Among the examples of the mistakes in speech collected by me I can scarcely find one in which I would be obliged to attribute the speech disturbance simply and solely to what Wundt calls “contact effect of sound.” Almost invariably I discover besides this a disturbing influence of something outside of the intended speech. The disturbing element is either a single unconscious thought, which comes to light through the speech-blunder, and can only be brought to consciousness through a searching analysis, or it is a more general psychic motive, which directs itself against the entire speech. (_Example_ _a_) Seeing my daughter make an unpleasant face while biting into an apple, I wished to quote the following couplet:-- “The ape he is a funny sight, When in the apple he takes a bite.” But I began: “The apel....” This seems to be a contamination of “ape” and “apple” (compromise formation), or it may be also conceived as an anticipation of the prepared “apple.” The true state of affairs, however, was this: I began the quotation once before, and made no mistake the first time. I made the mistake only during the repetition, which was necessary because my daughter, having been distracted from another side, did not listen to me. This repetition with the added impatience to disburden myself of the sentence I must include in the motivation of the speech-blunder, which represented itself as a function of condensation. (_b_) My daughter said, “I wrote to Mrs. Schresinger.” The woman’s name was Schlesinger. This speech-blunder may depend on the tendency to facilitate articulation. I must state, however, that this mistake was made by my daughter a few moments after I had said _apel_ instead of _ape_. Mistakes in speech are in a great measure contagious; a similar peculiarity was noticed by Meringer and Mayer in the forgetting of names. I know of no reason for this psychic contagiousness. (_c_) “I _sut_ up like a pocket-knife,” said a patient in the beginning of treatment, instead of “I _shut_ up.” This suggests a difficulty of articulation which may serve as an excuse for the interchanging of sounds. When her attention was called to the speech-blunder, she promptly replied, “Yes, that happened because you said ‘_earnesht_’ instead of ‘_earnest_.’” As a matter of fact I received her with the remark, “To-day we shall be in earnest” (because it was the last hour before her discharge from treatment), and I jokingly changed the word into _earnesht_. In the course of the hour she repeatedly made mistakes in speech, and I finally observed that it was not only because she imitated me but because she had a special reason in her unconscious to linger at the word earnest (Ernst) as a name.[18]