Um-- Slips, Stumbles, and Verbal Blunders, and What They Mean

by Erard, Michael.

  Meanwhile, slips of the tongue of all types were being folded into larger attempts to understand human cognition, its robustness, and its frailties. In 1881 James Sully, a British psychologist, wrote the first general survey of human error. In 1900, H. Heath Bawden, an American psychologist, published A Study of Lapses, which noted a variety of speech errors, such as the man who asked the druggist for “Phosford’s Acid Horsephate” and a “portar and mestle,” or the professor who referred to the “tropic of Cancercorn,” or the father who told his son to put the “barn in the cart.” (Bawden doesn’t mention Reverend Spooner by name, though he quotes some classic spoonerisms.)

  In Bawden’s time, slips were taken as signs that consciousness was partly made of automatic mechanisms that weren’t voluntary and partly made of voluntary mechanisms that couldn’t be controlled. Slips were considered “fringes” of consciousness, the leftovers of attention. They were, Bawden said, the kin of absentmindedness, as when a man puts a sock on over his shoe or a woman smells her watch to see if it’s stopped. He noted that “instances are not infrequent in which the word ‘glad’ is written in place of the word ‘sorry’ in letters of condolence,” which happened for a range of reasons, often because someone was embarrassed, in a hurry, preoccupied, tired, stupid, or nervous.

  One of the most prominent figures who helped shape our view of the modern self, Sigmund Freud, was also the first to understand speech errors as something more fundamental to human consciousness. His view of slips departed from that of Bawden and others. As Freud would posit, the slip of the tongue was a sign of a true self seeking the light, a seeping of the unconscious out from under its loosening lid.

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  The Life and Times of the Freudian Slip

  With its broad boulevards and monumental buildings, Vienna did not seem to be a city where small events like slips of the tongue would be noticed. But at the close of the nineteenth century and the dawn of the twentieth, slips, gaffes, and lapses found a special home in the city’s collective mind. Sophisticated, decadent, and vibrant, Vienna, a city of 1.6 million people, was the capital of the sprawling Austro-Hungarian Empire, which struggled to consolidate its power. The vastness of the empire, its mix of ethnicities and languages, and the absence of a single national identity put many people who spoke distinct languages in contact and made the Viennese highly attuned to subtle spoken cues. They noted the various German dialects, whether the nasal language of the high nobility, the slightly idiomatic German spoken by the emperor, army officers, civil servants, and the intelligentsia, or the street slang of salesgirls. They listened for the fractured German of assimilated immigrants. Vienna was also home to an emotionally restrained, socially disciplined, middle class. Despite the public propriety, the city’s intellectuals (such as Sigmund Freud and Richard Freiherr von Krafft-Ebing, who studied sexual deviance) pioneered the study of sexuality, and Vienna was proud of its cabarets and prostitutes. Other contradictions, both intellectual and political, gave the place an atmosphere of secrecy and amorality. In 1990, Bruno Bettelheim argued that only in Vienna could psychoanalysis have been born. It was “one of the major intellectual developments of a time when a pervasive awareness of political decline led Vienna’s cultural elites to abandon politics as a subject to take seriously, to withdraw their attention from the wider world and turn inward,” Bettelheim wrote.

  Sigmund Freud began his career in Vienna in the 1880s, treating female patients suffering from hysteria. He worked with Josef Breuer, an older doctor, who taught Freud how to treat psychological problems by getting patients to talk about early memories and experiences and the emotions connected to them. Breuer called this the “cathartic method.” Breuer’s patient, Bertha Pappenheim, who was twenty-one years old when Breuer was first called to see her, named it the “talking cure” and “chimney sweeping.” Working with Bertha and other patients, Freud and Breuer became aware of the importance of symbolism in dreams. Freud started to write down his own. By 1896, he was writing down dreams and his interpretations of them as well as slips of the tongue, forgotten names, and misrememberings. All of these he took to be eruptions of the unconscious self’s desires.

