“The Garden of Earthly Delights” in the Museo del Prado in Madrid, c. 1495–1505, attributed to Hieronymus Bosch (born Jheronimus van Aken, c. 1450 – 9 August 1516). Click on image to enlarge.
What (some) modern people couldn’t help but notice after Freud, through their symptoms, their dreams, their slips of the tongue and their bungled ambitions—especially modern people who were no longer religious believers—was how unconscious they were, how removed from a clear sense of their own intentions, how determinedly ignorant they were about their pleasure. And, in Freud’s language, this meant how conflicted they were about their appetites, and so how fundamentally divided there were against themselves. As if people no longer knew what was in their best interests or, what their interests were; or indeed whether they had best interests. Modern people could live as if they couldn’t care less about themselves. They would, for example, risk everything or nothing at all for money or for love, for safety or for excitement. It was confounding, after Darwin, to discover that Man, as he was then called, was the animal that deliberately estranged himself from his own nature, that suffered above all, from his capacity for adaptation. In Freud’s account, it had become all too human to adapt (i.e., to assimilate and conform) at the cost of vitality. From a psychoanalytic point of view even the Darwinian facts seemed too simple. Psychoanalysis was to be a therapy in which modern people could work out for themselves what, if anything, mattered most to them: and despite the strictures of science.—Adam Phillips, Becoming Freud: The Making of a Psychoanalyst (Yale University Press, 2014)
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While taking verbatim notes from a book on psychoanalysis and ethics I twice committed what I would term “Freudian slips,” in this instance, “slips of the pencil” (I always take notes from what I am reading with a mechanical pencil, writing on ‘glue top, 8-1/2 x 11 pads, narrow rule, canary’ paper). I don’t know if the slips had any sort of sub-conscious or unconscious connection with what I am reading: Ernest Wallwork’s uncommonly judicious and incisive analysis and interpretation of Freud’s writings as they concern “psychoanalysis and ethics” (including psychoanalytic ethics for analysis, in the clinic or on the couch) in his book by that title (Yale University Press, 1991), or if it was just a coincidence. While I might later tell you what the two slips were, for now I’d like to share some of my notes on parapraxis/parapraxes, Freudian “Slips,” or Fehlleistung, which includes several dictionary entries (although not in their entirety).
The primary source (although discussed in later works as well): Sigmund Freud (Anthea Bell, trans.), The Psychopathology of Everyday Life (Penguin Books, 2003 [1901]). As for other important sources in the Freudian corpus, we’ll defer to David Sachs:
“Among Freud’s main works, no others, if they are to be evaluated fairly, demand as much care and tact as The Interpretation of Dreams and The Psychopathology of Everyday Life. Nor can one appreciate them without an informed sense of Freud’s two other major works that appeared in the same astonishing half-decade: Jokes and their Relation to the Unconscious [also in English as The Joke and Its Relation …] and Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality. The neglected book on jokes is singular for its clear and compelling statement of Freud’s view of the processes of unconscious thought, and the essays on sexuality are indispensable for his view of the materials of unconscious thought, that is, erotic and hostile wishes and resistances to them.”
Parapraxis: “Act whose explicit goal is not attained; instead this goal turns out to have been replaced by another one. When speaking of parapraxes we do not include all failures of memory, speech, or action, but just those acts which the subject is normally able to perform successfully, so that he is inclined to attribute his failure to mere lack of concentration or happenstance. Freud showed that parapraxes, like symptoms, are compromise-formations resulting from the antagonism between the agent’s conscious intentions and what he has repressed. [….]
The German term ‘Fehlleistung’—literally, ‘faulty function’—is understood by Freud as connoting not only acts proper but also all kinds of errors and slips in speech and in mental operations. The German language brings out the common denominator of all these mistakes by giving the prefix ‘ver-‘ to many of the words which describe them: das Vergessen (forgetting), das Versprechen (slip of the tongue), das Verlesen (misreading), das Verschreiben (slip of the pen), das Vergreifen (bungled action), [and] das Verlieren (mislaying).
It is worth noting that before Freud these marginal phenomena of everyday life had never been seen as connected or brought together under one heading—witness the lack of a generic concept for them.” — Jean Laplanche and Jean-Bertrand Pontalis (Donald Nicholson-Smith, trans.), The Language of Psycho-Analysis (Karnac Books, 1988 [Hogarth Press, 1973 and Presses Universitaires de France, 1967])
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“[Examples of parapraxis or the ‘Freudian slip’]: going to the wrong address, speaking the wrong name, or making a wrong statement. Such ‘mistakes,’ Freud explained, were not mere accidents but determined and meaningful acts due to unconscious desires, motives, and conflicts.” — Ross M. Skelton, ed. The Edinburgh International Encyclopedia of Psychoanalysis (Edinburgh University Press, 2006)
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Parapraxis: “Errors, slips of the tongue, memory lapses, and the host of manifestations Freud discussed in his book The Psychopathology of Everyday Life. They constitute symptomatic acts that are determined by unconscious motives; they are compromise formations between forbidden impulses or ideas and the censorship imposed on them. The principle of psychic determinism is particularly well illustrated in parapraxes.
