Part 3

But all this doesn’t seem to promise much of interest for a psycho-analytic investigation. We might feel tempted to give up the topic. To be sure, a closer inspection of the facts shows that they are not all in accord with the ‘attention’ theory of errors of this sort, or at least that not everything can be directly deduced from it. We find that such errors and such forgetfulness also take place when people are not fatigued or excited, but are in every way in their normal condition; unless, just because of the errors, we were subsequently to attribute to them a condition of excitement which they themselves did not acknowledge. Nor can the matter be quite so simple as that the successful performance of an act will be ensured by an intensification of attention, or endangered by a diminution of it. For a great number of actions may be carried out in a purely automatic way with very little attention and yet quite successfully. In walking, a man may perhaps scarcely know where he is going but keep to the right road and stop at his destination without having gone astray. At least, this is what usually happens. A practised pianist strikes the right notes without thinking of them. He may of course also make an occasional mistake, but if automatic playing increased the danger of errors the virtuoso, whose constant practice has made his playing entirely automatic, would be the most exposed to this danger. Yet we see, on the contrary, that many acts are most successfully carried out when they are not the objects of particularly concentrated attention, and that mistakes may occur just on occasions when one is most eager to be accurate, that is, when a distraction of the necessary attention is most certainly not present. One could then say that this is the effect of the ‘excitement,’ but we do not understand why the excitement does not rather intensify the concentration on the end so much desired. So that if in an important speech anyone says the opposite of what he intends, it can hardly be explained according to the psycho-physiological or the attention theory.

There are also many other minor features in connection with these errors which we do not understand and which are not rendered more comprehensible by these explanations. For instance, when one has temporarily forgotten a name one is annoyed, one is determined to recall it and cannot desist from the attempt. Why is it that despite this annoyance the person so often cannot succeed, as he wishes, in directing his attention to the word which, as he says, is “on the tip of his tongue,” and which he instantly recognizes when it is supplied to him? Or, to take another example, there are cases in which the errors multiply, link themselves together or act as substitutes for one another. The first time, one forgets an appointment; the next time, after having made a special resolution not to forget it, one discovers that one has made a mistake in the day or hour. Or one tries by devious ways to remember a forgotten word, and in the course of so doing loses track of a second name which would have been of use in finding the first. If one then pursues the second name, a third gets lost, and so on. It is notorious that the same thing happens with misprints, which are of course errors on the part of the compositor. A stubborn error of this sort is said once to have crept into a Social-Democratic newspaper, where, in the account of a festivity, the following words were printed: “Amongst those present was His Highness, the Clown Prince.” The next day a correction was attempted. The paper apologized and said: “The sentence should of course have read, ‘the Crow-Prince.’” Again, in a war-correspondent’s account of meeting a famous general whose infirmities were pretty well known, a reference to the general was printed as “this battle-scared veteran.” Next day an apology appeared which read “the words of course should have been ‘the bottle-scarred veteran!’” We like to attribute these occurrences to a devil in the type-setting machine or to some malevolent goblin—figurative expressions which at least imply something more than a psycho-physiological theory of the misprint.

I do not know if you are aware of the fact that slips of the tongue can be provoked, called forth by suggestion, as it were. An anecdote will serve to illustrate this. Once when a novice on the stage was entrusted with the important part in The Maid of Orleans of announcing to the King: “The Constable sends back his sword,” the principal player, during the rehearsal, played the joke of several times repeating to the timid beginner, instead of the text, the following: “The Komfortabel sends back his steed.” At the performance the unfortunate actor actually made his début with this perverse announcement, though he had been amply warned against so doing, or perhaps just because he had been.

All these little characteristics of errors are not much illuminated by the theory of diverted attention. But that does not necessarily prove the theory wrong. There may be something missing, a link, by the addition of which the theory might be made completely satisfactory. But many of the errors themselves can be considered from another aspect.

Let us select slips of the tongue, as the type of error best suited to our purpose. We might equally well choose slips of the pen or of reading. Now we must first remind ourselves that, so far, we have only enquired when and under what conditions the wrong word is said, and have received an answer on that point only. Interest may be directed elsewhere, though, and the question raised why just this particular slip is made and no other: one can consider the nature of the mistake. You will see that so long as this question remains unanswered, and the effect of the mistake is not explained, the phenomenon remains a pure accident on the psychological side, even if a physiological explanation has been found for it. When it happens that I make a mistake in a word I could obviously do this in an infinite number of ways, in place of the right word substitute any one of a thousand others, or make innumerable distortions of the right word. Now, is there anything which forces upon me in a specific instance just this one special slip, out of all those which are possible, or does that remain accidental and arbitrary, and can nothing rational be found in answer to this question?

