Freudian Slips

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Freudian Slips

#1  Postby kennyc » Apr 25, 2014 5:03 pm

Interesting article in Aeon.
Do you think a similar thing happens/can happen in internet forums? email, on Twitter?

Freudian slips
Verbal gaffes can profoundly challenge our sense of self, offering insight into our idiosyncrasies and desires


by Jay Watts 1,800 words
Jay Watts is a clinical psychologist, psychotherapist and academic based in London. She tweets @Shrink_at_Large.

I have been interested in Freudian slips for as long as I can remember. Where I grew up, etiquette was everything. My mother spent considerable time doing ‘meals on wheels’ for the elderly, helping local disabled youngsters, and was much admired for these virtues. She never had a cross word for anyone, and always dressed immaculately. One Christmas, she took us to a neighbour’s party who, local gossip had it, was envious of my mum. As the party drew to a close, my mother went up to the hostess and thanked her ‘for her hostility’. Despite my mother’s mortification, this small bungle meant something. Knowledge had leaked through the slip and we could all stop holding our breath for a second, and laugh.

A similar reaction of unchecked laughter was the response when the presenter James Naughtie somewhat unfortunately renamed the politician Jeremy Hunt on BBC’s Radio 4 in December 2010. Naughtie spent much of the next 10 minutes in giggles, poorly masked as a cough. As is often the case, such camouflage only served to underline what was actually going on.

Freudian slips often have something of the prohibited in them — a reference to a rude word or contempt. Sigmund Freud called them Fehlleistungen (literally, ‘faulty actions’) in The Psychopathology of Everyday Life (1901), though his editor favoured the term parapraxes (a minor error). For Freud, slips were almost invariably a result of an unconscious thought, wish or desire. What we want most is forbidden and therefore provokes anxiety. We make slips because a suppressed element ‘always strives to assert itself elsewhere’. Slips, like dreams, are royal roads to the unconscious: they both hide and reveal that which drives us.

Despite cultural recognition, today Freud’s theories are seen as outdated and irrelevant

The technique of ‘free association’ was introduced to explore these ‘errors’ of speech, memory or action. If we listen closely enough, Freud argued, ‘the accidental utterances and fancies of the patient… though striving for concealment, nevertheless intentionally betrays’ that which is suppressed. By examining the chain of associations we emphasise the extra word, the wrong word, the missing word, and ask ‘Why?’ What is being kept out of the conscious mind?

Such a way of understanding the human experience has saturated the cultural world. Think of all the films — from Cruel Intentions (1999) to The Twilight Saga series — in which a geeky teenager's clumsy awkwardness suddenly disappears after their first kiss. Scriptwriters seem to suggest that there is no longer any need to stumble, drop or fall, once repressed sexuality has been expressed. In psychoanalysis, we welcome these parapraxes: in them lies a clue to the inner world of our unconscious. Through the careful work of unpacking condensed and disguised references within slips, we can find a nexus of forgotten material and distress that can then be untangled.

Despite this cultural recognition of Freudian slips, today Freud’s theories are seen as outdated and irrelevant by proponents of cognitive psychology and many in psychoanalytic circles. Cognitive psychologists argue that how we produce speech is so complicated that there are bound to be gaffes. Consider how speech occurs. We must generate the intention to relate a particular idea with a word. We formulate a pre-verbal message, part of which involves a serious competition between a number of words, before we select the most relevant ones. Then we consider the form. There needs to be grammar. We need to encode how words are uttered. Naturally, our brains use shortcuts, going for the quickest, most efficient solution, tending to pick words we have used before. All of this happens through super-quick, preconscious processes, or we’d go quite mad.

Given the complexity of this process, things can go wrong. We might mix up parts of words: for example, ‘the self-destruct instruction’ can become ‘the self-instruct destruction’. Or we might anticipate part of a later word too early in a sentence — ‘the reading list’ becomes ‘a leading list’. Similarly, words gain meaning only within the organisation of a sentence. In this way, for cognitive psychologists, these gaffes are simply a misfiring of the shortcuts that brain-processing relies on.
....


Rest here:
http://aeon.co/magazine/being-human/jay ... ian-slips/
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