  In 1901, Freud published The Psychopathology of Everyday Life, placing his stamp on verbal blunders forever. Psychopathology (which was first an article, then a book, published in 1904) turned the marginalia of people’s lives, including their speech errors, into spotlights on the unconscious self. With its mundane examples of conscious intentions gone awry, it became one of Freud’s most popular books. In its early editions, it makes the Viennese look like an awkward people, prone to faltering and gaffing and as equally embarrassed by their lapses and faults. In later editions of the book, Freud added some of his encounters with strangers who approached him to talk about their slips, a more frequent situation once he and psychoanalysis became better known. Sometimes his fellow Viennese submitted their slips to his scrutiny, as if he were a fortune-teller or an astrologer, not a doctor.

  Freud never enjoyed the convenience of using the term “Freudian slip,” and it’s unlikely he ever met someone at a costume party dressed in a negligee, a goatee, and a wink. Instead he wrote of Fehlleistung, or “faulty performance.” For Freud, a verbal blunder was like a thread strung through a labyrinth. By following such threads, the psychoanalyst could uncover the lair where the monstrous intentions of the neurotic patient were imprisoned. Deep conflicts existed in the unconscious self, deeper than a person could know or reflect upon. The unconscious conveyed its own desires via verbal blunders.

  The famous example of a Freudian slip, perhaps the textbook example, was the case of the forgotten aliquis. In Psychopathology, Freud recounted a conversation with a young man about the anti-Semitic prejudice they both faced. The young man tries to quote a line from Virgil in Latin: “Exoriare aliquis nostris ex ossibus ultor,” which means, “May someone rise, an avenger, from my bones.” In Virgil, the lines are spoken by Dido, the Queen of Carthage, enraged that the wandering adventurer Aeneas is about to leave her. But to Freud, the young man is expressing his hope for someone to punish people who discriminate against Jews.

  But the young man misquotes the line. “Exoriare ex nostris ossibus ultor,” he says. Freud noted the changes. He ignored the two words that the young man reversed (ex nostris for nostris ex), and focused instead on the dropped aliquis, eventually building a complicated interpretation to explain it.

  Why did I do that? the young man asks Freud.

  “We can get to the root of it at once,” Freud tells him, “if you’ll tell me everything that occurs to you when you concentrate on the word you forgot.” To Freud, the forgotten name, the omitted word, or the transposed sound all had the same source: they’d been cut off, intruded upon, rerouted, diverted, or blocked by a deeper, secret intention of the unconscious, a desire that the speaker was repressing. Freud called uncovering the desires of the unconscious “psychoanalysis,” and he would try to make it a science. Others would call it overinterpretation, even charlatanism. Still others would call it an art, a sort of modern poetry of the soul.

  The young man recognizes Freud, whom he knows as the founder of psychoanalysis, and he submits to an analysis on the fly. From aliquis, the young man thinks and says the word “liquid,” then recalls a Catholic relic in a church, a vial of blood that belonged to St. Januarius, which liquefies only once a year, and how horrified the people of the parish feel when the liquefaction occurs too late.

  Aha, says Freud. You’re worried that your lover is pregnant.

  “How on earth did you guess that?” asks the astonished young man. (The assessment was accurate.)

  “It’s not so difficult,” the older man replies, then walks the young man backward through the chain of associations he’d interpreted.

  Now we use the term “Freudian slip” to label lapses that are salacious, obscene, or hostile—and whose impropriety is immediately evident. When you read in Psychopathology about the anatomy professor who replaced the word Ve
rsuche with the word Versuchungen and said to his class that “The study of the female genitals, despite many temptations, I beg your pardon, experiments,” you almost expect him to tack on, “Well, I guess that’s a Freudian slip there.” He doesn’t, of course. That’s because he hadn’t lived with Freudian slips as long as we have. By contrast, the case of the forgotten aliquis seems too subtle to be a Freudian slip. It is, however, a good illustration of how deeply Freud dug to get to personal truths. To him, any slip or gaffe, however seemingly innocuous, hid a secret intention that could be unburied through investigation.

