Freudian lapsus: what lies behind a simple mistake
Forget a name. Messing up an entire sentence because you say one word instead of another. Forgetting that you have performed simple actions or where certain objects have been placed. All these can be seen as normal daily forgetfulness, perhaps dictated by a hectic lifestyle or by the stress of a particularly chaotic period.
In fact, already in the early years of the twentieth century, the father of psychoanalysis, Sigmund Freud, connoted any error of this type as a slip, known today as a Freudian slip.
What is meant by Freudian slip
Before the studies conducted by Sigmud Freud, mistakes made in the course of a conversation, forgetfulness and habitual inattention were seen as the results of a simple distraction. In 1901, however, the father of psychoanalysis explored the subject in his treatise Psychopathology of everyday life, where he tries to give a different explanation to all these daily acts which thus take the name of slip.
Therefore, with the term Freudian slip, we mean all those actions that form the expression of the unconscious. Through the slip, the psychic conflict between conscience and everything that is normally repressed, that is the unconscious part of our psyche, would be explicit. .
See also
The emergence of the unconscious through failed acts: the characteristics
As we will see better later, Freudian slips are of various types: there are linguistic and mnemonic ones relating to writing and reading and those connected to the loss of objects. In any case, these errors dictated by the contrast between conscious and unconscious have characteristics in common. In fact, a Freudian slip tends to always manifest itself suddenly, when least expected. In the same way, its frequency is random: between one slip episode and another it could take a long time and then have two a few days apart. .
So, what emerged from Freud's studies was that such a mistake is completely unpredictable and, above all, involuntary. The unconscious transpires without the directly interested individual noticing it and brings to his attention what for the most varied reasons is silenced in the depths of his mind. The psychoanalyst gave as interpretation that of the so-called "failed acts": the slips would not only be the manifestation of an unconscious drive that emerges and finds satisfaction, but would also constitute a channel through which thoughts, values and sensations find an outlet that, otherwise, would remain removed. from the censorship of our ego.
The various types of slips according to Freud
It is well established that slips usually "accompany" us, even when we do not pay particular attention to them. As already mentioned, there are various types which, while showing the common characteristics of involuntary and unpredictability, differ in terms of their manifestation. We see in the details the most frequent, studied extensively over the years in the field of psychology, also by the essayist Sebastiano Timpanaro.
Verbal lapsus
The linguistic slip is probably the best known. It is a mistake that we make in the course of a conversation, saying one word instead of another. Without Freud's interpretation, all of this would be seen as the product of a classic inattention, but after his studies it emerged a very different picture. With a verbal slip, thoughts, personal judgments and perhaps desires arise that, as a rule, you would like to keep hidden from others. Words spoken "by mistake" are, in reality, what we unconsciously tend to repress and censor.The reasons behind this censorship can be different: you do not want to hurt your interlocutor, fear his opinion or do not want to bring to light a fear, an upset, an unpleasant memory or even a "forbidden" desire.
Lapsus of writing and reading
The process behind a reading and writing slip is similar to that of a linguistic unconscious error. Usually it is thought that these slips are less frequent than those related to speech, because, in themselves, such actions require a more "accurate" and less spontaneous reasoning than a conversation, but this is not the case. Let's think about when we read a text: how many times have we happened to read a word instead of "another and thus alter the meaning of the sentence ? According to Freud, the word with which we replace the one actually written is charged with importance for us. The roots of this phenomenon lie in the unconscious and psychoanalytic work is often necessary to make them emerge, while, in other cases, the explanation is more immediate. Obviously, this also applies to writing.
Memory lapsus
For psychoanalysis, the "category" of mnemonic slips are all those that manifest themselves as a memory lapse and can concern different situations, for example forgetting the name of a person we know well, forgetting to do something when we knew it was important and even briefly erase from our minds words in a foreign language that we have used very often in the past. Behind episodes of this type, which bring with them a sense of bewilderment and confusion, there is always the "surfacing" of the unconscious that blocks us from a circumstance that we involuntarily know not to be entirely welcome.
Regarding the forgetfulness of names, Freud himself stated: «The mechanism of forgetting names […] consists in the disturbance of the desired reproduction of the name by a series of extraneous ideas, not conscious at that moment. [...] Among the reasons for these disturbances emerges the intention to avoid the onset of displeasure through memory ".
Loss of items
Finally, slips can occur not only at the level of language or writing, but also in the "concrete" action of the loss of objects. Often episodes of this type are passed off as carelessness or memory lapses due to excessive haste, but they can hide deeper reasons. Essentially when we forget the place where we have put a certain thing, it is for reasons of regret or because we involuntarily associate it with an unpleasant memory. Freud himself had shown that if our judgment changes positively, it is easy to find the object believed to be lost.
