Page:Freud - Psychopathology of everyday life.djvu/84

 Psychopathology of Everyday Life

nected with one another in a quite peculiar manner" (p. 10).

The authors grouped the examples of speech- mistakes collected by them first according to purely descriptive view-points, such as interchangings (e .g., the Milo of Venus instead of the Venus of Milo), as anticipations (e.g., the shoes made her sorft . . . the shoes made her feet sore), as echoes and post positions, as contaminations (e.g., "I will soon him home," instead of  "I will soon go home and I will see him"), and substitutions (e.g.,  "he entrusted his money to a savings crank," instead of "a savings bank"). Besides these principal categories there are some others of lesser importance (or of lesser significance for our purpose). In this grouping it makes no difference whether the transposition, disfigurement, fusion, etc., affects single sounds of the word or syllables, or whole words of the concerned sentence.

To explain the various forms of mistakes in speech, Meringer assumes a varied psychic value of phonetics. As soon as the innervation affects the first syllable of a word, or the first word of a sentence, the stimulating process immediately strikes the succeeding sounds, and the following words, and in so far as these innervations are synchronous they may effect some changes in one another. The stimulus of the psychically more

1 The examples are given by the editor. 72