A General Introduction to Psychoanalysis: The Meaning of Slips

Sigmund Freud was a doctor in Vienna who invented psychoanalysis, a way of treating the mind by exploring thoughts that people are not aware of.In 1915 he began a series of lectures for ordinary listeners, and he started not with illness, but with the small mistakes everyone makes.

“We all make little errors every day: we say one word when we meant another, we forget a name we know perfectly well, or we put something down and cannot find it again.Most people think these slips are mere accidents, caused by tiredness, excitement or a lack of attention.But I believe that an error can have a meaning of its own, and that this meaning may be more interesting than the circumstances in which it happened.

The most common slip of all is to say the exact opposite of what one meant.The president of our parliament once opened a meeting with the words, ‘Gentlemen, I declare a quorum present, and I hereby declare the meeting closed.’His meaning is not hard to see: he wanted the meeting to end, and he said so himself.We may put it like this: ‘I declare the meeting open, but I would rather it were closed.’

A newspaper that had been accused of taking bribes wanted to say that it had always worked for the public good in the most ‘disinterested’ way, but the writer wrote ‘interested’ instead.In such cases, the slip shows a conflict between two intentions: the one the speaker shows openly, and another that he is trying to hold back.The hidden intention cannot win openly, so it slips out through the mistake.So these errors are not meaningless accidents but real mental acts, and if we study them closely, they can show us the way into the hidden parts of the mind.”