Freud's Slip

"In every day life, unconscious ideas are struggling for expression; what might seem to be a casual slip of the tongue is actually an expression of real, though unacknowledged, motives."

Sigmund Freud no doubt made that statement, although I was unable to track it down in those exact words in the myriad of publications by or about Freud or related to his work. Freud's particular theory regarding the relationship between the latent unconscious and the more apparent conscious gave birth to the popular colloquial expression of a "Freudian slip". Freud himself provided one of the best examples of such a "slip" when he spoke of how a British Member of Parliament referred to a peer as the "honourable member from Hell" when he meant to say "from Hull". To Freud, the MP was revealing his actual unconscious (in this case negative) appraisal of his colleague. (Wade, 2000, p. 476 citing Freud 1920/1960).

The statement is representative of Freud's general belief that the complex unconscious is like a "gray eminence" which skulks behind the simple, innocent conscious and makes the latter dance to its tune. Freud argued that conscious awareness is merely, as Wade and Tavris put it: "the visible tip of a mental iceberg beneath which lies the unconscious part of the mind, containing unrevealed wishes, passions, guilty secrets, unspeakable yearnings, and conflicts between desire and duty. " (Wade, 2000, p. 16-17). Freud believed that these unconscious urges and thoughts come out in dreams, slips of the tongue, apparent accidents, and even jokes. (Wade, 2000, p. 16-17 citing Freud 1905b, 1920/1960, 1923/1962).

Freud's original ideas on the unconscious and other aspects of psychology have been extensively reworked by successive "schools of thought" in the 20th century. However, his groundwork is still evident in modern psychological theories and approaches such as psychodynamic therapy, the study of childhood amnesia, and personality analysis.