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A Freudian slip, also called parapraxis, is an error in speech, memory, or physical action that is interpreted as occurring due to the interference of some unconscious ("dynamically repressed"), subdued, wish, conflict, or train of thought. The concept is thus part of classical psychoanalysis.
Slips of the tongue and the pen are the classical parapraxes, but psychoanalytic theory also embraces such phenomena as misreadings, mishearings, temporary forgettings, and the mislaying and losing of objects.
In general use, the term 'Freudian slip' has been debased to refer to any accidental slips of the tongue.[1] Thus many examples are found in explanations and dictionaries which do not strictly fit the psychoanalytic definition.
For example: She: 'What would you like—bread and butter, or cake?' He: 'Bed and butter.'[1]
In the above, the man may be presumed to have a sexual feeling or intention that he wished to leave unexpressed, not a sexual feeling or intention that was dynamically repressed. His sexual intention was therefore secret, rather than unconscious, and any 'parapraxis' would inhere in the idea that he unconsciously wished to express that intention, rather than in the sexual connotation of the substitution.
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The Freudian slip is named after Sigmund Freud, who in his 1901 book The Psychopathology of Everyday Life, described and analyzed a large number of seemingly trivial, bizarre, or nonsensical errors and slips.
Freud never named an idea, discovery, or concept after himself, instead calling his therapies psychoanalysis. (Today, after countless revisions by those in the field, it is now called psychodynamic.) It is unknown who first coined the term "Freudian slip" and since has been used around the world in various pop-culture referencing and everyday living.
The process of analysis is often quite lengthy and complex, as was the case with many of the dreams in his book The Interpretation of Dreams (1899). An obstacle that faces the non-German reader is that Freud's emphasis on 'slips of the tongue' leads to the inclusion of a great deal of material that is extremely resistant to translation.
As in the study of dreams, Freud submits his discussion with the intention of demonstrating the existence of unconscious mental processes in the healthy:
| “ | In the same way that psycho-analysis makes use of dream interpretation, it also profits by the study of the numerous little slips and mistakes which people make -- symptomatic actions, as they are called [...] I have pointed out that these phenomena are not accidental, that they require more than physiological explanations, that they have a meaning and can be interpreted, and that one is justified in inferring from them the presence of restrained or repressed intentions and intentions. [Freud, An Autobiographical Study (1925)] | ” |
Freud, himself, referred to these slips as Fehlleistungen (meaning "faulty actions", "faulty functions" or "misperformances" in German); the Greek term parapraxes (plural of "parapraxis", from the Greek παρά [para] and πρᾶξις [praxis], meaning "another action" in English) was the creation of his English translator, as is the form "symptomatic action".
Popularisation of the term has resulted in its being applied to any slip-of-the-tongue phenomenon, often in an attempt by the user to humorously assign hidden motives or an air of sexual innuendo to the mistake. This has brought about a dilution of the original technical meaning, with the word "Freudian" being applied to interpretations and explanations that have no essential connection with genuine psychoanalytic thought.
In contrast to Freud and his followers, cognitive psychologists claim that linguistic slips can represent a sequencing conflict in grammar production. From this perspective, slips may be due to cognitive underspecification that can take a variety of forms – inattention, incomplete sense data or insufficient knowledge. Secondly, they may be due to the existence of some locally appropriate response pattern that is strongly primed by its prior usage, recent activation or emotional change or by the situation calling conditions.[2]
Some sentences are just susceptible to the process of banalisation: the replacement of archaic or unusual expressions with forms that are in more common use. In other words, the errors were due to strong habit substitution.[2]
See "Speech error" article for more.