Two authors, Meringer and Mayer (a philologist and a psychiatrist) did indeed in 1895 make an attempt to approach the problem of slips of the tongue from this side. They collected examples and first treated them from a purely descriptive standpoint. This of course does not yet furnish any explanation, but it may lead the way to one. They differentiated the distortions which the intended phrase suffered through the slip into: interchanges (in the positions of words, syllables or letters), anticipations, perseverations, compoundings (contaminations), and substitutions. I will give you examples of these authors’ main categories. As an instance of an interchange (in the position of words) someone might say “The Milo of Venus” instead of “The Venus of Milo.” The well-known slip of the hotel-boy who, knocking at the bishop’s door, nervously replied to the question “Who is it?” “The Lord, my boy!” is another example of such an interchange in the position of words. In the typical Spoonerism the position of certain letters is interchanged, as when the preacher said: “How often do we feel a half-warmed fish within us!” It is a case of anticipation if anyone says: “The thought lies heartily...” instead of: “The thought lies heavily on my heart.” A perseveration is illustrated by the well-known ill-fated toast, “Gentlemen, I call upon (auf) you

hiccough (= aufzustossen) to (auf) to the health of our Chief.” (drink) (= anzustossen)

And when a member of the House of Commons referred to another as the “honourable member for Central Hell,” instead of “Hull,” it was a case of perseveration; as also when a soldier said to a friend “I wish there were a thousand of our men mortified on that hill, Bill,” instead of “fortified.” In one case the ell sound has perseverated from the previous words “member for Central,” and in the other the m sound in “men” has perseverated to form “mortified.” These three types of slip are not very common. You will find those cases much more frequent in which the slip happens by a compounding or contraction, as for example when a gentleman asks a lady if he may insort her on her way (begleit-digen); this contraction is made up of begleiten = to escort, and beleidigen = to insult. (And by the way, a young man addressing a lady in this way will not have much success with her.) A substitution takes place when a poor woman says she has an “incurable infernal disease,” or in Mrs. Malaprop’s mind when she says, for instance, “few gentlemen know how to value the ineffectual qualities in a woman.”

The explanation which the two authors attempt to formulate as the basis of their collection of examples is peculiarly inadequate. They hold that the sounds and syllables of a word have different values and that the innervation of the sounds of higher value can interfere with those of lower value. They obviously base this conclusion on the cases of anticipation and perseveration which are not at all frequent; in other forms of slips of the tongue the question of such sound priorities, even if they exist, does not enter at all; for the most frequent type of slip is that in which instead of a certain word one says another which resembles it, and this resemblance is considered by many people sufficient explanation of it. For instance, a professor may say in his opening lecture, “I am not inclined (geneigt instead of geeignet = fitted) to estimate the merits of my predecessor.” Or another professor says, “In the case of the female genital, in spite of the tempting ... I mean, the attempted ...” (Versuchungen instead of Versuche).

The commonest and also the most noticeable form of slip of the tongue, however, is that of saying the exact opposite of what one meant to say. These cases are quite outside the effect of any relations between sounds or confusion due to similarity, and in default one may therefore turn to the fact that opposites have a strong conceptual connection with one another and are psychologically very closely associated. There are well-known examples of this sort. For instance, the President of our Parliament once opened the session with the words “Gentlemen, I declare a quorum present and herewith declare the session closed.”

Any other common association may work in a way as insidious as the association of opposites and may on occasion lead to results as inopportune. So there is a story to the effect that, at a festivity in honour of the marriage of a child of H. Helmholtz with a child of the well-known inventor and captain of industry, W. Siemens, the famous physiologist Dubois-Reymond was asked to speak. He concluded his doubtless brilliant speech with the toast “Success to the new partnership, Siemens and Halske!” which was of course the name of the old firm. The association of the two names must have been as familiar to a resident in Berlin as “Crosse & Blackwell” to a Londoner.

So the effect of word associations must be taken into account, as well as that of sound-values and similarities between words. But even that is not enough. In one type of case, before we can arrive at an adequate explanation of the slip we must consider some phrase which had been said, or perhaps only thought, previously. Again, that is, a case of perseveration, as Meringer insists, but arising in a more distant source.—I must confess that altogether I have the impression that we are further than ever from comprehension of slips of the tongue.

