THE LAPSES OF SPEECH 119 



THE LAPSES OF SPEECH 1 



By Professor JOSEPH JASTROW 



UNIVERSITY OF WISCONSIN 



A SPECIAL interest attaches to the psychological relations of 

 ■*--*- speech — an interest shared by the philologist, by reason of his 

 recognition that the mode of use and growth of language, in spite of 

 its arbitrary accretions, reflects the native traits of the impulses that 

 gave it being; by the psychiatrist, for whom the observable disturb- 

 ances of speech offer the most delicate and distinctive criteria of the 

 nature and extent of inner defect; and by the psychologist, for its 

 unique status as the embodiment and recapitulation, racial and indi- 

 vidual, the record as well as the means of advance of the psychic endow- 

 ment in efficiency, in scope and, above all, in analytic insight. Indeed 

 there is hardly an aspect of the psychologist's pursuit that does not 

 find pointed illustration among the extensively variable phenomena of 

 language. I propose to indicate such of the habits, and particularly 

 of the lapses of speech, as reflect the subconscious processes that par- 

 ticipate in its normal functioning. 



Psychologically, speech is but one of several modes of indicating 

 that we appreciate the situations that confront us, that we judge and 

 assimilate and combine these in rational fashion, and that we shape 

 our conduct accordingly. A chess-player exhibits all this as distinct- 

 ively as a debater ; and the moves of the one, though quite remote from 

 any verbal expression, are closely parallel to the arguments of the other. 

 The analogies of speech with other forms of intelligent expression favor 

 the expectation that the lapses of the two will exhibit a considerable 

 range of resemblance ; for both will be expressive of the common habit 

 of the mind to step and trip in set measure. The reduction of ideas 

 to words and the marshaling of words in expressive and conventionally 

 regulated sentences is an intricate accomplishment, even to the expert; 

 like all such, it requires that the technique thereof, the ability to register 

 and manipulate the common factors that enter in kaleidoscopic shifting 

 of position into the pattern of the fashioned product, shall have become 

 a well-drilled habit. If we could look upon an exhibition of the art 

 of constructing sentences with something of the objective, uninitiated 

 attitude with which we observe the bewildering flight of the scores of 

 bobbins and the shifting of the pins of the lace-maker, we should marvel 



1 This article will form an appendix in the volume, ' The Subsconscious,' 

 shortly to appear from the press of Houghton, Mifflin and Co., Boston. 



