In Errato Veritas: Schiller and Freud on Slips

Abstract

It is a little known fact that slips of the tongue and kindred errors are common throughout the history of literature. They are called by various names. In classical antiquity they were known as lapsus linguae; in eighteenth-century Germany, eine Naivitit; in France, une naivete. In the twentieth century we speak of a Freudian slip.' Specialists in the theory of error refer to it as parapraxis.2 In his essay Ober naive and sentimentalische Dichtung (1795) Friedrich Schiller calls such behavior das Naive der Oberraschung, traditionally rendered as 'the naive of surprise' but more accurately 'the lapse of surprise' or 'the slip of surprise' as the following pages will make clear.3 Research establishes that Schiller and his contemporaries and Freud and his school are very close in their views on the subject of lapses. In fact, Freud quotes from Schiller's drama Die Piccolomini (1799) to illustrate the literary use of a slip of the tongue.' Yet scholarship has not even realized that they are discussing the same topic. Furthermore, no one has called attention to Schiller's extensive use of the lapse for dramatic purposes. There are two main reasons for the oversight. First, there was a change in terminology; second, Schiller scholars disagree about the validity of comparing him with Freud. Although some claim that Freud's insights can produce valid results when used judiciously,' many remain skeptical.6 They observe that criticism informed by depth psychology yields interesting, though problematic results simply because the discovery of the unconscious and its suitability for literary expression occurred a hundred years later. Schiller scholarship is now polarized around this issue. The points I wish to raise, however, do not require taking sides. My purpose is neither to establish the poet as an intuitive precursor of modern psychology nor to debate the validity of the psychoanalytic approach. My objectives are, first, to establish that Schiller and Freud are discussing the same subject and that, the unconscious excepted, their views are similar. The implication is that the traditional understanding of Schiller's theory is out of date and needs modernizing. I will begin with an exposition of the ontological principles involved in Schiller's theory. There follows a brief survey of other contributions culminating in a discussion of Freud. In the light of the evidence, I suggest a new definition for Schiller's das Naive der Oberraschung. This leads to my other main