Page:Freud - A general introduction to psychoanalysis.djvu/41

A man who was asked how his horse was, answered, “Oh, it may stake—it may take another month.” When asked what he really meant to say, he explained that he had been thinking that it was a sorry business and the coming together of “take” and “sorry” gave rise to “stake.” (Meringer and Mayer.)

Another man was telling of some incidents to which he had objected, and went on, “and then certain facts were re-filed.” Upon being questioned, he explained that he meant to stigmatize these facts as “filthy.” “Revealed” and “filthy” together produced the peculiar “re-filled.” (Meringer and Mayer.)

You will recall the case of the young man who wished to “inscort” an unknown lady. We took the liberty of resolving this word construction into the two words “escort” and “insult,” and felt convinced of this interpretation without demanding proof of it. You see from these examples that even slips can be explained through the concurrence, the interference, of two speeches of different intentions. The difference arises only from the fact that in the one type of slip the intended speech completely crowds out the other, as happens in those slips where the opposite is said, while in the other type the intended speech must rest content with so distorting or modifying the other as to result in mixtures which seem more or less intelligible in themselves.

We believe that we have now grasped the secret of a large number of slips of the tongue. If we keep this explanation in mind we will be able to understand still other hitherto mysterious groups. In the case of the distortion of names, for instance, we cannot assume that it is always an instance of competition between two similar, yet different names. Still, the second intention is not difficult to guess. The distorting of names occurs frequently enough not as a slip of the tongue, but as an attempt to give the name an ill-sounding or debasing character. It is a familiar device or trick of insult, which persons of culture early learned to do without, though they do not give it up readily. They often clothe it in the form of a joke, though, to be sure, the joke is of a very low order. Just to cite a gross and ugly example of such a distortion of a name, I mention the fact that the name of the President of the French Republic, Poincaré, has been at times, lately, transformed into “Schweinskarré.” It is therefore easy to assume that there is