Freudian slip of the tongue

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A Freudian slip of the tongue (after Sigmund Freud ), also called lapsus linguae , is a linguistic mistake in which an actual thought or intention of the speaker appears involuntarily.

general description

When evaluating an apparently meaningful slip of the tongue as a Freudian mistake, it is assumed that an unconscious statement comes to the fore in the meaning discrepancy caused by a slip of the tongue. It is therefore not assumed that such slip of the tongue is based on a simple, (neuro-) physiological or even associative influence on language production , but claims that it is v. a. there is a psychological cause for it. In the case of Freud's mistakes, something would be said instead of what was actually meant, which might even correspond better to what was thought and could be interpreted in this sense.

The existence of such a phenomenon was asserted by Freud (1900, 1904) in On the Psychopathology of Everyday Life . Since the general announcement of the supported on Freud's findings theory of errors has someone who makes such a slip, a bad state to prove his audience that it is not a mistake is the Freudian kind, whereas before Freud's time, such a slip of the tongue only would have been an occasion for cheerfulness, or possibly accompanied by complete incomprehension, also indignant whispers.

An example from Freud is reported here:

“A man talks about any occurrences that he objected to and continues: But then facts have come to the fore. ([…] Upon request, he confirms that he wanted to call these processes 'mess'.) 'Vorschein and Mess' have together created the strange 'Vorschwein'. "

- Sigmund Freud

This evaluation was not supposed to be verbalized, but it had found a way by inserting itself into the current statement as a (Freudian) slip of the tongue. Due to specific motivation, it is only then, namely in the case of such measures that suppress an accessory thought, that one can speak of an actual “failure”.

Justifications of the theory

Freudian slip of the tongue are those in which a psychological motivation is assumed, a "sense", as it is called by Freud, in order to make a demarcation from the judgments of "chance" or "physiological background" as the cause of such (incorrect or correct) performances. The scope of the problem area also becomes clear from this determination: On the one hand, it is a phenomenon. That means: it is at least potentially recognizable for the speaker that his listeners heard something that was not consciously intended; Rosa Ferber has found, however, that most slip-ups go unnoticed, neither by the senders nor by the recipients. On the other hand, Freud's statement that there is a general "sense" behind all so-called "Freudian mistakes" is the scientific interpretation of a phenomenon: on the premise that the slip of the tongue has an unconscious or preconscious motive as the cause - a recognizable meaning or a structure - the first task is to examine which motive can be assumed to be the most likely.

Acceptance and scientific demarcation

Compared to this approach, the scientific camp is divided into at least three parts:

  • Some consider the question of motivation to be wrong and wrong and only want to allow investigations that deal with language production and the slip of the tongue that disturbs its process from the point of view of purely physiological processes. For this camp, slip of the tongue are valuable windows that provide insights and a. into the neurologically controlled speech production.
  • Michael Motley , on the other hand, would be a representative of the other camp, which tries to experimentally prove the motivation of slip- ups in psycholinguistics . By offering sexual or neutral situations as context in a speed reading experiment, Motley was able to show that the frequency of Freudian slips of the tongue increases in sexual context situations compared to neutral ones. He thus experimentally confirmed Freud's theory,
  • and Dilger / Bredenkamp combine both approaches.

According to neurolinguistic studies, there are organically caused or randomly occurring disorders of the proper flow of speech. The reason can be, for example, destruction or malformations of areas of the language center in the brain. Therefore it does not make sense to suspect a Freudian mistake behind every kind of slip of the tongue.

The slip of the tongue research in the context of cognitive linguistics examines the connection between linguistic structures and types of slip. The explanations found here for different types of slip of the tongue make the assumption of a psychological cause in the sense of Freud's theories superfluous (see Linguistic slip of the tongue theories ).

In particular, however, the question of motivation is not inappropriate in the case of lexical slip of the tongue. Depending on which conception one has of the psychic processes and the "topology of the psychic apparatus", one will ascribe more or less power to the unconscious .

Examples

  • Freud cites in the psychopathology of everyday life : The German national representative Lattmann stands up in the Reichstag in 1908 for an address of allegiance to Wilhelm II , and if you do that, “ [...] we want to do it spinelessly. “After minutes of stormy exhilaration, according to the minutes of the meeting, the speaker declared that of course he meant unreservedly .

literature

  • Sven Staffeldt: The urge of the disturbing intention to speak. Dieter Flader's criticism of Freud's theory of the slip of the tongue , Kümmerle, Göppingen 2004.
  • Sebastiano Timpanaro : Il lapsus freudiano: Psicanalisi e critica testuale (Florence: La Nuova Italia 1974). English translation: The Freudian Slip: Psychoanalysis and Textual Criticism . Transl. by Kate Soper (London, 1976).

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Nora Wiedenmann (1998): Verschievers. Phenomena and dates. With materials on disk. Vienna: Science publisher Edition Praesens.
  2. ↑ Nora Wiedenmann (1997): Verssprecher - Dissimilation and similation of consonants. Speech production under spatio-temporal aspect . Dissertation. Speech Science and Psycholinguistics, Institute for Phonetics and Linguistic Communication; Philosophical Faculty for Linguistics and Literature II; Ludwig-Maximilians-University Munich; = 1999: slip of the tongue: dissimilation of consonants. Language production under spatio-temporal aspect (Linguistic Works, 404). Tübingen: Niemeyer.
  3. ^ Hartmann Hinterhuber : Sigmund Freud, Rudolf Meringer and Carl Mayer: Promise and reading out . In: Neuropsychiatry . tape 21 , no. 4 , 2007, p. 291-296 .
  4. ^ Sigmund Freud: Collected works. Volume XI, 1916/1917, p. 35.
  5. ↑ R. Ferber: Error Linguistics. A collection of speech errors and their descriptive representation . In: Unpublished MA thesis, University of Freiburg . 1986.