- Freud has more than once drawn attention to
the familiar fact that parapraxes are highly
'infectious ' hope to contribute a little to the
understanding of this phenomenon of infection by
describing and explaining two cases of the
kind.
-
- I was invited one evening to the house of a
certain Herr B. This man is a conceited person,
of a petty disposition, who sets great store
upon being regarded as a man of culture although
he is not in fact very well-informed. When I
arrived at his house, a number of guests had
already assembled, but others were still to
come. In the course of conversation it suddenly
occurred to me that I had left my pocketbook in
my overcoat pocket. I got up unobtrusively and
went into the room where we had left our coats,
but it was in darkness and I could not find the
electric switch. I was much surprised that the
light had already been turned off, when other
guests were still expected. I thought to myself:
'Really, this is a mean sort of economy'. (B.'s
meanness, which we often ridiculed, had played a
part in my forgetting of my pocket-book, but I
will not go into the analysis of this
parapraxis.) I went back to the other room; the
master of the house had observed my absence and
came to meet me, asking if I were looking for
something. I said: 'I have left something in the
other room. Would you show me where the switch
is? It is quite mean [German: kieinlich]
out there-er-that is to say, there is no light'
[German: kein Licht.]
-
- I was horrified at my slip of the tongue,
but B.'s expression reassured me; evidently he
has noticed nothing and, even if he had noticed,
he certainly could not have understood my slip,
for he knew nothing whatever about
psycho-analysis and would put the whole thing
down to chance. To my great astonishment,
however, in the course of the evening B. himself
made several slips, all of which were obviously
a response to my own slip. In giving me a light
for my cigarette he 'accidentally' struck two
matches at once and burnt my hand. This
parapraxis is not simply to be interpreted as an
act of revenge, though probably the
revenge-motive did enter into it; obviously the
unconscious thought behind it was: 'I don't
economize in fire (light) ; on the contrary I am
so lavish with it that you may even burn
yourself'. Later, the conversation was on the
subject of Italy. B. said: Last summer I bought
three Stromhüte (current-hats) ', meaning,
of course, Strohhütee (straw-hats). Strom=
electric or other current. Stroh = straw.]
It is hardly possible fully to understand this
last slip without analysing it, but at all
events a boast about the use of the current
underlies it.
-
- That these parapraxes were aimed at me
became quite evident later. B. was speaking
about Italian art, of which he knew very little
except some famous names, and asserted that he
'did not care for Andrea Salaino; he had such a
commonplace style'. It turned out that he could
not recollect a single picture by this artist
and had probably never seen one. The
unfavourable criticism was aimed at me by way of
the similarity in the names Salaino-Szalai. Very
likely B. had heard the name of this not
particularly famous painter somewhere and wanted
to work it into his ' art-criticism'; his
aggressive feeling towards myself came out in
the content of his verdict.
-
- It looks as though B.'s unconscious had
immediately interpreted my slip of the tongue
and thereupon reacted with parapraxes on its own
account.
-
- My friend, D., who was present when both B.
and I made our slips, also made a slip of the
tongue in speaking to our host: instead of
saying 'gas-fire' [Heizgas], he twice
said' miser' [Geizha(l)s] without anyone
else noticing it.
-
- My second instance is of a rather different
type. I wrote a letter to my friend G., in which
I betrayed some annoyance. In his reply he said
at the end' However, in your last letter you
made a little slip: you forgot to sign your
name. I had a good laugh over that'. My friend
is well acquainted with psycho-analytical theory
and he immediately interpreted my slip, quite
correctly, as an act of aggression against
himself, comparable to cutting someone in the
street. (Actually may omission had another
meaning as well, which we may infer from the
particular situation when I wrote. It meant 'I
do not altogether identify myself with the
contents of this letter '.)
- The remarkable point in this instance is the
following: my friend, who not only noticed but
interpreted my parapraxis, himself made several
slips in his reply. He misspelt my name on the
envelope in a comical way and wished me 'alles
gutte' [the correct spelling would
be'allesgute = all the best ']. These were
all slips of the pen expressing aggression and
derision (his reaction to my own slip).
-
- It appears, then, that it makes no
difference whether or not a person consciously
recognizes the meaning of a parapraxis of which
he is the object; the reaction of the
unconscious is the same in either case.
