Freudian Slips

The president of the Austrian parliament opens a session by thundering, I declare

this meeting closed! In answering his phone, a preoccupied business executive
picks up the receiver and bellows, Come in. At a copying machine, a secretary
counts copies: eight, nine, ten, jack, queen, king. A jogger, just finishing her
run, tosses her shirt into the toilet instead of the laundry hamper.
Freud believed that such slips were motivated by unconscious conflicts. A hidden
motive could presumably be found for even the most innocuous mistake if it were
investigated with psychoanalytic methods. The Austrian president, wrote Freud, secretly wished he was already in a
position to close the meeting from which little good was to be expected.
Todays cognitive psychologists favor a more parsimonious explanation for the slips that are part of everyday life. They
argue that they are a natural by-product of how our minds process information and direct action. For example, the single
most common type of slip seems to involve the intrusion of a strong habit. An activity that is more familiar, is more
frequent, or has been recently performed interferes with the intended behavior. The secretary at the copy machine had
recently been playing cards.
Psychologist Donald Norman calls this kind of mistake a capture error. Norman states: Pass too near a well-formed habit
and it will capture your behavior. If the habit is strong enough, even cues that only partially match the situation in which it
usually occurs are likely to activate it. Norman cites William James report of the absentminded person who went to the
bedroom to dress for dinner but instead put on his pajamas and got into bed.
Most actions, argues Norman, are carried out automatically, by subconscious mechanisms. At a conscious level we make a
general selection, but the actual execution of the intended act occurs without further reflection. Such mental laziness is
typically beneficial, for it permits us to save our mental resources for more important things. Occasionally, however, we
may forget whether we have performed the action, as is evident in this psychologists report: As I was leaving the
bathroom this morning, it suddenly struck me that I couldnt remember
whether or not I had shaved. I had to feel my chin to establish that I had.
Attention is the critical factor in preventing slips. When attention lags, a
competing response is more likely to replace the intended one. Sometimes the
components of an action may become misblended, as when indecision about
whether to say momentary or instantaneous produces momentaneous.
Or Norman gives an example many of us can identify with: We decide not to
take another bite of a delicious but calorie-laden cake but, after a brief lapse,
the cake somehow is eaten anyway!
Jerry Burger notes the inherent difficulty of studying Freudian slips
experimentally. They occur when we least expect them and laboratory subjects could talk a long time without ever making
one. However, researchers have developed ingenious ways of circumventing the problem. For example, male
undergraduates in one study were asked to complete some innocent-looking sentences either in the presence of an
attractive and scantily clad female experimenter or with a male experimenter. According to Freud, which group would make
more slips of the tongue? When completing sentences such as With the telescope, the details of the distant landscape
were easy to . . . . those in the female-experimenter group were more likely to say make out than were other subjects.
For the sentence, The lid wont stay on regardless of how much I . . . the same men were more likely to respond with
screw it. In a second study, males were asked to read quickly presented word pairs. Those in the presence of the female
were more likely to read bine-foddy as fine body and lood-gegs as good legs.
As Burger indicates, these findings may be used to support Freudian theory. However, other interpretations are clearly
possible. For example, linguists would be likely to explain these slips in terms of cognitive connections and the activation of
linguistic pathways. That is, the salience of sexuality in these situations activates our memory of sexually related
information. They prepare a kind of cognitive pathway between the beginning of the sentence and the double-entendre
word, making selection of the sexually related word more likely.
Burger, J. (2004). Personality (6th ed.). Belmont, CA: Wadsworth.
Norman, D. A. (1980, April). Post-Freudian slips. Psychology Today, 4250.