[Sigmund Freud, Rudolf Meringer and Carl Mayer: slips of the tongue and mis-readings. The history of a controversy].
In both his The Psychopathology of Everyday Life and his Lectures Sigmund Freud derived the terms unconscious, preconscious and conscious, particularly from slips in speech, slips in reading and forgetfulness. In these slips, Freud recognised parallels to dreams. In the work mentioned, he analysed these in depth as part of mental motivation. In the papers referred to, Sigmund Freud paid tribute to Rudolf Meringer and Carl Mayer's study which was published in 1895. Meringer and Mayer showed as phenomena reversals and rearrangement of whole words, syllables or sounds, along with pre-tones or anticipations and echoes, word contaminations and word substitutions as responsible for slips of the tongue. The present work demonstrates how passionately these three scientists have contributed to the controversy of their standpoints. For modern psycholinguistics and the psychology of language, speech errors are always an expression of a momentary malfunction of the human speech production system: for the cognitive process of speech production slips of the tongue offer an insight into speech processing. Pre-tones and echoes, serialization errors, as Meringer and Mayer recognised, represent the vast majority of slips of the tongue. They do not reveal any hidden point. But with lexical-semantic slips of the tongue the question of mental motivation is admissible. This short paper is a sign of appreciation and gratitude: firstly, a modest birthday gift for Sigmund Freud, secondly homage to Carl Mayer, who influenced generations of neurologists in his 40 years of chairing the Psychiatric-Neurological Clinic in Innsbruck, so that Hans Ganner rightly spoke of a "Carl Mayer School". But lastly, this short study is also-and especially-a late recognition of Rudolf Meringer, the great Austrian linguist. The view an individual has concerning mental processes and the "topology of the psychic apparatus" is decisive as to the power of determination attached to the unconscious.
Hinterhuber
Hartmann
H
Univ.-Klinik für Psychiatrie, Medizinische Universität Innsbruck. Hartmann.Hinterhuber@i-med.ac.at
D001317:Austria; D005619:Freudian Theory; D049672:History, 19th Century; D049673:History, 20th Century; D006801:Humans; D011572:Psychoanalysis / Q000266:history*; D011578:Psycholinguistics / Q000266:history*; D012660:Semantics; D014473:Unconscious, Psychology; D014705:Verbal Behavior