Repression, which operates in parapraxes, rests on a counter-cathexis. Energy is shifted between ego and id functions, serving to regulate conflict involved in pleasure-seeking, as well as serving to discharge drives. Tendencies particularly subject to conflict involve sexuality, aggression, strength or weakness, and control or lack of control. Parapraxes, like all symptom formations, blend drive, defense, and adaptation.” — Burness E. Moore and Bernard D. Fine, eds. Psychoanalytic Terms and Concepts (American Psychoanalytic Association and Yale University Press, 1990).
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“… [P]arapraxes may be as fruitful for insight as is the analysis of more serious symptoms. Such episodic symptomatic acts usually convey a discrete message about a specific conflict, and they often rather easily yield a hidden message.” — Burness E. Moore and Bernard D. Fine, eds. Psychoanalysis: The Major Concepts (Yale University Press, 1995)
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“A change in a state of being damned up, caused by a neurotic conflict, seems possible only through a break-through of the original impulse or through an intensification of the defense. Actually, however, there is a third possibility which at first glance seems paradoxical: both may occur simultaneously. Compromises are found in which the objectionable impulse finds some substitute outlet, but the substitute outlet may help to ward of the remainders of the original impulse. A part of the damned-up energy is discharged, but in such a way as to intensify the defense against the rest. The typical neurotic symptom expresses drive and defense simultaneously. Slips, errors, and symptomatic acts constitute fairly simple examples wherein the formation of compromises of this sort can be studied in relative isolation.”
“If a person makes a slip of the tongue, it is due to the fact that unconsciously he is somehow resisting what he consciously intended to say. The analysis of a slip discloses what tendency has disturbed the original intention to speak. If a person instead of making a slip of the tongue merely begins to stammer a little, it is obvious that some unconscious motive has disturbed his intention, but we cannot guess what the motive is. If such an occasional stuttering occurs regularly as a response to a specific stimulus, knowledge of the stimulus can used as a starting point for an analysis of the disturbing factor. If, however, a person stammers not only as a reaction to a certain stimuli but does so more or less whenever he talks, the disturbing fact must be rooted in the fact that the very intention to speak has an objectionable significance. Thus some types of occasional stammering may be due to the unconscious instinctual significance of the thing the person is going to say; whereas in severe cases of stuttering the function of speech itself represents an objectionable instinctual impulse.” — Otto Fenichel, The Psychoanalytic Theory of Neurosis (W.W. Norton & Co., 1996/1st ed., 1945)
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“Obviously, if a person knocks down a vase by accident this will not bear any relation to his life and character. But if it is a genuine accident can we describe what is in question as an action or reaction? By a reaction I mean something like slapping someone on the face in anger, bursting into tears on hearing a distressing piece of news, twitching nervously while waiting for an interview, becoming confused, one’s mind going black [or ‘going blank’], forgetting one’s lines, just where one wants to succeed or make a good impression. It is in instances of the latter kind that Freud is not content to rest with such answers as ‘His mind went blank because he was nervous, and he was nervous because so much was at stake for him.’ This may well be true, of course, and the connection in question perfectly intelligible. Still Freud believes that there is room for probing here, a probing in the direction of something more distinctively personal. But need there be some further explanation in every case? Should we never take a statement like the above as the final explanation? Freud’s answer in connection with slips and errors was this: ‘We do not maintain—and for our purposes we do not need to maintain—that every single mistake which occurs has a meaning, although I think that probable. It is enough to prove that such a meaning is relatively frequent in various forms of errors.
Freud explains that by ‘meaning’ he understands ‘significance, intention, tendency and a position in the sequence of mental concatenations.’ Thus when, for instance, the word which a person intended to speak enables a different word to escape him, or when he inadvertently distorts it so that what comes out of his mouth is related to a different word, the word uttered or suggested may express a thought or an affective response which he was checking, though he was not aware of it. Compare with the case where the words which a person speaks in anger may reveal what he really thinks. He may himself be surprised and when he reverts to his everyday slightly deferential attitude, he may dismiss his words as a ‘lapse:’ ‘Those words were spoken in anger, they do not reflect what I think of you.’ Compare with: ‘That was not him; it was the alcohol speaking.’
Freud’s view is that there is a variety of instances in which the truth, in the sense of what a person really thinks or feels, his real reactions or preoccupations, escapes him in unguarded moments, in moments when his powers of attention and self-control are low. It escapes him in words, errors, inadvertent acts, and omissions which may look innocent, so that we are tempted to take them at face value and dismiss them as ‘insignificant’ or ‘trivial.’ We do so because there is no conscious intention on the part of the person in question, because it does not fit in with his conscious thoughts and deliberate actions. Freud’s view is that if we can take a more intimate and comprehensive view of the person, and this would involve a willingness on his part to be conversationally open with us, then we may find that it does fit in. This may change the aspect under which we see it. Such a change of aspect for him involves taking responsibility for certain thoughts and attitudes which, previously, he had been unwilling to own.
