Freud was known to poo-poo hypnotism, which is ironic considering the trance he has placed Western civilization under for almost 100 years. Here’s an example:
We love good stories. It’s like we’re wired to tell them, to hear them, to make them up.
The earliest cave paintings seem to be stories of the hunt. We are story making machines.
And, we’ll hold onto a good story even in the face of evidence that it’s dramatically wrong, if the evidence doesn’t provide a better story.
One story we love is the Hero’s story… we love and adore the victor. We also attribute qualities to the victor that s/he may not have had.
Freud is a victor. His theories permeate society (Google “Century of the Self” +BBC and watch this provocative documentary series).
But, just because his stories won, that doesn’t mean they were the best or that he was correct.
For example: One of Freud’s contemporaries, Rudolf Meringer, mapped out a simple explanation for most verbal blunders and slips of the tongue. He identified a handful of specific errors that recur in almost every language and, just as important, noticed which ones do not occur. For example, we’ll often swap the first phonemes of words (e.g. “I bought a lottle of biquor” for “I bought a bottle of liquor”) but not the last ones (e.g. “I bought a bottor of liqttle”), and when we make swaps the new words sound like they could be real words.
In short, Meringer concluded that slips and blunders were merely processing errors. It’s difficult to produce language and, therefore, or not-perfect minds make predictable mistakes. That is, we’re quite mechanistic, but not perfect machines.
But the story that we are machines is not as compelling as Freud’s story about verbal blunders, namely, that these gaffes revealed our hidden, secret, repressed, real thoughts that, like steam from a kettle, have accidentally escaped. For Freud, a verbal gaffe is a battle between good and evil, right and wrong, inner and outer.
This is, clearly, a much more engaging story (Freud, in fact, cherry-picked specific examples from Meringer’s research to “prove” this unconscious escape theory). Meringer’s doesn’t stand a chance.
Freud’s story is so much more engaging that even when it seems blatantly obvious that Meringer’s is a simpler explanation, a more robust and testable theory, and, much more likely to be closer to the truth… we can’t drop the notion of a “Freudian Slip,” and it’s almost impossible to hear George W. Bush talk about the “erections in I lack” (instead of “elections in Iraq”) and not believe that he just inadvertently revealed his hidden agenda and that he really invaded Iraq because of some issue that could have been solved with Viagra.
More about this Freudian Trance (or is it a nightmare) soon…
(and thanks to Michael Erard and his book Um. . .: Slips, Stumbles, and Verbal Blunders, and What They Mean for introducing me to Meringer… and, um, like, you know for a wonderfully entertaining read)
Comments
5 responses to “The Freudian Trance, part 1”
I guess the phrase: “Meringerian Slip” isn’t as easy to pronounce as the more famous Freudian version thereof! Yes, Freud was an excellent story teller, incorporating things like Greek mythology into his work in order to add some kind of classical weight to what he was attempting to explain. I have always thought his comment that “sometimes a cigar is just a cigar” to be the height of irony, considering that for most of the time in his theories any vaguely cigar shaped object was invariably a phallic symbol. Freud was a product of his time, his age, and we forget that nothing he wrote about was even vaguely testable by any sort of experimentation. The idea of neurochemistry was unknown to Freud and so there was no room in his theories for a physical cause for mental symptoms. His skill as a story teller seems to enable him to slip pretty much anything he likes under our mental radar and we simply accept it as being true. This is a dangerous acceptance! Just because something sounds good, sounds convincing, doesn’t mean to say that it is in any way true!
Actually, I like the sound of “Meringerian Slip” 😉
What most people don’t know about Freud, and what’s shown in “The Century of the Self” is how Freud’s nephew, Edward Bernays, not only made Freud and his ideas popular in the US, he also used the simplest of them — that what we REALLY want when we buy a product is safety, control, approval or esteem/identity — to create the modern PR and advertising world.
Freud, apparently, approved of neither since he thought the US and business were crass… again, an irony considering how he massively marketed himself in Vienna.
And let’s not leave out the VERY limited sample of people he used to “verify” his theories… oh, and then there was the cocaine use…
Hi I enjoyed reading your article “The Freudian Trance, part 1”.
I have also been studying the impact of Freud and his family members on society a lot lately, but you might be shocked at what I have collected concerning his wayward disciple – Wilhelm Reich:
http://www.blendedbody.com/_cl/_audio/_2ndgen/CenturyOfSelf/WilhelmReich/
It is healthy for man to learn the full truth!
Steve Nelson – Boise
http://www.OurSecondGeneration.com
Interesting resources, Steve.
Of course most of the people who claimed they didn’t agree with Freud (like Reich), basically *did* agree with the fundamental ideas, like “something happened to you in the past that you need to clear up now.”
They just disagreed about WHEN that thing happened and WHAT to do to clear it up.