Psychology of Swearing and Foul Language

The traditional psychological commonplace is that swearing releases tension. The Restoration dramatist George Farquhar (1678–1707) is but one author to articulate this point in a melodramatic fashion: “Grant me some wild expressions, Heavens, or I shall burst … Words, words or I shall burst” ( The Constant Couple , V iii). The entry for Laurence Sterne deals with various humorous treatments of the theme, more especially the imbalance between the triviality of a provoking situation and the gravity of the resulting oath. Also revealing on the point is the semantic history of the term ejaculation: the original sense was the hurling of missiles (Latin jaculum meaning “a javelin”), followed by “the emission of sperm” and “a short hasty prayer or utterance.” Thus the physical and emotional senses were originally intertwined, although only the sexual sense is still current. While some forms of swearing, like cursing or malediction, are clearly directed at others, some are paradoxically self-directed.

The influence of Sigmund Freud (1856–1939) on modern views has been profound, providing valuable insights into swearing and foul language, the most general being that swearing is an expression of unconscious wishes, a form of aggression in which words are used as weapons. The verbal use of tirade, broadside , and volley are revealing here. Swearing also expresses certain antisocial, suppressed, and taboo wishes in words like motherfucker or veiled death threats or the less obvious verbal “Freudian slip,” word-plays which may be hostile, obscene, or revealing. A humorous collection of literary examples is Peter Hainings A Slip of the Pen . From his wide literary and cultural knowledge Freud focused on certain seminal sites of unconscious energy. Shakespeare’s Hamlet , a major source-text of Freudian insights, contains many instances, such as Hamlet’s furious execration of the villain Claudius as “Bloody, bawdy villain! / Remorseless, treacherous, lecherous, kindless villain!” (II ii 568-69). This outpouring, revealing in its sexual emphasis, is the more poignant for being uttered, not to the villain’s face but in soliloquy. Hamlet similarly says that he will “speak daggers” to his mother but use none (III ii 421), and cruelly dismisses Ophelia to a “nunnery,” which in Elizabethan English could mean a brothel as well as place of religious sanctuary (III i 145).

In Civilization and Its Discontents (1930), Freud makes an explicit link between antisocial behavior and terms of abuse. He comments on “The man that is not clean, i.e. does not eliminate his excretions, therefore offends others, shows no considerations for them—a fact which is exemplified in the commonest and most forcible terms of abuse” (1930, 67 note). This insight formulates a specific link with historically the earliest category of insults, namely shit words, recorded from the thirteenth century. One can also posit a link with the insulting idioms kiss my arse, kiss the devil’s arse , and its variations, recorded from medieval drama onward.

Freud’s explicit perception that sexual shame derives for “all neurotics and many others too” from “the fact that ‘inter urinas et faeces nascimur’ (‘we are born between urine and feces’)” (1930, 78 note) leads in many directions. The principal route is to puritanical “sexual repression” and to the disgust articulated in the semantic complex of terms covered in the entry for foul language, including a key quotation from King Lear (IV vi 129-35). William Butler Yeats’s more polite version, “Love has pitched his mansion in the place of excrement” occurs in “Crazy Jane Talks to the Bishop.”

Freud’s famous insights into the Oedipus Complex (1930, 118) have clear semantic correlatives in the savage insult motherfucker and its synonyms in other cultures. His study Totem and Taboo (originally 1912–1913) opens with an anthropological chapter on “The Savage’s Dread of Incest,” but interprets “the incestuous fixations of the libido” as being a key source of neurosis (1950, 17). His linking of Eros and Death or Thanatos (1930, 136) is supported semantically by the Elizabethan sense of die for “to experience orgasm” and similar metaphors of death, including the later Victorian sense of go for modern come . The complex of Eros and Death informs the more sinister impulses of murder and suicide by betrayed lovers, dramatized in Othello, Cavalleria Rusticana , and I Pagliacci . However, his emphasis on the phallus, which profoundly influenced D.H. Lawrence and many others, has since generated the feminist counter-reaction terminology of phallocentric, phallogocentric , etc. His almost casual comment “Man too is an animal with an unmistakably bisexual disposition” (1930, 77 note) clearly anticipates, not only the researches of Kinsey et al., but more modern insights and tolerance into homosexual and “alternative” sexual preferences.

Freud took the deeply pessimistic view that “Civilized society is perpetually menaced with disintegration through this primary hostility of men towards one another” (1930, 86). He also retained an unflinching memory of the history of persecution: “Anyone who calls to mind the atrocities of the early migrations, of the invasion by the Huns or by the so-called Mongols under Jenghiz Khan and Tamurlane, the sack of Jerusalem by the pious Crusaders, even the horrors of the last world-war, will have to bow his head humbly before this view of man” (1930, 86). These various forms of hostility underlie the abundance of xenophobic stereotyping and ethnic abuse.

Jacques Lacan’s re-reading of Freud, especially his proposition that “the unconscious is structured like a language” (1998, 48) invites insights into the relationship between Manichean polarities of the psyche and those in the binary opposition between sacred and profane language discussed in the Introduction.