3 ways in which the unconscious manifests itself and reason ignores it

Sigmund Freud, the father of psychoanalysis, noticed phenomena that had not caught the attention of other scientists of his time.. One of them was the manifestations of the unconscious in everyday life. From his observations a work was born that became a classic on the subject: Psychopathology of everyday life.

In this play, Freud identifies small phenomena of everyday life that are located within what we call “non-rational”. These are expressions that break with logic, so to speak. There are behaviors such as selective forgetting, lapses, failed acts and others.

One of the most interesting aspects of Freud and this topic in particular is that With these postulates the idea collapsed that human beings can be guided exclusively by reason, the processing of the conscious. The truth is that in our way of thinking, feeling and acting there are agents of influence that do not pass through our consciousness.

The important thing about this is that Freud pointed out that those elements that do not pass through our consciousness are those that are expressed involuntarily. Also, it was those ignored contents that ended up making suffering chronic and, finally, making us sick.

Slips, a manifestation of the unconscious in everyday life

Slips are involuntary errors in language . We want to say one thing and end up saying another. This confusion almost always causes laughter and is not given greater importance. However, Freud’s clinical eye saw much more in lapses than meaningless errors. The lapses would be one of the ways in which unconscious desires or contents would manifest themselves.

The lapses can be spoken or written. There are very famous lapses, like when Mariano Rajoy, the former Spanish president, said, during a debate: “What we have done, which you did not do, is deceive people”.

Or when former president Juan Manuel Santos, also a 2016 Nobel Peace Prize winner, noted during a controversy: “That does not invalidate the number of votes that were cast in favor of corruption”. What she wanted to say was “votes that were cast in favor of re-election”.

In the examples given, what would be the confession of guilt. The lapse would be a way of seeking atonement through confession. It would be one of the ways in which the unconscious is expressed in everyday life..

Selective forgetting, another manifestation of the unconscious in everyday life

The content of our memory is not always available. We have all felt at one time or another that part of that large warehouse was closed, just when we had gone there to get a souvenir. This happens especially with concrete elements, such as words. What may be more strange It is forgetting something that we should keep in mind and that has some impact on what we frequently do..

Like when we “forget” to do a task that had been emphatically assigned to us. Or when we forget the name of the coworker we see every day. Also in those occasions when we remain blank in the middle of an exhibition that we have prepared well.

All of these examples would be, under the paradigm of psychoanalysis, manifestations of the unconscious. What would happen is that There is some factor that leads us to reject certain content because it is associated with desires, fears or content that we have not rationalized.. We forget the task we didn’t want to do, the name of someone with whom we have some unacknowledged difficulty, or the speech in which we will say things we disagree with.

The failed acts

Failed acts are similar to lapses, but they do not have to do with language, but with the action itself. Some call them “achieved acts.” This is because these are situations in which we were going to do one thing, but we end up doing another, without knowing why. The unconscious would defeat the conscious, because the hidden desire is stronger than the recognized desire.

A failed act takes place when, for example, we go somewhere on public transport. We are sure we have read the route correctly. However, we end up very far from our destination, because we took the wrong bus or subway line. The hypothesis would be that Our rejection of the appointment with the dentist makes the unconscious desire of not going prevail..

All these manifestations of the unconscious in everyday life would reveal what is deep within ourselves. In reality, they would not be misunderstandings, but rather expressions of something we carry inside that is struggling to come out.

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