Freud - Complete Works (208 page)
¹
Slips of the tongue of this type are used,
for instance, by Anzengruber in his
Der
G
’
wissenswurm
to expose the character of the
hypocritical legacy-hunter.
The Psychopathology Of Everyday Life
1177
When the linguistic material
happens to be favourable, it often causes slips of the tongue to
occur which have the positively shattering result of a revelation,
or which produce the full comic effect of a joke. - This is the
case in the following example observed and reported by Dr.
Reitler:
‘"That smart new hat -
I suppose you ‘
aufgepatzt
’ [instead of
‘
aufgeputzt
’ (trimmed)] it yourself?" said
one lady in a voice of admiration to another. She could proceed no
further with her intended praise; for the criticism she had
silently felt that the hat’s trimmings were a
"
Patzerei
" had been indicated much too clearly by
the unfriendly slip of the tongue for any further phrases of
conventional admiration to sound convincing.’
The criticism contained in the
following example is milder but none the less unambiguous:
‘A lady who was visiting an
acquaintance became very impatient and weary at her tedious and
long-winded conversation. When at last she succeeded in tearing
herself away and taking her leave she was detained by a fresh
deluge of words from her companion, who had meanwhile accompanied
her into the front hall and now forced her, as she was on the very
point of departing, to stand at the door and listen once more. At
last she interrupted her hostess with the question: "Are you
at home in the front hall?" It was not till she saw the
other’s astonished face that she noticed her slip of the
tongue. Weary of being kept standing so long in the front hall she
had meant to break off the conversation by asking: "Are you at
home in the mornings?", and her slip betrayed her impatience
at the further delay.’
The next example, which was
witnessed by Dr. Max Graf, is a warning that one should keep a
watch on oneself.
‘At the General Meeting of
the "Concordia", the Society of Journalists, a young
member who was invariably hard-up made a violently aggressive
speech, and in his excitement spoke of the
"
Vorschussmitglieder
" (instead of
"
Vorstandsmitglieder
" or
"
Ausschussmitglieder
"). The latter have the
authority to sanction loans, and the young speaker had in fact put
in an application for a loan.’
We have seen from the example of
‘
vorschwein
’ that a slip of the tongue can
easily occur if an effort has been made to suppress insulting
words. In this way one gives vent to one’s feelings:
A photographer who had made a
resolution to refrain from zoological terms in dealing with his
clumsy employees, addressed an apprentice - who tried to empty out
a large dish that was full to the brim and in doing so naturally
spilt half the contents on the floor - in the following words:
‘But, man,
schöpsen sie
¹ some of it off
first.’ And soon after this, in the course of a tirade
against a female assistant who had nearly spoilt a dozen valuable
plates by her carelessness, he said: ‘Are you so
hornverbrannt
. . . .?’²
¹
[He meant to say ‘draw’, which
would have been ‘
schöpfen Sie
’. Instead he
used ‘
schöpsen Sie
’, which is meaningless.
The word ‘
Schöps
’, however, means
‘sheep’ or ‘silly fellow’.]
²
[Here he meant to say
‘
hirnverbrannt
’, ‘idiotic’,
literally ‘with your brain (
Hirn
) burnt up’. The
word he used instead, a non-existent term, would mean ‘with
your horn (
Horn
) burnt up’. The word
‘
Hornvieh
’, literally ‘horned
cattle’, is used in the sense of
‘fool’.]
The Psychopathology Of Everyday Life
1178
The next example shows how a slip
of the tongue resulted in a serious self-betrayal. Certain details
in it justify its repetition in full from the account given by
Brill in the
Zentralblatt für Psychoanalyse
, Volume
II.¹
‘I went for a walk one
evening with Dr. Frink, and we discussed some of the business of
the New York Psychoanalytic Society. We met a colleague, Dr. R.,
whom I had not seen for years and of whose private life I knew
nothing. We were very pleased to meet again, and on my invitation
he accompanied us to a café, where we spent two hours in
lively conversation. He seemed to know some details about me, for
after the usual greetings he asked after my small child and told me
that he heard about me from time to time from a mutual friend and
had been interested in my work ever since he had read about it in
the medical press. To my question as to whether he was married he
gave a negative answer, and added: "Why should a man like me
marry?"
