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he gets annoyed and asks the students to respect the tragic tale he is telling, one
of them puts his hand up and points to the board: “Sir, it's that you've written
'eroticism”'.
The mechanism of these lapses (one tragic, the other comic) is obvious: the doctor
and teacher consciously wish to transmit a particular message and go about choosing
the logically appropriate words and arranging them in the right order. At a certain
point in their speech an unforeseen slip brings catastrophe. One of the words they
want to pronounce is suddenly replaced by another that they had not summoned up
deliberately.
There is a very clear phonetic analogy between the dropped word and the one
that suddenly appears: biopsy-autopsy (in Spanish
biopsia-autopsia
), ergotism-
eroticism (in Spanish even closer:
ergotismo-erotismo
). But the tiny difference
between two similar signifiers produces a radical change in meaning: what the in-
dividual consciously wanted to say is supplanted by something else that he says
unintentionally. And this something else is so authentic, so indiscreetly sincere, that
both the person speaking and anyone listening are immediately and simultaneously
convinced that what was said involuntarily is much closer to the truth than what was
intended.
The mechanism by which it has been said is the brusque substitution of one sig-
nifier by another, similar but with a very different meaning from that foreseen. This
happens in the middle of a perfectly well thought out speech that was meant to
follow a plan of
classical rationality
, the kind that allows you to say what you con-
sciously want to say. But the desired speech is suddenly ambushed by an another
kind of rationality: a
rationality of wild association
which has the effect of making
you say what you didn't consciously want, however true it may be.
Human rationality
is the result of the interaction between
classical rationality
and
associative rationality
.
10.2
Delirious Thought
In one of his works, the Spanish psychiatrist Manuel Cabaleiro Goas records the
story of a patient who, as he entered the doorway of his home, found a broken bottle
in a puddle of red wine. His mind lit up and “everything became perfectly clear
to him”. He understood, without any doubt, that the bottle proved he was going
to be killed and his blood spilled. “What I had just seen in the doorway revealed
everything to me. In a few seconds all was explained to me, without any room for
doubt”. ([1], p. 977)
If someone enters the doorway of their home and finds a broken bottle in the
middle of a red-coloured, alcoholic smelling stain, the most likely thing for him to
say is: “a neighbor has dropped a bottle of wine and it has stained the doorway”.
This is a logical application of classical rationality.
But if he has a sudden illumination, the dazzling and certain revelation that the
bottle and the stain prove his life will be destroyed and his blood shed, he has left
classical rationality behind, made an arbitrary interpretation, gone mad.
Classic