  Sigmund Freud’s methods for relating the trivial edges of life to its central dramas came from a source that, at first glance, seems unlikely: an Italian art historian and physician named Giovanni Morelli who, between 1874 and 1876, published a series of essays about Italian paintings. In the essays, Morelli offered to solve a problem that plagued the world of art until the days of Fourier transform spectroscopy and polarized light microscopy: how do you determine the authenticity of a painting? The historian Carlo Ginzburg has argued that Morelli, who put his finger on a new method of reading evidence, helped Freud develop his ideas and methods. The powerfully inferential method that Morelli laid out was a knowledge tool that professionals could hone, which they did. His ideas were reflected in the detective methods that Sir Arthur Conan Doyle attributed to Sherlock Holmes, in the biological measurements by Francis Galton that led to the science of fingerprinting, and later to Andrew Ellicott Douglass’s discovery that counting tree rings could help date archaeological sites. They also shaped Freud’s psychoanalysis.

  As Morelli pointed out, the traces and clues on paintings that were imperceptible to most people were, in fact, valuable evidence about the person who painted them. If you try to authenticate a painting by matching its major attributes to the representative ones of a painter’s style—such as how he used colors, how he represented light, even his subject matter—you will easily be deceived. After all, such techniques are widely taught and copied. They’re signatures. And like signatures, they can be forged.

  But an artist always left a unique mark in the details that were casually, perhaps carelessly, tossed off: earlobes, fingernails, the shapes of fingers and toes, and other flourishes, trills, and decorations all captured an artist’s unintentional signature. An authenticator should learn to examine these details, even trust them, Morelli argued. In such details an artist would not be so intent on working in his or her style; artists tend to produce this kind of visual marginalia without much thinking or planning. Yet an artistic sensibility—and identity—left its unique traces behind.

  Freud read Morelli’s essays sometime between 1883 and 1896. By 1898, he had purchased a copy of Morelli’s collected essays, Della Pittura Italiana. Ginzburg argues forcefully that Freud’s psychoanalytic method originated with Morelli. “It was the idea of a method of interpretation,” Ginzburg writes, “based on discarded information, on marginal data, considered in some way significant.” Connoisseurs of Freud will note that Morelli did not share Freud’s conception of the unconscious as a matrix of desire. But Freud himself compared his method to Morelli’s. “It seems to me that [Morelli’s] method of inquiry is closely related to the technique of psychoanalysis,” he wrote in an essay about Michelangelo’s marble sculpture of Moses.

  For Freud, slips of the tongue that had once been marginalized by laughter, embarrassment, or sheer ignorance were, in fact, valuable data. Where a person’s conscious control falters, a true intention shines out. An unconscious motivation takes the disguise of a dream, a slip, or a neurotic symptom. In Psychopathology he mentions various types: forgetting proper names, foreign words, phrases, childhood memories; slips of the tongue; slips of writing, hearing, and reading; and other inadvertent actions. Some of the slips were embarrassing gaffes. Freud once asked a patient how her uncle was; she replied, “I don’t know, these days I see him only in flagranti.” (She had meant to say en passant.) Other slips are more pointed. A woman was asked what regiment her soldier son was in. “The Forty-second murderers,” she replied. (In the German she’d said Mörder instead of Mörser, or “mortars.”)

  Freud took speech errors as something more than the “fringes of consciousness.” Unlike H. Heath Bawden, Freud wasn’t willing to say they were accidental or unintentional. They were products of will—willed by the dynamics of the unconscious. Neither were such intentions marginal or unimportant. In Freud’s view, the repressing of unconscious desires was the main mechanism by which the conscious self, or the ego, was created. They were central, not marginal. The slip of the tongue took the temperature of this process, pointing to places where psychic pressure needed release.

  It has been widely acknowledged that Freud cherry-picked slips for Psychopathology that were particularly juicy or easy to interpret. Everyday life was bursting with slips of the tongue. But his method simply had no way of accounting for them all. Instead he focused on the ones that suited his theory of a repressed unconscious.