‘On leaving the
café, he suddenly turned to me and said: "I should like
to know what you would do in a case like this: I know a nurse who
was named as co-respondent in a divorce case. The wife sued the
husband and named her as co-respondent, and
he
got the
divorce." I interrupted him, saying: "You mean
she
got the divorce." He immediately corrected himself saying:
"Yes, of course,
she
got the divorce", and
continued to tell how the nurse had been so affected by the divorce
proceedings and the scandal that she had taken to drink, had become
very nervous, and so on; and he wanted me to advise him how to
treat her.
¹
In the
Zentralblatt
the paper was
ascribed in error to Ernest Jones.
The Psychopathology Of Everyday Life
1179
‘As soon as I had corrected
his mistake I asked him to explain it, but I received the usual
surprised answers: had not everyone a right to make a slip of the
tongue? it was only an accident there was nothing behind it, and so
on. I replied that there must be a reason for every mistake in
speaking, and that, had he not told me earlier that he was
unmarried, I would be tempted to suppose he himself was the hero of
the story; for in that case the slip could be explained by his wish
that he had obtained the divorce rather than his wife, so that he
should not have (by our matrimonial laws) to pay alimony, and so
that he could marry again in New York State. He stoutly denied my
conjecture, but the exaggerated emotional reaction which
accompanied it, in which he showed marked signs of agitation
followed by laughter, only strengthened my suspicions. To my appeal
that he should tell the truth in the interests of science, he
answered: "Unless you wish me to lie you must believe that I
was never married, and hence your psycho-analytic interpretation is
all wrong." He added that someone who paid attention to every
triviality was positively dangerous. Then he suddenly remembered
that he had another appointment and left us.
‘Both Dr. Frink and I were
still convinced that my interpretation of his slip of the tongue
was correct, and I decided to corroborate or disprove it by further
investigation. Some days later I visited a neighbour, an old friend
of Dr. R., who was able to confirm my explanation in every
particular. The divorce proceedings had taken place some weeks
before, and the nurse was cited as co-respondent. Dr. R. is to-day
thoroughly convinced of the correctness of the Freudian
mechanisms.’
The self-betrayal is equally
unmistakable in the following case, reported by Otto Rank:
‘A father who was without
any patriotic feelings, and who wished to educate his children so
that they too should be free from what he regarded as a superfluous
sentiment, was criticizing his sons for taking part in a patriotic
demonstration; when they protested that their uncle had also taken
part in it, he replied: "
He
is the one person you
should not imitate: he is an
idiot
." On seeing his
children’s look of astonishment at their father’s
unusual tone, he realized that he had made a slip of the tongue,
and added apologetically: "I meant to say
‘
patriot
’, of course."'
The Psychopathology Of Everyday Life
1180
Here is a slip of the tongue
which was interpreted as a self-betrayal by the other party to the
conversation. It is reported by Stärcke, who adds a pertinent
comment, though it goes beyond the task of interpreting the
slip.
‘A woman dentist promised
her sister that she would have a look some time to see if there was
Kontakt
between two of her molars (that is, to see if the
lateral surfaces of the molars were touching each other so that no
fragments of food could lodge in between). Her sister finally
complained about having to wait so long for this inspection, and
jokingly said: "She’s probably treating a colleague at
the moment, but her sister has to go on waiting." The dentist
eventually examined her, found there was in fact a small cavity in
one of the molars, and said: "I didn’t think it was in
such a bad way - I thought it was merely that you had no
Kontant
- I mean
Kontakt
." "You
see?" laughed her sister; "your greed is the only reason
why you made me wait so much longer than your paying
patients!"
‘(Obviously I should not
add my own associations to hers or base any conclusions on them,
but when I heard of this slip of the tongue it at once sprang to my
mind that these two pleasant and gifted young ladies are unmarried
and have in fact very little to do with young men, and I asked
myself whether they would have more
contact
with young
people if they had more
ready money
.)'
