Forgot a piece of important information? Maybe you ran into an old acquaintance on the street and forgot their name, which made the conversation awkward for you. Then you probably experienced what is called a failed act. Don’t worry, it’s incredibly common.
Failed acts, lapsus, or Freudian slips, are instances where individuals unintentionally express their subconscious thoughts, desires, or emotions through verbal or behavioral errors.
In psychology, these lapses are often interpreted as revealing underlying motives, conflicts, or unresolved issues within the individual's psyche.
They are believed to occur when the unconscious mind momentarily overrides the conscious mind, leading to the expression of repressed thoughts or feelings. However, more times than not, they can also be attributed to a person’s physical state, such as them having a migraine, having consumed alcohol, being fatigued, tired, or exhausted, or lack of language learning and simple errors in speaking or grammatical processing.
The main types of failed acts are: forgetfulness - of certain words, names, intentions, actions, and objects -, verbal lapses - such as when someone wishes to say something but pronounces another word or someone says the opposite of what they meant-, writing, hearing, and reading lapses, misplacing objects, memory illusions, and the automatic execution of intentional acts in inappropriate circumstances. This term was conceptualized by Sigmund Freud in his book, “The Psychopathology of Everyday Life”. In one of his lectures, Freud gave as an example of these acts the case of a woman who often used her maiden name while she was married when signing important documents, saying that that marriage has led to a divorce, but not attributing this event to superstition, but to the subconscious mind. Freud based his idea on his work with a young man who misquoted a Latin phrase from "The Aeneid." This man had dropped one of the Latin words when he repeated it, and Freud determined that the word reminded the young man of blood, which he believed was linked to a pregnancy scare the man had experienced with his girlfriend, thus reminding him of this negative experience. Failed acts are also quite often used intentionally in literary works to reveal a character’s true intentions or state of mind and give the reader a glimpse of their psyche, such as in The Merchant of Venice, by William Shakespeare.
In conclusion, failed acts are common slips or lapses, which can be attributed to both physiological and psychological factors, oftentimes revealing a person’s deeply buried desires or true intentions.
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