A Freudian slip

I love Freud. I don't really care whether his theories were right or not (although some of them seem to fit pretty good some of the time)--at least they are entertaining.

One aspect of his thought that seems pretty solid is the one developed in the book The Psychopathology of Everyday Life. This is where he develops the idea that apparently meaningless and accidental things that slips of the tongue (or what some of my friends call "mouthographical errors") or in writing, mistaken actions, losing or forgetting things and such express unconscious thoughts and ideas.

These are the Freudian slips, in other words, where the cat gets out of the bag whether the holder wants it to or not. It can happen to the best of us. It happened to me yesterday.

Right here.

After being up late watching election returns and then getting up early, I banged out a red-eyed post-election analysis, starting with Senator-elect Joe Manchin's race. I meant to write that Manchin handily defeated his Republican challenger John Raese, but this is what came out:

"Governor Joe Manchin handily defeated Republican challenger Joe Manchin for the late Robert C. Byrd's senate seat."

This is what happens when you don't get enough sleep. I corrected it almost as soon as I posted it but some people saw the not-ready-for-prime-time version. A friend who saw it even thought it was clever.

The unconscious is pretty clever. In this case, it really was a classical Freudian slip in that it expressed something I probably really thinking about the whole thing.

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