-
- These instances, which I selected as the
most characteristic from many similar ones,
prove that the unconscious of one person can
directly understand the utterances of the
unconscious of someone else. By this I do not
mean that the unconscious can discern the full
meaning and determination of another's
parapraxis (as a psycho-analyst would understand
it after a thorough analysis) ; that is
impossible. The unconscious merely grasps the
general character of the slip and its most
obvious meaning, much as a psycho-analyst may
have insight into a parapraxis without knowing
the whole nexus of its associations.
-
- It is important to note that the unconscious
may also misunderstand another person's
parapraxis, because it does not know the deeper
connections in his mind. I know of several cases
in which the reaction of another person's
unconscious to a parapraxis which was carefully
analysed was incorrect and was based on an
obvious misunderstanding.
-
- If we accept the fact that the unconscious
can understand the unconscious system of
another, we shall not have any difficulty in
explaining the 'infectious' character of
parapraxes. The infection is either an
expression of the reaction of the unconscious to
the utterance of the unconscious of another or
else it indicates an unconscious identification
with that utterance, or, rather, with the
thoughts that underlie it.
-
- The hypothesis that one person's parapraxis
'calls the attention' of another's unconscious
to this mode of expressing itself and that the
infection results from this seems to me to have
no general validity.
-
- For example, it hardly accounts for the fact
that a slip of the tongue on my part may, by
'infection', cause someone else to pick up some
object which he did not intend to, as in my
instance* of the matches. There may be some
cases which can be adequately explained by such
a notion, but I am sure that there are many more
for which this analysis does not suffice.
-
- The theory which I have suggested here may
be applied to another phenomenon, namely, the
infectiousness of yawning. Yawning
has this point in common with parapraxes: it is
an involuntary and, in many cases, a regrettable
manifestation. There are two situations which
correspond exactly to the two kinds of
infection. Two people are talking to each other
when suddenly one of them yawns.
Sometimes, according to the situation, this
implies 'You bore me'! In a few minutes the
other also yawns. The meaning certainly
is 'And you bore me!' Here, the infection is by
way of reaction. In another case, e.g. when
someone yawns during a dull lecture and
the yawning spreads through the audience,
the infection is based on identification with
the first manifestation of boredom, which, of
course, was again an act of aggression against
the speaker. Yawning is not invariably to
be deemed a parapraxis, but, while the
physiological theory may often suffice to
explain the yawn itself, it never
accounts for the infection.
-
- The physiological explanation of
yawning may perhaps help us in
determining the reason why this curious mode of
expression-opening the mouth and taking a deep
breath-should be selected to indicate boredom
and sleepiness. Thoroughly to analyse this
phenomenon requires a separate investigation;
here I will only draw attention to the
remarkable fact that boredom does not enter into
our dreams. To my knowledge no one has ever been
bored in a dream, and this is in accordance with
the circumstance that the end of boredom may be
sleep.
-
- Unconscious impulses leak out in everyday
life:
- •Parapraxes: forgetting, slips of the
tongue, accidents.
- •Wit: a "leak" occurring in a
controlled manner
- •Dreams: "the royal road to the
unconscious" containing latent content
- According to Freud, unconscious impulses
leak out in everyday life:
- Parapraxes
- Forgetting to do something, slips of the
tongue (e.g., accidentally calling your partner
by an ex-partner's name!), so-called accidents
which may be hidden hostility, etc.
- Wit
- Freud believed that parapraxes are more or
less random leaks that occur wherever defenses
are weak. However, in wit, a forbidden impulse
comes out in a controlled manner. Freud saw wit
as essentially a form of sublimation. An
impulse that would be anxiety provoking or even
harmful is vented in an enjoyable way. Wit is
therefore the safe expression of evil according
to Freud. Of course, the most common themes of
wit are sex, violence and bodily elimination -
all Freud's favourites! The forbidden impulse is
not just being expressed by the person telling
the joke but by those who laugh at it. The
purpose of wit or a joke is to allow a forbidden
impulse to be release in such a way that anxiety
can be avoided.
- Dreams
- "The royal road to the unconscious". What
most of us think of as the dream i.e. the actual
sensory content, Freud called the manifest
content. He believed however that there are
unconscious thoughts, feelings and urges which
give rise to the manifest content. This he
termed the latent content of the dream. Freud
felt latent content came from 3 sources:
- 1.Sensory stimulation (lightning, telephone)
that can prompt as well as be incorporated into
a dream.
- 2.Current concerns: incorporating these
anxieties into a dream will prevent them from
waking you.
- 3.Unconscious id impulses which the ego has
blocked while you're awake - often childhood
conflicts.
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