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.
A still more impressive example was found by O. Rank in Shakespeare. It occurs in the Merchant of Venice, in the famous scene in which the fortunate suitor makes his choice among the three caskets; and I can perhaps not do better than read to you now Rank’s short account of it.
“A slip of the tongue which occurs in Shakespeare’s Merchant of Venice (Act III, Sc. 2) is exceedingly fine in the poetic feeling it shows and in the brilliant way in which it is applied technically. Like the slip in Wallenstein quoted by Freud in his Psychopathology of Everyday Life, it shows that the poets well understand the mechanism and meaning of such slips and assume that the audience will also understand them. Portia, who by her father’s wish has been bound to the choice of a husband by lot, has so far escaped all the unwelcome suitors by the luck of fortune. Having at last found in Bassanio the suitor to whom she is inclined, she fears that he too will choose the wrong casket. She would like to tell him that even so he may rest assured of her love, but she is prevented by her oath. In this inner conflict the poet makes her say to her chosen suitor:
Just that which she only meant to indicate subtly to him because she should really have concealed it from him altogether, namely, that even before the lot she was his and loved him, this the poet with exquisite fineness of psychological feeling causes to come to expression in her slip; and is able, by this artistic device, to relieve the unbearable uncertainty of the lover as well as the suspense of the audience as to the issue of the choice.”
And notice, at the end, how subtly Portia reconciles the two declarations which are contained in the slip, how she resolves the contradiction between them, and finally even justifies the slip.
It has happened that other thinkers outside the field of medicine have disclosed by an observation the meaning of some error and so anticipated our efforts in this direction. You all know the witty satirist Lichtenberg (1742–1799) of whom Goethe said: “Where he makes a joke, a problem lies concealed.” And occasionally the solution of the problem is revealed in the joke. Lichtenberg writes in his witty and satirical Notes, “He always read ‘Agamemnon’ for ‘angenommen’ (verb meaning ‘to take for granted’), so deeply versed was he in Homer.” This really contains the whole theory of slips in reading.
At the next lecture we will see whether we can agree with the poets in their conception of the meaning of psychological errors.
THIRD LECTURE
THE PSYCHOLOGY OF ERRORS (continuation)
At the last lecture it occurred to us to consider the error by itself alone, apart from its relation to the intended act with which it had interfered, and we perceived that in certain cases it seemed to betray a meaning of its own. We said to ourselves that if this conclusion, that the error has its own meaning, could be established on a larger scale, that meaning would soon prove more interesting to us than the investigation of the conditions under which errors arise.
Let us once more agree upon what we understand by the “meaning” of a mental process. This is nothing else but the intention which it serves and its place in a mental sequence. In most of the cases we examined we could substitute for the word “meaning” the words “intention” and “tendency.” Now was it only a deceptive appearance, or a poetic glorification of the error, that led us to believe that we could see an intention in it?
Let us still keep to the examples of slips of the tongue and review a larger number of such manifestations. We then find whole categories of cases in which the intention, the meaning, of the slip is quite obvious, particularly so in those instances in which the opposite of what was intended is said. The President says in his opening speech: “I declare the session closed.” That is surely not ambiguous. The meaning and intention of this slip is that he wants to close the session. One might well say, “he said so himself”; we only take him at his word. Please do not interrupt me with the objection that this is impossible, that we know quite well that he wished to open the session, not to close it, and that he himself whom we have just recognized as the best judge of his intention will affirm that he meant to open it. In doing so you forget that we agreed to consider the error by itself; its relation to the intention which it disturbs will be discussed later. You would be guilty of an error in logic, by which you would conveniently dispose of the whole problem under discussion, which in English is called “begging the question.”
In other cases, where the form of the slip is not exactly the opposite of what is intended, a contradictory sense may still often come to expression. “I am not inclined (geneigt) to appreciate my predecessor’s merits.” “Inclined” is not the opposite of “in a position to” (geeignet), but it is an open confession of a thought in sharpest contradiction to the speaker’s duty to meet the situation gracefully.