Freud is critical of this kind of dismissiveness: ‘Here, as in still other spheres, determinism reaches farther than we suppose.’ In the previous sentence he makes it clear that an act which seems arbitrary, in the way that an error is arbitrary, is subject to determinism if it is ‘explainable through purposive ideas.’ ‘That there should be uncaused events is unthinkable.’ I commented on this earlier. ‘That there should be innocent slips, errors, or omissions, purely accidental acts, is unthinkable. Freud is inclined to go that way, but he restrains himself, and rightly so: fewer of them are innocent than we suppose. Perhaps his view is that in psycho-analysis we should not assume them innocent until they are proven otherwise, that we should start with the reverse assumption and hold on to it until we have been proven wrong. Perhaps this is the sense of his words: ‘determinism reaches farther than we suppose.” — Ilham Dilman, Freud and the Mind (Basil Blackwell, 1984)
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“Early in this century Freud became convinced that his most persuasive introduction to psychoanalysis was his account of Fehlleistungen, that is, the parapraxes of everyday life: anomalies of memory, slips of the tongue, eye, and pen, bungled actions, and—what to my mind prove most striking—combined parapraxes.
In the Psychopathology, Freud avoids examples that require ‘depth’ psychology. Though he uses the term ‘repression,’ he often employs it interchangeably with ‘suppression.’ In his first two examples he utilizes the technique of free association extensively but in both cases the associations culminate in material that is suppressed rather than repressed. As with those cases, so too with most of the other examples of parapraxes in the Psychopathology: They are not instances of the emergence of deeply ‘repressed’ ideas or affects. Nonetheless, much of the material Freud presents … illustrates basic psychoanalytic tenets. ... [A]mong the phenomena he discusses, combined parapraxes are particularly striking—at least by way of nudging me toward a psychoanalytic viewpoint. Freud’s chapter on them is, however, meager. To help supplement it, I shall briefly discuss certain phenomena closely akin to combined parapraxes, namely, accumulated ones.
Some readers of this piece may have had experiences of roughly the following kind: In the days just before an appointment that a person anticipates with barely felt anxiety, she quite atypically forgets some signal items, say, first, her money purse and, later, her keys. She then—and this too is unusual for her—makes and engagement that, unrealized by her at the time, conflicts with her appointment. She then recalls the latter and tries to postpone it, or recalls it only after the time for keeping it is past.
That sort of example of accumulated parapraxes is, as I have suggested, not unfamiliar. If one inquires among one’s acquaintances, one may learn of a number of examples similar to it. The one I have sketched—drawn from an actual case—is of some evidential value in the following ways: First, in pointing to a disposition to more felt anxiety about the appointment than was actually experienced—a disposition that helps explain the resistance to keeping the appointment; second, the odd forgetting of the signal items, episodes emblematic of the resistance, trenches on the symbolism that Freud, though hardly the first to notice, was the first to employ systematically. In the Psychopathology, Freud often adverts to that symbolism. [….] When Freud states how he came to know the meaning of the symbols, he does not depend on clinical findings. The position is rather the revers:
‘[W]e learn it from very different sources—from fairy tales and myths, form buffoonery and jokes, from folklore [that is, from knowledge about popular manners and customs, sayings and songs) and from poetic and colloquial linguistic usage. [….] If we go into these sources in detail, we should find so many parallels to dream symbolism we cannot fail to be convinced of our interpretations.’
[….] On Freud’s conception, combined parapraxes concur and in some cases cooperate in trying to fulfill the same wish. Accumulated parapraxes—as I am using the phrase—repeatedly express or allude to a wish and may also work toward fulfilling it. (In my example of accumulated parapraxes, the appointment the woman forgot was with a gynecologist and concerned a question charged with anxiety.) Single parapraxes either try to fulfill a wish or express or allude to it.” — David Sachs, “In fairness to Freud: A critical notice of The Foundations of Psychoanalysis, by Adolf Grünbaum,” in Jerome Neu, ed. The Cambridge Companion to Freud (Cambridge University Press, 1992).
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For a withering critique of Freud’s psychoanalytic theory of parapraxis, one which I think is profoundly misguided and thus mistaken, see Sebastiano Timpanaro (Kate Soper, trans.), The Freudian Slip: Psychoanalysis and Textual Criticism (Verso, 1976).
See too: (i) Marxism and Freudian Psychology bibliography, (ii) Freudian and Post-Freudian Psychoanalytic Theory and Therapy: An Incipient “Science of Subjectivity” and Therapeutic Model, (iii) Psychoanalytic Psychology Beyond the Color Line: A Select Bibliography; and (iv) Psychoanalytic Psychology and Therapy: A Select Bibliography of Secondary Literature.-
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