  Methods of Freudian interpretation unpacked the drama of an ego inherent in a slip of the tongue. They also illuminated the relationships among ordinary but disparate phenomena like jokes and dreams. By 1910, Freudian memes had migrated to America, where they drew much attention in literary and artistic circles. Translated into English, Freud’s Fehlleistung was rendered as “parapraxis.” The American modernist writer Sherwood Anderson described meeting the bohemian guru Floyd Dell in 1913 in Chicago. Dell and his friends set about “psyching” people—reading the details of their behavior, noting their slips and gestures. What we now take as a central plot point in the pulpiest detective novel, Dell and his gang did for fun. “Freud had been discovered at the time and all the young intellectuals were busy analyzing each other and everyone they met,” Anderson wrote in his memoir. “And now [Dell] had begun psyching us. Not Floyd alone but others in the group did it. They psyched me. They psyched men passing in the street. It was a time when it was well for a man to be somewhat guarded in the remarks he made, what he did with his hands.”

  The Freudian slip (the term would not be coined until the 1950s) eventually took on a pop icon status, acquiring a forbidden, often sexual, flavor that Freud had not intended. It also lost its depth and stopped serving as a window into inscrutability. People who had never read Freud called any mere slip a Freudian slip to mitigate their embarrassment; saying the term becomes a magic incantation, socially useful in the way that an apology clears the air without replacing the shattered window or mending the broken heart. Announcing that “I must have made a Freudian slip” works as a social salve. It’s a way of demonstrating that you’re aware that you’ve spoken an infelicity while also giving you a way to ignore what you accidentally revealed about yourself. To Freud, all slips were Freudian. Not so for the rest of us.

  Among the other roles that it has played in the culture, the Freudian slip has invited attacks on psychoanalysis itself. Sebastiano Timpanaro, an Italian philologist, carried a personal grudge against psychoanalysis: it had never cured him of his fear of public speaking (which kept him from getting a job as a professor), and he lived much of the last part of his life indoors, stricken by an agoraphobia that he felt psychoanalysis could not dent. A committed Marxist, he skewered the Freudian slip in a 1976 book, The Freudian Slip, attempting to take down the edifice of psychoanalysis with it. In Timpanaro’s view, if the theory of repression were valid, and given how sexually uptight people in Vienna were and how high tensions ran in the politically repressive Austro-Hungarian empire, Freud should have detected more slips about sex and revolution. But he didn’t. So, concluded the Marxist, Freud must have been coddling the bourgeoisie with his talking cure.

  Timpanaro proposed unextraordinary reasons for slips of the tongue. An expert in the changes that occur in medieval texts as they’re copied by successive generations of monks, Timpanaro knew how easily a scribe could introduce an error by substituting a simple word for a hard one, leaving out letters, or reversin
g words. He called these mundane errors “banalization.” This explained even the famous aliquis example. Timpanaro argued that exoriare aliquis nostris ex ossibus ultor has an unusual word order in Latin, which the young man regularized according to the word order in German, his native language.*12 Thus, it was not surprising that he’d stumbled over it. Consequently, he forgot aliquis as well—while deciding whether or not to fix his stumble, he left aliquis out. This might be explained by a simple look at the work of medieval monks, who tended to leave out words that were less important to the meaning of the whole sentence. Aliquis, or “someone,” was one such word.

  Timpanaro pointed out that many of Freud’s examples of slips, forgotten words, or forgotten names were words in languages the speakers didn’t speak natively. Surely a slip in an unfamiliar language counted differently than a slip in one’s native tongue. The point is minor but effective—for all the mysterious powers of the unconscious, is it supposed to be multilingual, too?

  Timpanaro makes another move so playful and inspired, it’s worth relating. Recall that the young man in the aliquis example turns out to be waiting for news from his lover that she’s not pregnant. He forgets aliquis, thereby implicating himself. But Freud’s method of deciphering the meaning of the slip suggests that aliquis is the only word that could launch the discovery of the anxiety about an unintended pregnancy. That particular slip, not any other, was the only entrance into the young man’s unconscious. Is this genuinely the case? Does aliquis uniquely lead to fears of a pregnant lover?

  What if the young man had slipped up on, say, exoriare, which means “arise”? Timpanaro wonders. You could get from “arise” to “birth” easily. What if he forgot nostris? Then he might have thought of the Catholic “Our Father” (the pater noster), then slid down the chain of associations to saints, their relics, and the liquid blood (though remember that the young man is Jewish). Freud’s analysis had no monopoly on the conclusion; the interpretation seemed arbitrary, up to the whims of the analyst.