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Common, everyday errors in speech and action, sometimes embarrassing and socially disruptive, often capture the imagination of both observer and perpetrator alike. In his “Psychopathology of Everyday Life” Freud (1) traces many such errors to deeply imbedded unconscious motives. The forgetting of names, words, ideas and resolutions; mistakes in speech, reading and writing, and the carrying-out of erroneous actions are very often unconscious protective devices to ward off anxiety or serve as expressions of covert aggression where open expression is inexpedient.
As supporting evidence for this hypothesis Freud offers numerous interesting anecdotes of patients, students and colleagues as well as highly revealing personal experiences. Most of the examples are comparatively brief, but some contain a dominant theme which serves to unify a number of isolated psychopathological errors and reveal the unconscious motivation causing them. There are also analyses of various literary selections including those of Shakespeare (2). The ingenuity of the analyses is very convincing and even carping