Freudian Slipping

"Yesterday I had a Freudian slip at my in-laws' place over dinner. I meant to say 'please pass the carrots' but I accidentally said 'your mother's a stupid hooker.'"

Ah yes, the Freudian Slip. Freud called it fehlleistung which I think is German for completely bullshit theory. While I dig a lot of Freud's work, I'm not a big fan of this particular idea. Nonetheless, it behooves the amateur psychologist to understand what the fuck Freud was talking about and why he cared so much about your mother. But first, I would just like to get to know you we need a little background.

Freud was a smart mofo. He helped pioneer the idea (in the West) that people were not fully aware of what was going on in their mind. He divided the mind along two dimensions, what I'll call content and awareness. The id comprises your primal desires, you know, basic stuff like killing, stealing, and mother-fucking. It operates unconsciously. The superego comprises the social rules that restrict the id: don't fuck that, don't kill this, don't take those. The ego mediates between the two when anxiety is running high by using defense mechanisms. I can't have that? REPRESS! I can't do that? RATIONALIZE! I can't achieve this? INTELLECTUALIZE! The superego and ego operate at the conscious, unconscious and preconscious (almost conscious) levels.

Freud thought that people get tripped up when they don't process things correctly. He thought, based on what he observed, that people were avoiding expressing their disappointments and traumas through their defense mechanisms and this led to complications in their life. When people finally got in touch with their hidden traumas and disappointments, they experienced catharsis, a big emotional release. They could then attain insight into the relationship between their past trauama and present reactions and no longer be controlled by those traumas.

The whole process was taking the unconscious, hidden material and bringing it back into conscious awareness so that it could be squared away. Once you appreciate that, it's easy to understand what Freud was trying to do: summon the unconscious. Freud had a nifty bag of tricks to accomplish that task. He investigated dreams because he saw them as unconcious goldmines, free of conscious editing and censorship. He tried to eliminate the personality of the therapist to create a blank screen for the patient to project their unconscious conflicts (which explains why old-skool Freudian therapists are so unresponsive and irritating). He encouraged free association to coax patients into stop monitoring themselves and tap into their unconscious reserves, like making them dream while awake. And of course, he paid attention to Freudian slips. A Freudian slip happens when a person means to say one thing but slips up and says something else. Freud thought of that as unconcious content bubbling up to the surface and exploited it for deeper meaning and insight.

That should give you a basic idea of Freud's penis. Next time we'll delve deeper into the defense mechanisms.