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In psychoanalysis, a Freudian slip, also called parapraxis, is an error in speech, memory, or physical action that occurs due to the interference of an unconscious subdued wish or internal train of thought. Classical examples involve slips of the tongue, but psychoanalytic theory also embraces misreadings, mishearings, mistypings, temporary forgettings, and the mislaying and losing of objects.
The Freudian slip is named after Sigmund Freud, who, in his 1901 book The Psychopathology of Everyday Life , [1] described and analyzed a large number of seemingly trivial, even bizarre, or nonsensical errors and slips, most notably the Signorelli parapraxis.
Freud, himself, referred to these slips as Fehlleistungen [1] (meaning "faulty functions", [1] "faulty actions" or "misperformances" in German); the Greek term parapraxes (plural of parapraxis; from Greek παρά (para) 'another',andπρᾶξις (praxis) 'action') was the creation of his English translator, as is the form "symptomatic action".[ citation needed ]
Freud's process of psychoanalysis is often described as being lengthy and complex, as was the case with many of the dreams in his 1899 book The Interpretation of Dreams . An obstacle that faces the non-German-speaking reader is such that in original German, The Interpretation of Dreams, Freud's emphasis on "slips of the tongue" leads to the inclusion of a great deal of colloquial and informal material that are extremely resistant to translations. [2]
As in the study of dreams, Freud submits his discussion with the intention of demonstrating the existence of unconscious mental processes in the healthy:
In the same way that psycho-analysis makes use of dream interpretation, it also profits by the study of the numerous little slips and mistakes which people make—symptomatic actions, as they are called ... I have pointed out that these phenomena are not accidental, that they require more than physiological explanations, that they have a meaning and can be interpreted, and that one is justified in inferring from them the presence of restrained or repressed impulses and intentions. [Freud, An Autobiographical Study (1925)]
Sigmund Freud introduced the Freudian Slip, a psychological concept where an individual unintentionally reveals their true thoughts or feelings through a verbal or physical mistake. Freud believed these slips were manifestations of the unconscious mind, providing insight into inner desires and anxieties. [3]
A 1979 study investigated Freudian slips by having male test participants who had been primed with a stimulus either related to sex or an electric shock to read a list of words that had meaningful spoonerisms related to both stimuli. Primed participants had a far higher rate of spoonerism related to the specific stimulus. [4]
In contrast to psychoanalytic theorists, cognitive psychologists say that linguistic slips can represent a sequencing conflict in grammar production. From this perspective, slips may be due to cognitive underspecification that can take a variety of forms – inattention, incomplete sense data or insufficient knowledge. Secondly, they may be due to the existence of some locally appropriate response pattern that is strongly primed by its prior usage, recent activation or emotional change or by the situation calling conditions. [5]
Some sentences are just susceptible to the process of banalisation: the replacement of archaic or unusual expressions with forms that are in more common use. In other words, the errors were due to strong habit substitution. [5]
In general use, the term 'Freudian slip' has been debased to refer to any accidental slips of the tongue. [6] Thus many examples are found in explanations and dictionaries which do not strictly fit the psychoanalytic definition.
For example: She: 'What would you like—bread and butter, or cake?' He: 'Bed and butter.' [6]
In the above, the man may be presumed to have a sexual feeling or intention that he wished to leave unexpressed, not a sexual feeling or intention that was dynamically repressed. His sexual intention was therefore secret, rather than subconscious, and any 'parapraxis' would inhere in the idea that he unconsciously wished to express that intention, rather than in the sexual connotation of the substitution. Freudians might point out, however, that this is simply a description of what Freud and Breuer termed the preconscious which Freud defined as thoughts that are not presently conscious but can become conscious without meeting any resistance. [7] In Freud's theory, he allows parapraxes to be generated in the preconscious, [8] so he would allow for thoughts that one tries to put outside of consciousness to have effects on conscious actions.
Beyond slips of the tongue, these accidental human errors also commonly occur in the realm of human-computer interaction. In the context of interaction design, slips refer to an incorrect action that is taken with the correct intention. [9] As opposed to mistakes, which refer to an incorrect action due to an incorrect intention, slips result from automatic behaviors that are triggered by external factors, distracting the user from carrying out their intended goal. There are many different types of slips in interaction design, including capture errors, description similarity slips, data-driven errors, associative activation, loss of activation, and mode errors.
Capture errors occur when a familiar behavior takes over a less frequently occurring behavior. [10] An example of a capture error would be driving to the office on a Saturday when the intention was to go to the grocery store.
