Unconscious Iterations

Extract

I often write a letter or paragraph, and on revision throw my MS. away in disgust and vexation. Some word, perhaps one of my ‘pet’ words and nearly always a trivial one, has occurred in possibly three out of four sentences. On the first occasion my conscious mind chose the word intentionally; on the other occasions my unconscious mind thrust the word into places where my conscious mind would have rejected it.

Some years ago I began to be on the watch for similar phenomena in Greek and Latin authors. The thought occurs at once that unconscious repetitions would be revised by the writer, and so would leave no trace in our extant MSS. But the fact remains that there are such traces. Fifty years ago many of them were collected and commented on by A. B. Cook in the article mentioned above, but his passages and mine have nothing in common, nor are his conclusions quite the same as mine.