Feist−Feist: Theories of
Personality, Seventh
EditionII. Psychodynamic
Theories(^58) 2. Freud: Psychoanalysis © The McGraw−Hill
Companies, 2009
associations to the dream. Latent material is transformed into manifest content
through the dream work. The dream work achieves its goal by the processes of con-
densation, displacement, and inhibition of affect. The manifest dream may have lit-
tle resemblance to the latent material, but Freud believed that an accurate interpreta-
tion will reveal the hidden connection by tracing the dream work backward until the
unconscious images are revealed.
Freudian Slips
Freud believed that many everyday slips of the tongue or pen, misreading, incorrect
hearing, misplacing objects, and temporarily forgetting names or intentions are not
chance accidents but reveal a person’s unconscious intentions. In writing of these
faulty acts, Freud (1901/1960) used the German Fehlleistung,or “faulty function,”
but James Strachey, one of Freud’s translators, invented the term parapraxesto refer
to what many people now simply call “Freudian slips.”
Parapraxes or unconscious slips are so common that we usually pay little at-
tention 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 mutually opposing ac-
tion—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 uncon-
scious and the preconscious, with the unconscious intention being dominant and in-
terfering 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 im-
ages 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 behavior,
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 vis-
ited 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 unconscious sup-
plant the weaker intentions of the preconscious, thereby revealing a person’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 speculation? Did
Freud propose testable hypotheses? Are his ideas experimentally verifiable, testable,
or falsifiable?
52 Part II Psychodynamic Theories