Association of ideas; Memory; Paragrammatism; Psychoanalysis; Psychology, Pathological; Repression (Psychology)
Having been shown by the last examples of Meringer and Mayer that
speech disturbance may be caused through the influence of fore-sounds,
after-sounds, words from the same sentence that were intended for
expression, as well as through the effect of words outside the sentence
intended, _the stimulus of which would otherwise not have been
suspected_, we shall next wish to discover whether we can definitely
separate the two classes of mistakes in speech, and how we can
distinguish the example of the one from a case of the other class.
But at this stage of the discussion we must also think of the
assertions of Wundt, who deals with the manifestations of
speech-mistakes in his recent work on the development of language.[16]
Psychic influences, according to Wundt, never lack in these as well as
in other phenomena related to them. “The uninhibited stream of _sound_
and _word associations_ stimulated by spoken sounds belongs here in the
first place as a positive determinant. This is supported as a negative
factor by the relaxation or suppression of the influences of the will
which inhibit this stream, and by the active attention which is here a
function of volition. Whether that play of association manifests itself
in the fact that a coming sound is anticipated or a preceding sound
reproduced, or whether a familiar practised sound becomes intercalated
between others, or finally, whether it manifests itself in the fact
that altogether different sounds associatively related to the spoken
sounds act upon these--all these questions designate only differences
in the direction, and at most in the play of the occurring associations
but not in the general nature of the same. In some cases it may be
also doubtful to which form a certain disturbance may be attributed,
or whether it would not be more correct to refer such disturbance
to a concurrence of many motives, _following the principle of the
complication of causes_[17] (cf. pp. 380-81).”
I consider these observations of Wundt as absolutely justified and very
instructive. Perhaps we could emphasize with even greater firmness
than Wundt that the positive factor favouring mistakes in speech (the
uninhibited stream of associations, and its negative, the relaxation of
the inhibiting attention) regularly attain synchronous action, so that
both factors become only different determinants of the same process.
With the relaxation, or, more unequivocally expressed, _through_ this
relaxation, of the inhibiting attention the uninhibited stream of
associations becomes active.
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