In still other cases the slip simply adds a second meaning to the one intended. The sentence then sounds like a contraction, an abbreviation, a condensation of several sentences into one. Thus the determined lady who said: “He may eat and drink whatever I choose.” That is as if she had said: “He can eat and drink what he chooses, but what does it matter what he chooses? It is for me to do the choosing!” Slips of the tongue often give this impression of abbreviation; for instance, when a professor of anatomy at the end of his lecture on the nasal cavities asks whether his class has thoroughly understood it and, after a general reply in the affirmative, goes on to say: “I can hardly believe that that is so, since persons who can thoroughly understand the nasal cavities can be counted, even in a city of millions, on one finger ... I mean, on the fingers of one hand.” The abbreviated sentence has its own meaning: it says that there is only one person who understands the subject.
In contrast to these types in which the slip plainly discloses its meaning are others in which the slip of the tongue conveys nothing intelligible, and therefore directly controverts our expectations. The mis-pronunciation by mistake of proper names, or the enunciation of meaningless sounds, is such a frequent occurrence that this alone would appear to dispose at once of the question whether all errors have a meaning. Yet closer inspection of such examples discloses the fact that it is easily possible to understand such distortions; indeed, that the difference between these unintelligible cases and the previous more comprehensible ones is not so very great.
The owner of a horse, on being asked how it was, replied: “O, it may stad—it may take another month.”[14] Asked what he really meant to say, he answered that he was thinking it was a sad business, and the words “sad” and “take” together gave rise to stad. (Meringer and Mayer.)
Another man was relating some objectionable incidents and went on: “and then certain facts were refilled.”[15] He explained that he meant to say these facts were “filthy.” “Revealed” and “filthy” together combine to form refilled. (Meringer and Mayer.)
You will recall the case of the young man who offered to “insort” an unknown lady. We took the liberty of resolving this word into “insult” and “escort,” and were quite convinced of this interpretation without requiring proof of it.[16] From these examples you can see that even these more obscure cases can be explained as the concurrence, or interference, of two different intentions of speech with one another; the differences arise only in that in the first type of slip the one intention has entirely excluded the other, as when the opposite is said; while in the second type the one intention only succeeds in distorting or modifying the other, from which arise combinations of a more or less senseless appearance.
We believe that we have now discovered the secret of a large number of slips of the tongue. If we keep this clear in mind we shall be able to comprehend still further groups hitherto entirely mysterious. Although, for instance, in a case of distortion of a name we cannot suppose that it is always a matter of a contest between two similar but different names, yet the second intention is easily perceived. Distortions of names are common enough apart from slips of the tongue; they are attempts to liken the name to something derogatory or degrading, a common form of abuse, which educated persons soon learn to avoid but nevertheless do not willingly give up. It may be dressed up as a joke, although one of a very low order. To quote one gross and ugly example of such a distortion of a name, the name of the President of the French Republic, Poincaré, has lately been transformed into “Schweinskarré.” It is not going much further to assume that some such abusive intention may also be behind distortions of names produced by a slip of the tongue. In pursuing our idea, similar explanations suggest themselves for cases of slips where the effect is comic or absurd. In the case of the member of parliament who referred to the “honourable member for Central Hell,” the sober atmosphere of the House is unexpectedly disturbed by the intrusion of a word that calls up a ludicrous and unflattering image; we are bound to conclude from the analogy with certain offensive and abusive expressions that an impulse has interposed here, to this effect: “You needn’t be taken in. I don’t mean a word of this. To hell with the fellow!” The same applies to slips of the tongue which transform quite harmless words into obscene and indecent ones.[17]
We are familiar with this tendency in certain people intentionally to convert harmless words into indecent ones for the sake of the amusement obtained; it passes for wit, and in fact when one hears of a case one at once asks whether it was intended as a joke or occurred unintentionally as a slip of the tongue.
