“In still another passage Clara, by another lapsus, betrays her secret wish that she was on a more intimate footing with Vernon Whitford. Speaking to a boy friend, she says, ‘Tell Mr. Vernon—tell Mr. Whitford.’”
The conception of speech-blunders here defended can be readily verified in the smallest details. I have been able to demonstrate repeatedly that the most insignificant and most natural cases of speech-blunders have their good sense, and admit of the same interpretation as the more striking examples. A patient who, contrary to my wishes but with firm personal motives, decided upon a short trip to Budapest, justified herself by saying that she was going for only three days, but she blundered and said for only three weeks. She betrayed her secret feeling that, to spite me, she preferred spending three weeks to three days in that society which I considered unfit for her.
One evening, wishing to excuse myself for not having called for my wife at the theatre, I said: “I was at the theatre at ten minutes after ten.” I was corrected: “You meant to say before ten o’clock.” Naturally I wanted to say before ten. After ten would certainly be no excuse. I had been told that the theatre programme read, “Finished before ten o’clock.” When I arrived at the theatre I found the foyer dark and the theatre empty. Evidently the performance was over earlier and my wife did not wait for me. When I looked at the clock it still wanted five minutes to ten. I determined to make my case more favourable at home, and say that it was ten minutes to ten. Unfortunately, the speech-blunder spoiled the intent and laid bare my dishonesty, in which I acknowledged more than there really was to confess.
This leads us to those speech disturbances which can no longer be described as speech-blunders, for they do not injure the individual word, but affect the rhythm and execution of the entire speech, as, for example, the stammering and stuttering of embarrassment. But here, as in the former cases, it is the inner conflict that is betrayed to us through the disturbance in speech. I really do not believe that any one will make mistakes in talking in an audience with His Majesty, in a serious love declaration, or in defending one’s name and honour before a jury; in short, people make no mistakes where they are all there, as the saying goes. Even in criticizing an author’s style we are allowed and accustomed to follow the principle of explanation, which we cannot miss in the origin of a single speech-blunder. A clear and unequivocal manner of writing shows us that here the author is in harmony with himself, but where we find a forced and involved expression, aiming at more than one target, as appropriately expressed, we can thereby recognize the participation of an unfinished and complicated thought, or we can hear through it the stifled voice of the author’s self-criticism.[23]
VI
MISTAKES IN READING AND WRITING
That the same view-points and observation should hold true for mistakes in reading and writing as for lapses in speech is not at all surprising when one remembers the inner relation of these functions. I shall here confine myself to the reports of several carefully analysed examples and shall make no attempt to include all of the phenomena.
A. Lapses in Reading.
(a) While looking over a number of the Leipziger Illustrierten, which I was holding obliquely, I read as the title of the front-page picture, “A Wedding Celebration in the Odyssey.” Astonished and with my attention aroused, I moved the page into the proper position only to read correctly, “A Wedding Celebration in the Ostsee (Baltic Sea).” How did this senseless mistake in reading come about?
Immediately my thoughts turned to a book by Ruth, Experimental Investigations of “Music Phantoms”, etc., with which I had recently been much occupied, as it closely touched the psychologic problems that are of interest to me. The author promised a work in the near future to be called Analysis and Principles of Dream Phenomena. No wonder that I, having just published an Interpretation of Dreams, awaited the appearance of this book with the most intense interest. In Ruth’s work concerning music phantoms I found an announcement in the beginning of the table of contents of the detailed inductive proof that the old Hellenic myths and traditions originated mainly from slumber and music phantoms, from dream phenomena and from deliria. Thereupon I had immediately plunged into the text in order to find out whether he was also aware that the scene where Odysseus appears before Nausicaa was based upon the common dream of nakedness. One of my friends called my attention to the clever passage in G. Keller’s Grünem Heinrich, which explains this episode in the Odyssey as an objective representation of the dream of the mariner straying far from home. I added to it the reference to the exhibition dream of nakedness.[24]