Freud, philology, associations

I realize after reading a bit of The Psychopathology of Everyday Life that I've been a bit loose in my use of the word "association," when I am speaking in a Freudian context. That is, I thought I could admit a certain phenomenon without reserve into the category that Freud designates as "association." Actually one needs to narrow down this phenomenon heavily before doing so. That phenomenon is the play on words: word play is not, strictly speaking, associative for Freud, unless one has a specific understanding of what we mean here by each term used here. And, significantly I think, Freud is able to give us this understanding in Psychopathology by distinguishing psychoanalysis from philology.
In chapter five, Freud famously is looking at slips of the tongue. In doing so he makes reference to the work of Rudolf Meringer, a philologist. What Meringer does is look at slips of the tongue precisely in their word-play aspect. That is, he looks at them from the perspective of what is going on linguistically, and tries to show that the rules of the play are inherent to language. According to Meringer, then, in the sort of play going on when someone says "Vorschwein" instead of "Vorschein," or, to take a less famous but equally informative example, when someone says, instead of "Ich fordere Sie auf, auf das Wohl unseres Chefs antossen" (I ask you to toast our leader), "Ich fordere Sie auf, auf das Wohl unseres Chefs aufzustossen" (I ask you to belch to the health of our leader), what is determinative for the slip are the elements of language themselves. The tonal similarity between antossen and aufzutossen is more key for the mechanism of the slip than something like the fact that the person toasting might not like the leader. In other words, the slip--and to the extent that we're concerned with the mechanisms behind what we say, even the personal experience behind it, since it only serves to inform the slip--the slip can be reduced to the logic of language: language itself then becomes a the motor behind the slip. (Concomitantly, the aspects of language itself which slip are those which are similar--i.e. the particular material that this motor takes up is suited for this task because of its mimetic capabilities.)
Freud is wary of this, saying rightly that it's a conclusion "such as a linguistic scholar would hope to gain from studying the phenomenon" (Psychopathology of Everyday Life, New Penguin Edition, 55-6). In fact, he sounds a lot like Paul de Man: he is wary of reducing what happens in language to an expanded (because also including tones, etc. etc.) grammar. Unlike de Man, however, in Freud's case this is because this grammar would merely be a sort of logic.
Nevertheless, Freud is extremely aware that what he does--psychoanalysis--looks a lot like tracking down this logic within the workings of language:

It will be obvious that study of the "wandering" verbal but subliminal structures which were not meant to be uttered, together with a demand to know what the speaker was thinking about [i.e. looking at personal experience], approximate the conditions of my own analyses. I too am in search of unconscious material, and indeed I go about it in the same way... (57, tr. modified--Anthea Bell is closer than Strachey to the grammar but is weird and annoying sometimes).

So, Freud himself is saying that psychoanalysis looks sometimes a lot like philology. Not only in what it does, but in the value it attributes to the role of language in life and as something that can help interpret or unlock phenomena. But, he continues:

I too am in search of unconscious material, and indeed I go about it in the same way, except that, using a complex series of associations, I have to trace a longer route from the ideas of the person I am questioning to the discovery of the disruptive element (57).

A "longer route." A route that, according to Freud, goes "outside" the "context intended" for a word (56, tr. modified), as he explains later:

I do not, therefore, think that those instances of obvious or subtler speech disturbances which can ... be subsumed under "slips of the tongue" are mainly due to the influence of phonetic contacts; I believe that such slips derive from ideas outside what the speaker intends to say, which are sufficient to explain the slip (78).

He qualifies this, but in doing so makes it a bit clearer how we have to take this longer route into "more remote" regions:

I do not mean to imply any doubt of the phonetic laws causing sounds to modify each other, but they do not seem to me strong enough to impair correct speech by their own influence alone. In those cases that I have studied closely and of which I can claim some understanding, they merely represent an existing mechanism that can easily be used by a more remote psychic motive without its binding itself to the sphere of influence of those connections (78-9).

