Page:Freud - A general introduction to psychoanalysis.djvu/32
would be made completely satisfactory. But many of the errors themselves can be regarded from another aspect.
Let us select slips of the tongue, as best suited to our purposes. We might equally well choose slips of the pen or of reading. But at this point, we must make clear to ourselves the fact that so far we have inquired only as to when and under what conditions one’s tongue slips, and have received an answer on this point only. One can, however, direct one’s interest elsewhere and ask why one makes just this particular slip and no other; one can consider what the slip results in. You must realize that as long as one does not answer this question—does not explain the effect produced by the slip—the phenomenon in its psychological aspect remains an accident, even if its physiological explanation has been found. When it happens that I commit a slip of the tongue, I could obviously make any one of an infinite number of slips, and in place of the one right word say any one of a thousand others, 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 the 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. That, of course, does not yet furnish any explanation, but may open the way to one. They differentiated the distortions which the intended phrase suffered through the slip, into: interchanges of positions of words, interchanges of parts of words, perseverations, compoundings and substitutions. I will give you examples of these authors’ main categories. It is a case of interchange of the first sort if someone says “the Milo of Venus” instead of “the Venus of Milo.” An example of the second type of interchange, “I had a blush of rood to the head” instead of “rush of blood”; a perseveration would be the familiar misplaced toast, “I ask you to join me in hiccoughing the health of our chief.”[1] These three forms of slips are not very frequent. You will find those cases much more frequent in which the slip results from a drawing together or compounding of syllables;
- ↑ “Aufstossen” instead of “anstossen.”