Description similarity slips occur when an action is taken upon an item that is similar to the one you intended. [11] For example, flipping the switch for the bathroom vent fan instead of the light switch to turn on the bathroom light would be a description similarity slip.
Data-driven errors occur in the arrival of new sensory information that triggers an automatic response, such as dialing the hotel concierge to reserve a particular room and dialing the room number instead. [12]
Associative activation errors are caused by an internal correlation of two actions. [12] For example, associating the phone ringing with someone knocking on the door and saying "come in" as a response would represent a type of associative activation error. Associative activation errors are also considered accidental slips of the tongue.
Loss of activation is the error of executing an action but forgetting the goal behind the intended action. [12] A common example of a loss of activation error is walking into a room and forgetting the purpose for walking into the room.
Lastly, mode errors occur when the input for an action is the same for different modes of operation, but the output of that action varies according to the selected mode. [12] These errors could easily occur with the gear shift control in cars, since the action of stepping on the gas pedal to execute the action is the same for all gears, but the direction in which the car moves depends on the selected gear. This could lead to detrimental consequences if a user was accidentally in reverse mode but intended to be in drive mode.
Psychoanalysis is a set of theories and therapeutic techniques that deal in part with the unconscious mind, and which together form a method of treatment for mental disorders. The discipline was established in the early 1890s by Sigmund Freud, whose work stemmed partly from the clinical work of Josef Breuer and others. Freud developed and refined the theory and practice of psychoanalysis until his death in 1939. In an encyclopedic article, he identified the cornerstones of psychoanalysis as "the assumption that there are unconscious mental processes, the recognition of the theory of repression and resistance, the appreciation of the importance of sexuality and of the Oedipus complex." Freud's colleagues Alfred Adler and Carl Gustav Jung developed offshoots of psychoanalysis which they called individual psychology (Adler) and analytical psychology (Jung), although Freud himself wrote a number of criticisms of them and emphatically denied that they were forms of psychoanalysis. Psychoanalysis was later developed in different directions by neo-Freudian thinkers, such as Erich Fromm, Karen Horney, and Harry Stack Sullivan.
Sigmund Freud was an Austrian neurologist and the founder of psychoanalysis, a clinical method for evaluating and treating pathologies seen as originating from conflicts in the psyche, through dialogue between patient and psychoanalyst, and the distinctive theory of mind and human agency derived from it.
In psychoanalysis and other psychological theories, the unconscious mind is the part of the psyche that is not available to introspection. Although these processes exist beneath the surface of conscious awareness, they are thought to exert an effect on conscious thought processes and behavior. Empirical evidence suggests that unconscious phenomena include repressed feelings and desires, memories, automatic skills, subliminal perceptions, and automatic reactions. The term was coined by the 18th-century German Romantic philosopher Friedrich Schelling and later introduced into English by the poet and essayist Samuel Taylor Coleridge.
Psychoanalytic literary criticism is literary criticism or literary theory that, in method, concept, or form, is influenced by the tradition of psychoanalysis begun by Sigmund Freud.
In psychoanalytic theory, the id, ego and superego are three distinct, interacting agents in the psychic apparatus, defined in Sigmund Freud's structural model of the psyche. The three agents are theoretical constructs that Freud employed to describe the basic structure of mental life as it was encountered in psychoanalytic practice. Freud himself used the German terms das Es, Ich, and Über-Ich, which literally translate as "the it", "I", and "over-I". The Latin terms id, ego and superego were chosen by his original translators and have remained in use.
Psychoanalytic theory is the theory of personality organization and the dynamics of personality development relating to the practice of psychoanalysis, a clinical method for treating psychopathology. First laid out by Sigmund Freud in the late 19th century, psychoanalytic theory has undergone many refinements since his work. The psychoanalytic theory came to full prominence in the last third of the twentieth century as part of the flow of critical discourse regarding psychological treatments after the 1960s, long after Freud's death in 1939. Freud had ceased his analysis of the brain and his physiological studies and shifted his focus to the study of the psyche, and on treatment using free association and the phenomena of transference. His study emphasized the recognition of childhood events that could influence the mental functioning of adults. His examination of the genetic and then the developmental aspects gave the psychoanalytic theory its characteristics. Starting with his publication of The Interpretation of Dreams in 1899, his theories began to gain prominence.
Free association is the expression of the content of consciousness without censorship as an aid in gaining access to unconscious processes. The technique is used in psychoanalysis which was originally devised by Sigmund Freud out of the hypnotic method of his mentor and colleague, Josef Breuer.
