dipping of the brush into the ink, the handling of a key taken from the supposed stamp-box as though it were a postage stamp, the attempt to thread a thimble) induced by moments of abstraction; while the parallelism is completed when one or other of the commissions charged upon the mind emerges into utterance at the wrong occasion, and the preoccupied shopper asks the post-office clerk for individual salt-cellars instead of stamps, because that item is next on her list of commissions. A similar verbal interchange occurs when the absent-minded professor, in writing a testimonial, records that "Mr. A. has attended my remarkable lectures in chemistry with inorganic assiduity"; or asks at the toy-shop "for a two-year-old book for an indestructible child."[1] One may experimentally induce these intrusions by giving the mind two occupations, or exposing it to two sets of influences at the same time. In writing on one topic while thinking of another, or while listening to conversation, one may find in his written words some that found origin in, or were altered by what he heard, or by what became intruded into his writing from his extraneous meditations. A single instance: a clerk writing a pass for an employee while engrossed in the shipping of cylinders, writes From Lima to Cylinder instead of From Lima to Dayton. It is a familiar experience for teachers, in asking a question, with the answer prominent in consciousness, inadvertently to use the answer in framing the question.
The intrusion of the subconscious thus becomes a widely available formula to account for verbal as well as material slips of pen and tongue and hand; and the tendency to such lapses takes one of several distinctive forms, increasing with the similarity or suggestiveness of the confused situations, and most of all dependent upon the way in which the parts of the complex occupation lie in the mind, upon the momentary diversion of the attention from the central occupation, and everywhere upon the temperament and attentive habit of the subject. In these aspects, both in their larger features and with unexpected parallelism in detail, do the lapses of speech exhibit close analogies to the more general failures of adjustment in conduct of various types, that have in common with speech lapses the combined conscious and subconscious expression of reflection and intent.[2]
- ↑ I can not extend the survey to take account of the distinctive lapses of thought, which, in common with the lapses considered, involve the formulation of a fairly definite thought that uncritically reaches expression in words, which amusingly or significantly miss or distort the intention. Such is the reply of the excited old soldier to the presentation of a sword upon an anniversary occasion: 'This sword, gentlemen, is the proudest moment of my life.' A survey of such lapses of thought, for which (though not for these exclusively) we have the special term 'bull,' would introduce more intricate yet related considerations.
- ↑ See 'The Lapses of Consciousness' in the Popular Science Monthly for October, 1905.