Well, we seem to have solved the riddle of errors with comparatively little trouble! They are not accidents; they are serious mental acts; they have their meaning; they arise through the concurrence—perhaps better, the mutual interference—of two different intentions. But now I can well understand that you want to overwhelm me with a flood of questions and doubts, which must be answered and resolved before we can enjoy this first result of our efforts. I certainly do not want to press any hasty conclusions upon you. Let us coolly consider everything in turn.
What would you like to say? Whether I think that this explanation accounts for all cases of slips of the tongue or only for a certain number? Whether this conception can be extended to the many other types of errors, to misreading, slips of the pen, forgetting, wrongly performed actions, mislaying things and so on? What part the factors of fatigue, excitement, absent-mindedness and distraction of attention play in regard to the mental nature of errors? Besides this, it is clearly seen that of the two competing meanings in the slip one is always manifest, but not always the other. How is one to arrive at the latter? And if one believes that one has guessed it, how is one to find proof that this is not merely a probability but the only true meaning? Is there anything else you wish to ask? If not, then I myself will continue. I will remind you that we are not really greatly concerned with errors in themselves, but that we wished to learn from a study of them something of value from the point of view of psycho-analysis. Therefore I will put this question: What sort of purposes or tendencies are these which thus interfere with other intentions, and what is the relation between the interfering tendency and the other? Thus, as soon as we have found the answer to the riddle, our efforts begin again.
Very well then; is this the explanation of all cases of slips of the tongue? I am very much inclined to think so, and for this reason, because whenever one examines an instance of it this type of solution may be found. Still, one cannot prove that a slip of the tongue cannot come to pass without the agency of this mechanism. It may be so: for our purposes it is a matter of indifference, theoretically; for the conclusions which we wish to draw by way of an introduction to psycho-analysis remain valid, even if only a small proportion of the total incidence of slips of the tongue comes under our explanation, and this is certainly not so. The next question, whether this explanation extends to other forms of errors, may be answered by way of anticipation in the affirmative. You can convince yourselves of it when we turn to consider examples of slips of the pen, of wrongly performed acts, and so on. I propose, however, for technical reasons that we should postpone doing this until we have investigated the slip of the tongue itself more thoroughly.
The question what significance those factors, which some writers have placed in the foreground, can now have for us—such factors as disturbances of the circulation, fatigue, excitement, distraction, disturbances of attention—demands a more exhaustive reply if we assume the mental mechanism of slips described above. You will notice that we do not deny these factors. Indeed, in general it doesn’t often happen that psycho-analysis contests anything which is maintained in other quarters; as a rule, psycho-analysis only adds something new to what has been said; and it does certainly happen on occasion that what has hitherto been overlooked, and is now supplied by psycho-analysis, is the most essential part of the matter. The influence of such physiological predispositions as arise in slight illness, circulatory disturbances and conditions of fatigue, upon the occurrence of slips of the tongue is to be admitted without more ado; everyday personal experience may convince you of it. But how little is explained by this admission! Above all, these are not necessary conditions of errors. Slips of the tongue may just as well occur in perfect health and normal conditions. These bodily factors, therefore, are merely contributory; they only favour and facilitate the peculiar mental mechanism which produces slips of the tongue. I once used an illustration for this state of things which I will repeat here, as I know of no better. Just suppose that on some dark night I am walking in a lonely neighbourhood and am assaulted by a rogue who seizes my watch and money, whereupon, since I could not see the robber’s face clearly, I make my complaint at the police-station in these words: “Loneliness and darkness have just robbed me of my valuables.” The police officer might reply to me: “You seem to carry your support of the extreme mechanistic point of view too far for the facts. Suppose we put the case thus: Under cover of darkness and encouraged by the loneliness of the spot, some unknown thief has made away with your valuables. It appears to me that the essential thing to be done is to look about for the thief. Perhaps we shall then be able to take the plunder from him again.”