In psychology, the subconscious is the part of the mind that is not currently of focal awareness.
Transference is a phenomenon within psychotherapy in which repetitions of old feelings, attitudes, desires, or fantasies that someone displaces are subconsciously projected onto a here-and-now person. Traditionally, it had solely concerned feelings from a primary relationship during childhood.
In philology, a lapsus is an involuntary mistake made while writing or speaking.
A speech error, commonly referred to as a slip of the tongue or misspeaking, is a deviation from the apparently intended form of an utterance. They can be subdivided into spontaneously and inadvertently produced speech errors and intentionally produced word-plays or puns. Another distinction can be drawn between production and comprehension errors. Errors in speech production and perception are also called performance errors. Some examples of speech error include sound exchange or sound anticipation errors. In sound exchange errors, the order of two individual morphemes is reversed, while in sound anticipation errors a sound from a later syllable replaces one from an earlier syllable. Slips of the tongue are a normal and common occurrence. One study shows that most people can make up to as much as 22 slips of the tongue per day.
In psychoanalysis, preconscious is the loci preceding consciousness. Thoughts are preconscious when they are unconscious at a particular moment, but are not repressed. Therefore, preconscious thoughts are available for recall and easily 'capable of becoming conscious'—a phrase attributed by Sigmund Freud to Josef Breuer.
Resistance, in psychoanalysis, refers to the client's defence mechanisms that emerge from unconscious content coming to fruition through process. Resistance is the repression of unconscious drives from integration into conscious awareness.
Fixation is a concept that was originated by Sigmund Freud (1905) to denote the persistence of anachronistic sexual traits. The term subsequently came to denote object relationships with attachments to people or things in general persisting from childhood into adult life.
Psychoanalytic conceptions of language refers to the intersection of psychoanalytic theory with linguistics and psycholinguistics. Language has been an integral component of the psychoanalytic framework since its inception.
Psychopathology of Everyday Life is a 1901 work by Sigmund Freud, the founder of psychoanalysis. Based on Freud's researches into slips and parapraxes from 1897 onwards, it became perhaps the best-known of all Freud's writings.
Metapsychology is that aspect of any psychological theory which refers to the structure of the theory itself rather than to the entity it describes. The psychology is about the psyche; the metapsychology is about the psychology. The term is used mostly in discourse about psychoanalysis, the psychology developed by Sigmund Freud, which was at its time regarded as a branch of science, or, more recently, as a hermeneutics of understanding. Interest on the possible scientific status of psychoanalysis has been renewed in the emerging discipline of neuropsychoanalysis, whose major exemplar is Mark Solms. The hermeneutic vision of psychoanalysis is the focus of influential works by Donna Orange.
Content in Freudian dream analysis refers to two closely connected aspects of the dream: the manifest content, and the latent content. Impulses and drives residing in the unconscious press toward consciousness during sleep, but are only able to evade the censorship mechanism of repression by associating themselves with words, ideas and images that are acceptable to consciousness. Thus the dream as consciously remembered upon waking is interpreted in psychoanalysis as a disguised or distorted representation of repressed desires.
Psychic determinism is a type of determinism that theorizes that all mental processes are not spontaneous but are determined by the unconscious or preexisting mental complexes. It relies on the causality principle applied to psychic occurrences in which nothing happens by chance or by accidental arbitrary ways. It is one of the central concepts of psychoanalysis. Thus, slips of the tongue, forgetting an individual's name, and any other verbal associations or mistakes are assumed to have psychological meaning. Psychoanalytic therapists will generally probe clients and have them elaborate on why something "popped into" their head or why they may have forgotten someone's name rather than ignoring the material. The therapist then analyze this discussion for clues revealing unconscious connections to the slip of verbal association. Psychic determinism is related to the overarching concept of determinism, specifically in terms of human actions. Therapists who adhere to the belief in psychic determinism assume that human action and decisions are predetermined and are not necessarily under their own control.
Sigmund Freud is considered to be the founder of the psychodynamic approach to psychology, which looks to unconscious drives to explain human behavior. Freud believed that the mind is responsible for both conscious and unconscious decisions that it makes on the basis of psychological drives. The id, ego, and super-ego are three aspects of the mind Freud believed to comprise a person's personality. Freud believed people are "simply actors in the drama of [their] own minds, pushed by desire, pulled by coincidence. Underneath the surface, our personalities represent the power struggle going on deep within us".
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