in tones of apparent admiration: ‘That smart new hat - I suppose you aufgepatzt [a non-existent word instead of aufgeputzt (trimmed)] it yourself?’ Then no amount of scientific propriety will succeed in preventing our seeing behind this slip of the tongue the words: ‘This hat is a Patzerei [botched-up affair].’ Or, once more, we are told that a lady who was well-known for her energy remarked on one occasion: ‘My husband asked his doctor what diet he ought to follow; but the doctor told him he had no need to diet: he could eat and drink what I want.’ Here again the slip of the tongue has an unmistakable other side to it: it was giving expression to a consistently planned programme.

If it turned out, Ladies and Gentlemen, that not only a few instances of slips of the tongue and of parapraxes in general have a sense, but a considerable number of them, the sense of parapraxes, of which we have so far heard nothing, would inevitably become their most interesting feature and would push every other consideration into the background. We should then be able to leave all physiological or psycho-physiological factors on one side and devote ourselves to purely psychological investigations into the sense - that is, the meaning or purpose - of parapraxes. We shall therefore make it our business to test this expectation on a considerable number of observations.

But before carrying out this intention I should like to invite you to follow me along another track. It has repeatedly happened that a creative writer has made use of a slip of the tongue or some other parapraxis as an instrument for producing an imaginative effect. This fact alone must prove to us that he regards the parapraxis - the slip of the tongue, for instance - as having a sense, since he has produced it deliberately. For what has happened is not that the author has made an accidental slip of the pen and has then allowed it to be used by one of his characters as a slip of the tongue; he intends to bring something to our notice by means of the slip of the tongue and we can enquire what that something is - whether perhaps he wants to suggest that the character in question is absent-minded and fatigued or is going to have an attack of migraine. If the author uses the slip as though it had a sense, we have no wish, of course, to exaggerate the importance of this. After all, a slip might in fact be without a sense, a chance psychical event, or it might have a sense in only quite rare cases, but the author would still retain his right to intellectualize it by furnishing it with a sense so as to employ it for his own purposes. Nor would it be surprising if we had more to learn about slips of the tongue from creative writers than from philologists and psychiatrists.

An example of this kind is to be found in Wallenstein (Piccolomini, Act I, Scene 5). In the preceding scene Max Piccolomini has ardently espoused the Duke’s cause, and has been passionately describing the blessings of peace, of which he has become aware in the course of a journey while escorting Wallenstein’s daughter to the camp. As he leaves the stage, his father and Questenberg, the emissary from the Court, are plunged in consternation. Scene 5 continues:

QUESTENBERG Alas, alas! and stands it so?

What, friend! and do we let him go away

In this delusion - let him go away?

Not call him back immediately, not open

His eyes upon the spot?

OCTAVIO (recovering himself out of a deep study) He now has open’d mine,

And I see more than pleases me.

QUEST. What is it?

OCT. Curse on this journey!

QUEST. But why so? What is it?

OCT. Come, come along friend! I must follow up

The ominous track immediately. Mine eyes

Are open’d now, and I must use them. Come!

(Draws Q. on with him.)

QUEST. What now? Where go you then?

OCT. To her...

QUEST. To -

OCT. (correcting himself) To the Duke. Come let us go.

Octavio had meant to say ‘to him’, to the Duke. But he makes a slip of the tongue, and, by saying ‘to her’ he betrays to us at least that he has clearly recognized the influence that has made the young warrior into an enthusiast for peace.

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.’9

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.0

LECTURE IIIPARAPRAXES (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.’]1

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.

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.3

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

Дата добавления: 2014-12-23