Psycho-physiological factors such as excitement, absent-mindedness, distraction of attention, obviously provide very little in the way of explanation. They are mere phrases; they are screens, and we should not be deterred from looking behind them. The question is rather what has here called forth the excitement or the particular diversion of attention. The influence of sound-values, resemblances between words, and common associations connecting certain words, must also be recognized as important. They facilitate the slip by pointing out a path for it to take. But if there is a path before me does it necessarily follow that I must go along it? I also require a motive to determining my choice and, further, some force to propel me forward. These sound-values and word associations are, therefore, just like the bodily conditions, the facilitating causes of slips of the tongue, and cannot provide the real explanation of them. Consider for a moment the enormous majority of cases in which the words I am using in my speech are not deranged on account of sound-resemblance to other words, intimate associations with opposite meanings, or with expressions in common use. It yet remains to suppose, with the philosopher Wundt, that a slip of the tongue arises when the tendency to associations gains an ascendance over the original intention owing to bodily fatigue. This would be quite plausible if experience did not controvert it by the fact that in a number of cases the bodily, and in another large group the associative, predisposing causes are absent.
Particularly interesting to me, however, is your next question, namely, by what means the two mutually disturbing tendencies may be ascertained. You probably do not suspect how portentous this question is. You will agree that one of these tendencies, the one which is interfered with, is always unmistakable; the person who commits the slip knows it and acknowledges it. Doubt and hesitation only arise in regard to the other, what we have called the interfering, tendency. Now we have already heard, and you will certainly not have forgotten, that in a certain number of cases this other tendency is equally plain. It is evident in the result of the slip if only we have the courage to let the slip speak for itself. The President who said the opposite of what he meant—it is clear that he wishes to open the session, but equally clear that he would also like to close it. That is so plain that it needs no interpreting. But in the other cases, in which the interfering tendency merely distorts the original without itself coming to full expression,—how can the interfering tendency be detected in the distortion?
In one group of cases by a very safe and simple method, by the same method, that is, by which we establish the tendency that is interfered with. We enquire of the speaker, who tells us then and there; after making the slip he restores the word he originally intended. “O, it may stad—no, it may take another month.” Well, the interfering tendency may be likewise supplied by him. We say, “Now why did you first say stad?” He replies, “I meant to say it was a sad business”; and in the other case in which “refilled” was said, the speaker informs you that he first meant to say it was a filthy business, but controlled himself and substituted another expression. The discovery of the disturbing tendency is here as definitely established as that of the disturbed tendency. It is not without intention that I have selected as examples cases which owe neither their origin nor their explanation to me or to any supporter of mine. Still, in both these cases, a certain intervention was necessary in order to produce the explanation. One had to ask the speaker why he made the slip, what explanation he could give. Without that he might have passed it by without seeking to explain it. Being asked, however, he gave as his answer the first idea that occurred to him. And see now, this little intervention and the result of it constitute already a psycho-analysis, a prototype of every psycho-analytic investigation that we may undertake further.
Now, should I be too suspicious if I were to surmise that, at the very moment at which psycho-analysis begins to dawn upon you, a resistance to it instantly raises itself within your mind? Are you not eager to object that information supplied by the person enquired of, who committed the slip, is not completely reliable evidence. He naturally wishes, you think, to meet your request to explain his slip, and so he says the first thing that he can think of, if it will do at all. There is no proof that that is actually how the slip arose. It may have been so, but it may just as well have been otherwise. Something else also might have occurred to him that would have met the case as well or even better.
It is remarkable how little respect you have, in your hearts, for a mental fact! Imagine that someone had undertaken a chemical analysis of a certain substance and had ascertained that one ingredient of it is of a certain weight, so and so many milligrams. From this weight, thus arrived at, certain conclusions may be drawn. Do you think now it would ever occur to a chemist to discredit these conclusions on the ground that the isolated substance might as well have had some other weight? Everyone recognizes the fact that it actually had this weight and no other, and builds further conclusions confidently on that fact. But when it is a question of a mental fact, that it was such an idea and no other that occurred to the person when questioned, you will not accept that as valid, but say that something else might as well have occurred to him! The truth is that you have an illusion of a psychic freedom within you which you do not want to give up. I regret to say that on this point I find myself in sharpest opposition to your views.