I emphasize the distance metaphor because it seems to show that Freud regarded language as a more familiar and invisible thing when compared to philology's view of it. Or at least that he thought the distance philology possessed with respect to its object was really only a form of proximity when compared with where he needed to go to explain that same object.
This is crucial because what is even clearer is that Freud seeks, in explaining these slips of the tongue, to get beyond just the context intended by a phrase--i.e. that which "should have been said in this situation." We shouldn't have to reference this in order to explain the slip up. Or, more rigorously put, the split between that which should have been said and that which was said can't be seen as internal to language: language does not generate this split. There can be a sphere where linguistic factors aid in the splitting, but a more remote psychic motive is where the splitting takes place, as it were. (We begin to see that mimesis, or the similarity of the words becomes less and less an aspect that can qualify language for the disturbance: if the disturbance comes from elsewhere, it does not matter as much whether it takes up what is similar or not. So two words don't get mixed up, for Freud, depending on whether they are similar or not--you can track this emphasis of his throughout the chapter.)

But the consequences of all this are even more radical: Freud doesn't just want to get beyond a sort of reference to an intention internal to language, he wants to get beyond intent itself in thinking about these mistakes: he wants to think about the substance of language itself as being free from intent. In other words, we shouldn't even have reference to language as something that intends to say something and then does not when, sometimes, it actually does not. In other words, it isn't just that the intent in language takes place in some extra-linguistic space. Pointing this out doesn't tell us enough. For you will never be able to find this place, if you consider it as a place. That is the point: the place in which there is the irruption of the extra-linguistic into the linguistic only takes place in the linguistic--but in such a way that it is never reducible to a linguistic essence.
Now, this is where we see that it is no accident a delay, a spacing, a detour or a distance is used to illustrate what he is talking about. Because what this figure of distance allows is a way to figure the mistakes within language as precisely the irruption of this region as a non-region occuring sometimes within language. The gaps and mistakes in language are just this region in effect.
For it is only thus that they could be motivated in the sense that Freud is getting at when he talks here about a "psychic motive" right alongside "intention" (and its derivative here, "influence"): these slips are motivated, precisely, without intention--that is, without reference to a linguistic context or logic, even as they occur in language and take the form of precisely mistakes in this logic. This is the only way they can be motivated because if the slips or splits in language occured completely outside of language, they could never come into language, and they could never disrupt the psyche such that it would mess up the significance, the meaning of what we are trying to say. That is, they could never remain in accord with the nature of that psychic element of which they are: the unconscious, which "is" just motivation pure and simple, here.
This is the full sense in which we must take what Freud says immediately following his remark on linguistic laws "merely represent[ing] an existing mechanism that can easily be used by a more remote psychic motive without its binding itself to the sphere of influence of those connections:"

In a great many substitutions, a slip of the tongue occurs quite regardless of such laws of phonetics (79).

That is, the "regardless" must be precisely heard as implying the sort of "distance" we were talking about: it is an injunction to go back and trace what is going on, because though it occurs as if by chance, the verbal slip is pure motivation. In other words, the description here of the slip uncannily like how Derrida describes the aporia, which "couldn't care less" about us:

...One is never through with aporias worthy of their name. They wouldn't be what they are--aporias--if one saw or touched their end, even if there were any hope of being done with them. It is thus necessary to treat them differently, and decide otherwise, where they couldn't care less about our decision, and to let go, leaving ourselves in their hands... (On Touching--Jean-Luc Nancy, 4).

So Freud is not a philologist. But that only makes clear is that he has "to go about it in the same way." Only this way is "a longer route," one that treats of distances, delays, disruptions in language precisely by tracing them, or retracing them, reenacting them (insofar as this takes time), in the distance from language that they themselves, as motivation, remain:

I too am in search of unconscious material, and indeed I go about it in the same way, except that, using a complex series of associations, I have to trace a longer route from the ideas of the person I am questioning to the discovery of the disruptive element (57).

And we see here, precisely, association as this longer route: the route along which he goes, the route considered not from the perspective from philology but psychoanalysis is precisely that of "a complex series of associations." This makes associations irreducible to word play as a merely linguistic phenomenon, since essentially what we are saying here is that language, for Freud, is not a merely linguistic phenomenon. Instead, associations are words that, however much they play, are motivated, in the sense that we now understand all these words. They are--if we can speak of anything actually being anymore, which is a different post--simply language from the perspective of psychoanalysis along which we can search for unconscious material. Associations are language that spans itself across this distance, across this longer route. They are also what describe the relationship--or non-relationship--between psychoanalysis and philology.