In the following example, too,
reported by Reik (1915), the slip of the tongue amounts to a
self-betrayal:
‘A girl was to become
engaged to a young man whom she did not care for. To bring the two
young people closer together, their parents arranged a meeting
which was attended by the parties to the intended match. The young
girl possessed sufficient self-control to prevent her suitor, who
behaved in a very on-coming manner towards her, from detecting her
antipathy to him. But when her mother asked her how she liked the
young man, she answered politely: "Well enough. He’s
most
liebenswidrig
!"'¹
¹
[She intended to say
‘
liebenswürdig
’, ‘agreeable’
(literally ‘worthy of love’). The word she actually
used, ‘
liebenswidrig
’, would mean literally
‘repelling to love’.]
The Psychopathology Of Everyday Life
1181
Equally self-revealing is the
following, which Rank (1913) describes as a ‘witty slip of
the tongue’.
‘A married woman, who
enjoyed hearing anecdotes and who was said not to be altogether
averse to extra-marital affairs if they were reinforced by adequate
gifts, was told the following time-honoured story, not without
design on his part, by a young man who was eager to obtain her
favours. One of two business friends was trying to obtain the
favours of his partner’s somewhat prudish wife. In the end
she consented to grant them to him in exchange for a present of a
thousand gulden. When, therefore, her husband was about to start on
a journey, his partner borrowed a thousand gulden from him and
promised to pay them back next day to his wife. He then, of course,
paid the sum to the wife, implying that it was the reward for her
favours; and she supposed she had been caught at last when her
husband on his return asked for the thousand gulden and thus found
insult added to injury. When the young man reached the point in his
story at which the seducer says: "I’II
repay
the
money to your wife tomorrow", his listener interrupted with
the highly revealing words: "Let me see, haven’t you
repaid
me that - I’m sorry - I mean
told
me
that already?" She could hardly have given a clearer
indication, without actually putting it into words, of her
willingness to offer herself on the same terms.’
The Psychopathology Of Everyday Life
1182
A good example of this kind of
self-betrayal, which did not lead to serious consequences, is
reported by Tausk (1917) under the title of ‘The Faith of our
Fathers’. ‘As my fiancée was a Christian’,
Herr A. related, ‘and was unwilling to adopt the Jewish
faith, I myself was obliged to be converted from Judaism to
Christianity so that we could marry. I did not change my religion
without some internal resistance, but I felt it was justified by
the purpose behind it, the more so because it involved abandoning
no more than an outward adherence to Judaism, not a religious
conviction (which I had never had). Notwithstanding this, I always
continued later on to acknowledge the fact of my being a Jew, and
few of my acquaintances know I am baptized. I have two sons by this
marriage, who were given Christian baptism. When the boys were
sufficiently old they were told of their Jewish background, so as
to prevent them from being influenced by anti-semitic views at
their school and from turning against their father for such a
superfluous reason. Some years ago I and my children, who were then
at their primary school, were staying with the family of a teacher
at the summer resort in D. One day while we were sitting at tea
with our otherwise friendly hosts, the lady of the house, who had
no inkling of her summer guests’ Jewish ancestry, launched
some very sharp attacks on the Jews. I ought to have made a bold
declaration of the facts in order to set my sons the example of
"having the courage of one’s convictions", but I
was afraid of the unpleasant exchanges that usually follow an
avowal of this sort. Besides, I was alarmed at the possibility of
having to leave the good lodgings we had found and of thus spoiling
my own and my children’s in any case limited holiday period,
should our hosts’ behaviour towards us take an unfriendly
turn because of the fact that we were Jews. As however I had reason
to expect that my sons, in their candid and ingenuous way, would
betray the momentous truth if they heard any more of the
conversation, I tried to get them to leave the company by sending
them into the garden. I said: "Go into the garden,
Juden
", quickly correcting it to "
Jungen
". In this way I enabled the "courage of my
convictions" to be expressed in a parapraxis. The others did
not in fact draw any conclusions from my slip of the tongue, since
they attached no significance to it; but I was obliged to learn the
lesson that the "faith of our fathers" cannot be
disavowed with impunity if one is a son and has sons of one’s
own.’
