The 3 types of slips in Freud’s psychoanalysis

Hello friends!

In 1901, Freud published another work that would become known worldwide: The Psychopathology of Everyday Life. After publishing in the previous year (1900), The Interpretation of Dreams, the creator of psychoanalysis expands his theses on the unconscious to encompass everyday behavior.

If until then he had proven the existence of the unconscious, desire and repression (or repression) in the dreams and symptoms of neurotics, his aim with this work is now to show how the unconscious appears in everyday errors and failures, the so-called acts flawed.

See also – Course on Freud’s Flawed Acts – The Psychopathology of Everyday Life

Definition of Failed Act

In Portuguese we use the term faulty act to designate language errors (writing, speaking, reading), memory errors (forgetting) and behavioral errors (tripping, falling, breaking, etc.) . In English, these errors became known as Freudian Slips.

In German, the language somehow unites these errors through the prefix to see-

speech errors (versprechen), writing errors (verschreiben), read errors (verlesen), memory errors or forgetfulness (vergessen), errors in behavior or clumsy actions (vergreifen🇧🇷

Such mistakes are not just mistakes, meaningless failures. If we investigate why they happen, we will see that – from another point of view – the mistake is a success. The famous phrase by little Shakespeare (Chespirito), creator of the character Chaves, expresses it very well:

“It was unintentionally, intentionally”.

A slip was unintentionally (consciously speaking) but it was also wanting (unconsciously).

3 Types of Flawed Acts

In the book The Psychopathology of Everyday Life, We study 3 types of slips, therefore:

1) Malfunctions in language (speaking, writing, reading);

2) Faulty acts of forgetting (memory failure);

3) Malfunctions in behavior (falling, breaking, knocking over, tripping, etc.), finally, disturbances in motor control.

To be clear, let’s exemplify the 3 types below.

Malfunctions in language

They are the most well-known faulty acts. I remember when I was studying psychology at the university, one of my professors said that he was going to the university by bus, and heard from a passenger who was sitting behind him:

“That was a phallic act”…

In this sentence, we see that the person changed the word flawed to phallic (penis). An error in speech that, if we investigate it, we will find an unconscious meaning for it.

In a presentation at the faculty, in the first period, a student was talking about Freud (read Froid).

She said, “That’s how Fraud”…

We would also have to investigate why the student considers Freud a fraud, but it is obviously an example of a slip.

Faults of Forgetting

At the Psychopathology of Everyday Life, Freud gives several examples of the three types of slips. Early on, he mentions and analyzes a slip of forgetting that happened to himself. Visiting the cathedral of Orvieto, he forgets the name of the painter of the frescoes. He searches his memory, the names that appear are Botticelli and Boltraffio, but he recognizes that both are not the correct name.

Someone else tells you the name: Signorelli and he immediately recognizes it as the correct name. Analyzing the reason for forgetting, he sees that in the previous conversation they were talking about customs in Bosnia and Herzegovina. The related theme was of death and sexuality. The words Herzegovina and Herr (Sir, Signor in Italian, Signorelli ), who were in the previous conversation interfered with the associative chain and affected their memory.

A simpler example is when we forget to call someone. Forgetting is a mistake, but if we go deeper into the cause of forgetting, we will see that it would be as if “a part” of us didn’t really want to care.

Therefore, the slip is a mistake, but also a success (from the point of view of unconscious desire).

Mistakes in behavior

The last type of slip (vergreifen) is translated into Portuguese as equivocations in action. As we mentioned above, they are motor control disturbances that, if analyzed, also lead us to a formation of compromise between the unconscious and the conscious.

In Chapter VIII of the Psychopathology, Freud gives us the following example:

“In previous years, when I visited the patient at home more frequently than today, it would often occur to me, at the door where I should knock or ring the bell, I would take the keys to my own house out of my pocket and, right away, then put them away again, almost ashamed. When I consider the patients in whose homes this happened, I am forced to assume that this blunder – picking up my key instead of ringing the doorbell – was meant as an homage to the home where I made this mistake. It was equivalent to the thought: ‘Here I feel at home’, as it only occurred in places where I had become attached to the patient” (Obviously, I don’t ring the bell in my own house).

Chaves’ example of “unintentionally, wanting to” when he hits Senhor Barriga can also be considered a mistake in action that has a meaning. On the one hand, he really doesn’t want to be that clumsy, on the other hand, he might want to really hit the village owner.

Conclusion

It is important to note that, despite the differences between the three types of slips, they have a unity in language, as not only linguistic slips (speech, writing, reading) are errors of this type. When we forget a name when having to introduce a person or do not remember to send an email, we are experiencing a conflict between a mnemonic trait (a representative of the drive or a signifier) ​​and, likewise, behavioral slips are caused by a training compromise between two signifiers, one on the side of desire and the other on the side of repression.

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