Now you will break off here only to take up your resistance at another point. You will continue: “We understand that it lies in the peculiar technique of psycho-analysis to bring the person analysed to give the solution of its problems. Let us take another example, that in which the after-dinner speaker calls upon the company to hiccough to the health of their guest. The interfering tendency is, you say, in this case to ridicule; this it is which opposes the intention to do honour. But this is a mere interpretation on your part, based on observations made independently of the slip. If in this case you were to question the perpetrator of the slip he would not confirm your view that he intended an insult; on the contrary, he would vehemently deny it. Why do you not abandon your undemonstrable interpretation in the face of this flat denial?”
Yes, this time you have lighted upon something formidable. I can picture to myself that unknown speaker; he is probably an assistant of the guest of honour, perhaps already a junior lecturer himself, a young man with the brightest prospects. I will press him and ask whether he is sure he did not perceive some feeling in himself antagonistic to the demand that he should pay honour to his chief. A nice fuss there is! He becomes impatient and suddenly bursts out at me: “Look here, enough of this cross-examination, or I’ll make myself disagreeable! You will ruin my career with your suspicions. I simply said “aufstossen” instead of “anstossen,” because I’d already said “auf” twice before it. It’s the thing that Meringer calls a perseveration, and there’s nothing else to be read into it. Do you understand me? That’s enough.” H’m, this is a startling reaction, a truly energetic repudiation. I see that there is nothing more to be done with the young man, but I think to myself that he betrays a strong personal interest in making out that his slip has no meaning. You will perhaps agree too that he has no right to become so uncivil over a purely theoretical investigation, but after all, you will think, he must know what he wanted to say and what not.
O, so he must? That is perhaps still open to question.
Now you think you have me in a trap. “So that is your technique,” I hear you say. “When the person who commits a slip gives an explanation which fits your views then you declare him to be the final authority on the subject. He says so himself! But if what he says does not suit your book, then you suddenly assert that what he says does not count, one need not believe it.”
Certainly that is so. But I can give you another instance of a similarly monstrous procedure. When an accused man confesses to a deed the judge believes him, but when he denies it the judge does not believe him. Were it otherwise the law could not be administered, and in spite of occasional miscarriages you will admit that the system, on the whole, works well.
“Well, but are you a judge, and is the person who commits a slip to be accused before you? Is a slip of the tongue a crime?”
Perhaps we need not reject even this comparison. But see now to what deep-seated differences our attempt to investigate the apparently harmless problems of errors has brought us, differences which at this stage we do not know in the least how to reconcile. I suggest that we should make a temporary compromise on the basis of the analogy with the judge and the prisoner. You shall grant me that the meaning of an error admits of no doubt when the subject of the analysis acknowledges it himself. I, in turn, will admit that a direct proof for the suspected meaning cannot be obtained if the subject refuses us the information, and, of course, this applies also when the subject is not present to give us the information. As also in legal proceedings, we are then thrown back upon indications in order to form a decision, the truth of which is sometimes more and sometimes less probable. At law, for practical reasons, guilt has to be declared also on circumstantial evidence. There is no such necessity here; but neither are we bound to refrain from considering such evidence. It is a mistake to believe that a science consists in nothing but conclusively proved propositions, and it is unjust to demand that it should. It is a demand only made by those who feel a craving for authority in some form and a need to replace the religious catechism by something else, even if it be a scientific one. Science in its catechism has but few apodictic precepts; it consists mainly of statements which it has developed to varying degrees of probability. The capacity to be content with these approximations to certainty and the ability to carry on constructive work despite the lack of final confirmation are actually a mark of the scientific habit of mind.
