Chapter 2 Freud: Psychoanalysis 57faulty acts, Freud (1901/1960) used the German Fehlleistung, or “faulty function,”
but James Strachey, one of Freud’s translators, invented the term parapraxes to
refer to what many people now simply call “Freudian slips.”
Parapraxes or unconscious slips are so common that we usually pay little
attention to them and deny that they have any underlying significance. Freud,
however, insisted that these faulty acts have meaning; they reveal the unconscious
intention of the person: “They are not chance events but serious mental acts; they
have a sense; they arise from the concurrent actions—or perhaps rather, the mutu-
ally opposing action—of two different intentions” (Freud, 1917/1963, p. 44). One
opposing action emanates from the unconscious; the other, from the preconscious.
Unconscious slips, therefore, are similar to dreams in that they are a product of
both the unconscious and the preconscious, with the unconscious intention being
dominant and interfering with and replacing the preconscious one.
The fact that most people strongly deny any meaning behind their parapraxes
was seen by Freud as evidence that the slip, indeed, had relevance to unconscious
images that must remain hidden from consciousness. A young man once walked
into a convenience store, became immediately attracted to the young female clerk,
and asked for a “sex-pack of beer.” When the clerk accused him of improper behav-
ior, the young man vehemently protested his innocence. Examples such as this can
be extended almost indefinitely. Freud provided many in his book Psychopathology
of Everyday Life (1901/1960), and many of them involved his own faulty acts. One
day after worrying about monetary matters, Freud strolled the tobacco store that he
visited every day. On this particular day, he picked up his usual supply of cigars
and left the store without paying for them. Freud attributed his neglect to earlier
thoughts about budgetary issues. In all Freudian slips, the intentions of the uncon-
scious supplant the weaker intentions of the preconscious, thereby revealing a per-
son’s true purpose.
Related Research
The scientific status of Freud’s theory is one of the more hotly contested and
disputed questions in all Freudian theory. Was it science or mere armchair specu-
lation? Did Freud propose testable hypotheses? Are his ideas experimentally veri-
fiable, testable, or falsifiable?
Karl Popper, the philosopher of science who proposed the criterion of falsi-
fiability, contrasted Freud’s theory with Einstein’s and concluded that the former
was not falsifiable and therefore not science. It would be fair to say that for much
of the 20th century, most academic psychologists dismissed Freudian ideas as
fanciful speculations that may have contained insights into human nature but were
not science.
During the last 5 to 10 years, the scientific status of Freudian theory has begun
to change, at least among certain circles of cognitive psychologists and neuroscientists.
Neuroscience is currently experiencing an explosive growth through its investigations
of brain activity during a variety of cognitive and emotional tasks. Much of this growth
has been due to brain imaging technology afforded by functional magnetic resonance
imaging (MRI) that maps regions of the brain that are active during particular tasks.