Parapraxes: Are Cognitive and Analytic Theories Converging?

Parapraxes, as described in Freud's Psychopathology of Everyday Life, constitute one of the original and core observations of psychoanalysis about the way that descriptively, and often dynamically, unconscious mental contents manifest in behavior. As classically psychoanalytic interpretations of other mental contents, from the Oedipus complex to the latent content of dreams, have been challenged and cast in other, non-psychoanalytic, lights, parapraxes have remained strangely immune from these reinterpretations. Perhaps it is because of their entrenched place in our culture—after all, what more common reference is there to psychoanalysis in the parlance of non-professionals than the “Freudian slip”? Or perhaps it is because it feels so intuitively obvious that unconscious motivation is at work when we say or do exactly the wrong thing? Or most cynically, perhaps it is because a parapraxis can seem to be so trivial and without profound consequences for thinking and behavior, that it has hardly been worth challenging by psychologists and theorists who have challenged other conventional psychoanalytic descriptions.

Wegner's Ironic Monitoring Process

In the July 3, 2009, issue of Science, Daniel Wegner, a Harvard cognitive psychologist and author of numerous articles and studies of descriptively unconscious processes, takes on this issue in a review he calls “How to think, say, or do precisely the worst thing for any occasion.” He outlines contemporary theory for “the precisely counterintentional error” and presents some of his own research to support this framework. According to Wegner, when we are trying to suppress a thought or action, a part of our mental apparatus is devoted to vigilantly checking for exactly that thought which we are excluding so as to usher it away, if necessary. This so-called ironic monitoring process operates well under normal conditions, but when there is an increase in “mental load” (stress, time pressure, or distraction), it paradoxically can lead the individual to be more likely to make exactly the error that it was designed to guard against.

…what more common reference is there to psychoanalysis in the parlance of non-professionals than the “Freudian slip”?

Wegner presents several interesting experiments to support his hypotheses. In 1992, he published the results of a study in which he asked people to try not to think about a particular word during a word association task. Subjects were more likely to associate to exactly that forbidden word than subjects who had not been asked to suppress thought of that word. He also showed that this process occurs even when the task does not explicitly involve recall of words. Subjects were asked to name the color that a word was written in. As in the classic Stroop task, in which subjects are slower to name the color of the ink when the word itself spells out a different color name, subjects find it impossible to inhibit the natural response of reading the word, even though the task does not require it. When subjects were presented with words that they had been asked not to think about, they were slower to name the color of the ink, than when they were naming the color of other words. It appears that the very act of attempting consciously to exclude a word from consciousness, ironically initiates a process that brings that word to mind.

Wegner showed that this phenomenon is not restricted to language. In a 1998 experiment he asked some subjects to hold a pendulum still and other subjects to specifically avoid letting the pendulum swing in one particular direction. Ironically, subjects in the second group were much more likely to let the pendulum swing in the direction they had been asked to avoid, especially when they were distracted from the task with a meaningless cognitive load (counting backwards from 1000 by threes).

Return of the Supressed?

There are at least two obvious differences between the results of these experiments and what we traditionally think of as the “return of the repressed” or a parapraxis. First, the attempts to exclude a word from consciousness or to avoid a particular behavior as described in these experiments are themselves conscious, suggesting that these results bear more on suppression than on the more clinically relevant process of repression. Second, the motives for succeeding or failing in these tasks are not specifically addressed in the experiments—presumably the subject has

some desire to conform to the experimenter's instructions and perhaps showing his or her talents, but it is not obvious in the general case what the costs or benefits of complying or failing to comply would be.

Subsequent experiments by Wegner and other researchers have attempted to address this in a limited way. In one study, published in 1999 in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, some subjects with eating disorders were asked to role play not having an eating disorder during a clinical interview by a researcher. Subjects who were asked to pretend not to have an eating disorder not only reported an increase in intrusive thoughts of eating during the interview but were more likely to rate the interviewer as having an eating disorder. Thus we could speculate that the defense mechanism of projection has elements that can be usefully studied through this framework. Wegner even proposes reinterpreting experiments which show that individuals who are homophobic are more aroused by homoerotic material (a classic finding published by H.E. Adams and colleagues in 1996) or individuals who are trying hard to be “politically correct” are more likely to make prejudiced comments under mental load. Traditionally these studies were thought to show that the origins of homophobia and political correctness are in an increased force towards homoerotic feelings and prejudice, respectively. Wegner suggests that it is the very effort to suppress these thoughts and behaviors that gives rise to the increased likelihood of an “error.”

Even our understanding of dreams may be affected by further explanation of these phenomena. Wegner found that when individuals were instructed to suppress thoughts of neutral or emotional topics before sleep, they were more likely to report manifest dreaming about these topics. Clearly more work needs to be done to understand the role of this phenomenon for our understanding of dreams. Does motivated repression work in the same way as suppression? How does this relate to the degree of motivation of the underlying wish, which is being suppressed or repressed? And is this more relevant to manifest content of dreams or does it affect latent content as well?

The most intellectually appealing interpretation of Wegner's work may be that our division between dynamic and cognitive motives for parapraxes, as well as for common defense mechanisms such as displacement, projection, and reaction formation, is less clear than we once believed. The very act of excluding mental content, no matter what the motivation, adds to the level of attention which we are devoting to that particular material. Therefore, it is not surprising that we notice this material more quickly and that it affects what we think and do in important ways. Our attentional system, as analysts have long known about primary process material, may not be particularly concerned with determining whether something is good or bad, but rather when it is salient. Salience has profound effects for the rest of our mental processes both in and out of awareness. A greater understanding of these effects will be useful to scientists and clinicians alike.