But where shall we find a starting-point for our interpretations, and the indications for our proof, in cases where the subject under analysis says nothing to explain the meaning of the error? From various sources. First, by analogy with similar phenomena not produced by error, as when we maintain that the distortion of a name by mistake has the same intention to ridicule behind it as intentional distortion of names. And then, from the mental situation in which the error arose, from our knowledge of the character of the person who commits it, and of the feelings active in him before the error, to which it may be a response. As a rule what happens is that we find the meaning of the error according to general principles; and this, to begin with, is only a conjecture, a tentative solution, proof being discovered later by an examination of the mental situation. Sometimes it is necessary to await further developments, which have been, so to speak, foreshadowed by the error, before we can find confirmation of our conjecture.
I cannot easily give you evidence of this if I have to limit myself to the field of slips of the tongue, although even here I have a few good examples. The young man who offered to “insort” the lady is in fact very shy; the lady whose husband may eat and drink what she likes I know to be one of those managing women who rule the household with a rod of iron. Or take the following case: At a general meeting of a club a young member made a violent attack in a speech, in the course of which he spoke of the officers of the society as “Lenders of the Committee,” which appears to be a substitute for Members of the Committee.[18] We should conjecture that against his attack some interfering tendency was active which was itself in some way connected with the idea of lending. As a matter of fact an informant tells us that the speaker is in constant money difficulties and was actually attempting to raise money at the time. So the interfering tendency really is to be translated into the thought: “Be more moderate in your opposition: these are the people whom you want to lend you money.”
If I diverge into the field of other kinds of errors I can give you a wide selection of examples of such circumstantial evidence.
If anyone forgets an otherwise familiar proper name and has difficulty in retaining it in his memory—even with an effort—it is not hard to guess that he has something against the owner of the name and does not like to think of him; consider in the light of this the following notes on the mental situation in which an error of this kind was made.
A Mr. Y. fell in love with a lady, who did not return the feeling and shortly after married a Mr. X. Although Mr. Y. had already known Mr. X. for some time, and even had business relations with him, he forgets his name over and over again, so that he frequently has to ask someone the man’s name when it is necessary to write to him.[19] Obviously Mr. Y. wants to obliterate all knowledge of his fortunate rival. “Never thought of shall he be.”
Another example: a lady inquires of a doctor about a common acquaintance, calling her by her maiden name. She has forgotten the married name. She admits that she strongly objected to the marriage and dislikes the husband intensely.[20]
Later we shall have much to say in other connections in regard to the forgetting of names; at the moment we are chiefly interested in the ‘mental situation’ in which the lapse of memory occurs.
The forgetting of resolutions can in general be referred to an opposing current of feeling which is against carrying out the intention. It is not only we psycho-analysts who hold this view, however; it is the ordinary attitude of everyone in their daily affairs, which they only deny in theory. The protégé whose patron apologizes for having forgotten his request is not pacified by such an apology. He thinks immediately: “It’s evidently nothing to him; he promised, but he doesn’t mean to do it.” Forgetting is therefore criticized even in life, in certain connections, and the difference between the popular and the psycho-analytic conception of these errors seems to be dispelled. Imagine a hostess receiving a guest with the words: “What, is it to-day you were coming? I quite forgot that I had asked you for to-day”; or a young man confessing to his beloved that he had forgotten all about the appointment they had arranged on the last occasion. He will never admit it; he will rather invent on the spur of the moment the most wildly improbable hindrances which prevented his coming and made it impossible for him to communicate with her from that day to this. We all know that in military service the excuse of having forgotten is worthless and saves no one from punishment; the system is recognized as justifiable. Here everyone is suddenly agreed that a certain mistake has a meaning and what that meaning is. Why are they not consistent enough to extend their insight to other errors and then openly acknowledge it? There is naturally also an answer to this.
If the meaning of forgetting resolutions is so little open to doubt in the minds of people in general you will be the less surprised to find that writers employ such mistakes in a similar sense. Those of you who have seen or read Shaw’s Cæsar and Cleopatra will recall that Cæsar, when departing in the last scene, is pursued by the feeling that there was something else he intended to do which he had now forgotten. At last it turns out what it is: to say farewell to Cleopatra. By this small device the author attempts to ascribe to the great Cæsar a feeling of superiority which he did not possess and to which he did not at all aspire. You can learn from historical sources that Cæsar arranged for Cleopatra to follow him to Rome and that she was living there with her little Cæsarion when Cæsar was murdered, whereupon she fled the city.