However, I hope I am not mistaken in thinking that in the course of our examination of the above examples an impression has formed itself in us which may be of a kind to repay further attention. We were considering the general conditions under which slips of the tongue occur and then the influences which determine the kind of distortion effected in the slip, but so far we have not examined at all the result of the slip itself, as an object of interest without regard to its origin. If we bring ourselves to do this we shall in the end have to assert courageously that in some of the examples the slip itself makes sense. Now what does it mean when we say “it makes sense”? Well, it means that the result of the slip may perhaps have a right to be regarded in itself as a valid mental process following out its own purpose, and as an expression having content and meaning. Hitherto we have only spoken of errors, but now it appears as if the error could sometimes be quite a proper act, except that it has intruded itself in the place of one more expected or intended.

In certain cases the sense belonging to the slip itself appears obvious and unmistakable. When the President in his opening speech closes the session of Parliament, a knowledge of the circumstances under which the slip was made inclines us to see a meaning in it. He expects no good result from the session and would be glad to be able to disperse forthwith; there is no difficulty in discovering the meaning, or interpreting the sense, of this slip. Or when a lady, appearing to compliment another, says: “I am sure you must have thrown this delightful hat together” instead of “sewn it together” (aufgepatzt instead of aufgeputzt), no scientific theories in the world can prevent us from seeing in her slip the thought that the hat is an amateur production. Or when a lady who is well known for her determined character says: “My husband asked his doctor what sort of diet ought to be provided for him. But the doctor said he needed no special diet, he could eat and drink whatever I choose,” the slip appears clearly as the unmistakable expression of a consistent scheme.

Now supposing it should turn out that not only a few cases of slips of the tongue and errors in general, but the great majority of them, have a meaning, then the meaning of the error, to which we have hitherto paid no attention, would become the point of greatest interest to us and would justifiably drive all other points of view into the background. All physiological and psycho-physiological conditions could then be ignored and attention could be devoted to the purely psychological investigation of the sense, that is, the meaning, the intention, in the errors. With this in view, therefore, we shall soon consider further material.

Before undertaking this, however, I should like to invite you to follow up another clue with me. It often happens that a poet makes use of a slip of the tongue or some other error as a means of artistic expression. This fact in itself proves that he thinks the error, for instance, a slip of the tongue, has a meaning; for he constructs it intentionally. It could hardly happen that a poet accidentally made a slip of the pen and then allowed his slip of the pen to stand as a slip of the tongue of the character. He wishes to reveal something by means of the slip and we may well enquire what that may be—whether perhaps he wishes to indicate that the person in question is distracted or overtired, or is expecting a headache. Of course we should not exaggerate the importance of it if poets do make use of slips to express their meaning. Slips might be in reality without meaning, accidents in the mental world, or only occasionally have a meaning, and poets would still be entitled to refine them by infusing sense into them for their own purposes. However, it would not be surprising if more were to be learned from poets about slips of the tongue than from philologists and psychiatrists.

There is an example of a slip of this kind in Schiller’s Wallenstein (Piccolomini, Act I, Scene 5). In the foregoing scene, young Max Piccolomini had taken up Duke Wallenstein’s cause ardently, and had been passionately describing the blessings of peace, which he had become aware of in the course of a journey accompanying Wallenstein’s beautiful daughter to the camp. As he leaves the stage, his father (Octavio) and the courtier Questenberg are plunged in consternation. The fifth scene continues:—

QUESTENBERG. Alas! and stands it so? Friend, do we let him go In this delusion? let him go from us? Not call him back at once, not Open his eyes here and now?

OCTAVIO (recovering himself out of deep thought). He has now opened mine And I see more than pleases me.

QUESTENBERG. What is it?

OCTAVIO. A curse upon this journey!

QUESTENBERG. But why so? What is it?

OCTAVIO. Come, come, friend! I must up And follow the ill-omened clue at once And see with mine own eyes—come with me now!

QUESTENBERG. What now? Where go you then?

OCTAVIO (hastily). To her, herself!

QUESTENBERG. To ...

OCTAVIO (corrects himself). To the Duke! Come, let us go!

Octavio meant to say: “To him, to the Duke,” but his tongue slips and he betrays (to us, at least) by the words “to her” that he has clearly recognized the influence at work behind the famous young warrior’s rhapsodies in favour of peace.