Freud - Complete Works (204 page)

   (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
'.

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   (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
‘
Klapper
schlange’ 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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   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]

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1158

   (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.]

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1159

   (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.’

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1160

   (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.]

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   (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.