The cases of forgetting resolutions are as a rule so clear that they are of little use for our purpose, which is to discover in the mental situation indications of the meaning of the error. Let us turn, therefore, to a particularly ambiguous and obscure form of error, that of losing and mislaying objects. It will certainly seem incredible to you that the person himself could have any purpose in losing things, which is often such a painful accident. But there are innumerable instances of this kind: A young man loses a pencil to which he was much attached. A few days before he had had a letter from his brother-in-law which concluded with these words: “I have neither time nor inclination at present to encourage you in your frivolity and idleness.”[21] Now the pencil was a present from this brother-in-law. Had it not been for this coincidence we could not of course have maintained that the loss involved any intention to get rid of the gift. Similar cases are very numerous. One loses objects when one has quarrelled with the giver and no longer wants to be reminded of him, or again, when one has tired of them and wants an excuse to provide oneself with something different and better. Dropping, breaking, and destroying things of course serves a similar purpose in regard to the object. Can it be considered accidental when, just before his birthday, a child loses and damages his possessions, for instance, his watch and his schoolbag?
Anyone who has experienced often enough the annoyance of not being able to find something which he has himself put away will certainly be unwilling to believe that he could have had any intention in so doing. And yet cases are not at all rare in which the circumstances attendant on the act of mislaying point to a tendency to put the object aside temporarily or permanently. Perhaps the best example of this kind is the following.
A young man told me this story: “A few years ago there were misunderstandings between me and my wife; I thought her too cold, and though I willingly acknowledged her excellent qualities we lived together without affection. One day, on coming in from a walk, she brought me a book which she had bought me because she thought it would interest me. I thanked her for her little attention, promised to read the book, put it among my things and never could find it again. Months passed by and occasionally I thought of this derelict book and tried in vain to find it. About six months later my dear mother, who lived some distance away, fell ill. My wife left our house to go and nurse her mother-in-law, who became seriously ill, giving my wife an opportunity of showing her best qualities. One evening I came home full of enthusiasm and gratitude towards my wife. I walked up to my writing desk and opened a certain drawer in it, without a definite intention but with a kind of somnambulistic sureness, and there before me lay the lost book which I had so often looked for.”
With the disappearance of the motive the inability to find the mislaid object also came to an end.
I could multiply this collection of examples indefinitely; but I will not do so now. In my Psycho-pathology of Everyday Life (first published in 1901) you will find plenty of examples for the study of errors.[22] All these examples demonstrate the same thing over and over again; they make it probable to you that mistakes have a meaning and they show you how the meaning can be guessed or confirmed from the attendant circumstances. I restrict myself rather to-day, because our intention here was limited to studying these phenomena with a view to obtaining an introduction to psycho-analysis. There are only two groups of occurrences into which I must still go, the accumulated and combined errors, and the confirmation of our interpretations by subsequent events.
Accumulated and combined errors are certainly the finest flowers of the species. If we were only concerned to prove that errors had a meaning, we should have limited ourselves to them at the outset, for the meaning in them is unmistakable, even to the dullest intelligence, and strong enough to impress the most critical judgement. The repetition of the occurrences betrays a persistence which is hardly ever an attribute of chance, but which fits well with the idea of design. Further, the exchanging of one kind of mistake for another shows us what is the most important and essential element in the error; and that is, not its form, or the means of which it makes use, but the tendency which makes use of it and can achieve its end in the most various ways. Thus I will give you a case of repeated forgetting: Ernest Jones relates that he once allowed a letter to lie on his writing desk for several days for some unknown reason. At last he decided to post it, but received it back from the dead-letter office, for he had forgotten to address it. After he had addressed it he took it to post but this time without a stamp. At this point he finally had to admit to himself his objection to sending the letter at all.
In another case, taking up a thing by mistake is combined with mislaying it. A lady travelled to Rome with her brother-in-law, a famous artist. The visitor was much fêted by the Germans living in Rome and received, among other things, a present of an antique gold medal. The lady was vexed because her brother-in-law did not appreciate the fine specimen highly enough. After her sister had arrived she returned home and discovered, upon unpacking, that she had brought the medal with her—how, she did not know. She wrote at once to her brother-in-law telling him that she would send the stolen property back to him the next day. But the next day the medal was so cleverly mislaid that it could not be discovered and could not be returned, and then it began to dawn upon the lady what her “absent-mindedness” had meant, namely, that she wanted to keep the work of art for herself.[23]
I have already given you an example of a combination of forgetfulness with an error, in the case in which someone forgets an appointment, and a second time, with the firm intention of not forgetting it again, appears at an hour which is not the appointed one. A quite analogous case was told me from his own experience by a friend who pursues literary as well as scientific interests. He said: “Some years ago I accepted election to the Council of a certain literary society because I hoped that the society might at some time be useful to me in getting a play of mine produced; and, although not much interested, I attended the meetings regularly every Friday. A few months ago I received an assurance that my play would be produced at a theatre in F. and since then it has invariably happened that I forget to attend the meetings of the society. When I read your writings on this subject, I reproached myself with my meanness in staying away now that these people can no longer be of use to me and determined on no account to forget on the following Friday. I kept reminding myself of my resolution until I carried it out and stood at the door of the meeting-room. To my amazement it was closed and the meeting was already over! I had made a mistake in the day of the week and it was then Saturday!”
It would be tempting to collect more of these examples, but I will pass on and, instead, let you glance at those cases in which interpretation has to wait for confirmation in the future.
The main condition in these cases is, as we might expect, that the mental situation at the time is unknown or cannot be ascertained. At the moment, therefore, our interpretation is no more than a supposition to which we ourselves would not ascribe too much weight. Later, however, something happens which shows us how well justified our previous interpretation was. I was once the guest of a young married couple and heard the young wife laughingly describe her latest experience, how the day after the return from the honeymoon she had called for her sister and gone shopping with her as in former times, while her husband went to his business. Suddenly she noticed a man on the other side of the street and, nudging her sister, said, “Look, there goes Mr. K.” She had forgotten that this man had been her husband for some weeks. A shudder went over me as I heard the story, but I dared not draw the inference. Several years later the little incident came back to my mind after this marriage had come to a most unhappy end.
Maeder tells a story of a lady who had forgotten to try on her wedding-dress the day before the wedding, to the despair of the dressmaker, and remembered it only late in the evening. He connects it with the fact that soon after the marriage she was divorced by her husband. I know a woman now divorced from her husband who, in managing her money-affairs, frequently signed documents with her maiden name, many years before she really resumed it. I know of other women who lost their wedding-rings on the honeymoon and know, too, that the course of the marriage lent meaning to this accident. And now one striking example more, with a better ending. It is told of a famous German chemist that his marriage never took place because he forgot the hour of the ceremony and went to the laboratory instead of to the church. He was wise enough to let the matter rest with one attempt, and died unmarried at a ripe age.
Perhaps the idea has also come to you that in these examples mistakes seem to have replaced the omens or portents of the ancients. And indeed, certain kinds of portents were nothing but errors, for instance, when anyone stumbled or fell down. It is true that another group of omens bore the character of objective events rather than of subjective acts. But you would not believe how difficult it is sometimes to decide whether a specific instance belongs to the first category or to the second. The act knows so often how to disguise itself as a passive experience.
Everyone of us who can look back over a fairly long experience of life would probably say that he might have spared himself many disappointments and painful surprises, if he had had the courage and resolution to interpret as omens the little mistakes which he noticed in his intercourse with others, and to regard them as signs of tendencies still in the background. For the most part one does not dare to do this; one has an impression that one would become superstitious again by a circuitous scientific path. And then, not all omens come true, and our theories will show you how it is that they need not all come true.