Freud's theory of slip of the tongue

 Some time ago, Ted Kennedy was giving a speech about education that was televised on C-SPAN. The late senator often moved his hands when he spoke, and his gestures were especially expansive that day. His voice conveyed a sense of urgency that made pulses race. "Our national interest," he intoned, "ought to be to encourage...," his strong hands cupped the air, "the breast."

The audience tittered, but they didn't have an opportunity to savor the gaffe. Without hesitation, the master orator backed up and started again. This time it came out right: "The best and brightest."

Slips of the tongue are almost inevitable. For every 1,000 words spoken, we make one or two errors. Considering that the average pace of speech is 150 words a minute, a slip is bound to occur about once every seven minutes of continuous talk. Each day, most of us make somewhere between 7 and 22 verbal slips.

Sigmund Freud, whose name is indelibly linked with such gaffes, called them Fehlleistungen (faulty actions) in his 1901 book, The Psychopathology of Everyday Life. He deemed them notable for revealing an unconscious thought, belief, wish, or motive. "Almost invariably I discover a disturbing influence from something outside of the intended speech," he wrote. "The disturbing element is a single unconscious thought, which comes to light through the special blunder."

 Young woman placing finger over her mouth

The Freudian slip is invoked to explain some strange and embarrassing behavior. "Nice to beat you," smiles a woman when she meets the ex-girlfriend of her husband. A dinner guest thanks his host "for the hostility." Soon after the adulterous Tiger Woods complained of a neck injury, a female reporter blurted that the golfer withdrew from the 2010 Players tournament due to "a bulging di**" in his back. When the founder of al-Qaeda was finally ambushed and killed last year, a critic of the president said, "Obama is dead and I don't care."

"For seven and a half years, I've worked alongside President Reagan," President George H.W. Bush once declared. "We've had triumphs. Made some mistakes. We've had some sex... uh...setbacks."

Freud would likely have insisted that a repressed thought or motive in Bush's unconscious reared its ungovernable head. The Viennese psychiatrist might have subjected the president to the couch and asked him about his childhood, his feelings about Reagan, his relationship with his wife—and in the telling, an explanation would emerge. Perhaps hearing himself say triumphs and mistakes triggered an unconscious association with sex.

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Freud laid bare his analysis of slips in Psychopathology. In one example, he notes a blunder made by a Miss X in regard to a man, Mr. Y. He found it strange that Miss X spoke warmly of Mr. Y, when she had previously expressed indifference or contempt. "I really never had anything against him," she said. "I never gave him the chance to cuptivate my acquaintance." Interrogating the woman, Freud learned that she had become romantically involved with Mr. Y. From this, he concluded that she meant to say cultivate while her unconscious thought captivate. By saying cuptivate, she revealed her hidden thought about becoming engaged to the man.

More than a century after it was first identified and long after Freud's ideas, especially about the ubiquity of sexual urges, have been dethroned, the Freudian slip holds an astonishing power to terrorize ordinary men and women. It threatens to reveal passions and motives and problems that lurk so far below the surface that we don't even know they exist. If Freud is right, then each one of us, at any given moment, harbors an F-bomb just waiting to explode.

But even a contemporary of Freud, philologist Rudolf Meringer, had a far less titillating explanation for slips of the tongue. They're just banana peels in the path of a sentence, accidental shifts of linguistic units. To Meringer, who published two collections of verbal mishaps, an error is just an error and a banana is just a banana. While we all fear that even our most innocent words will betray us, it's more Meringer's view of our blunders that science confirms today.

Recent research has focused on speech production, most notably how the brain translates thoughts into words. Cognitive scientist Gary Dell, a professor of linguistics and psychology at the University of Illinois at Urbana, contends that slips of the tongue are indeed revealing—of a person's capacity for using language and its components.

 1w/ toy baby, 2w/ blackheart, 3 w/ razorblade, 4 w/ lemon

In his view, concepts, words, and sounds are interconnected in three networks in the brain—the semantic, lexical, and phonological—and speech arises from their interaction. But every so often, the networks, which operate through a process he calls "spreading activation," trip over each other. The result is a slip of the tongue. And that, he believes, is a good thing. A language-production system that is error-prone allows for the "novel production" of words. It is prima facie evidence of linguistic flexibility, proof of the great dexterity of the human mind.

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Imagine that you, like Freud's Miss X, would like to express the word cultivate. Your mind activates your semantic network, which represents the meanings of the 30,000 or so words in your vocabulary. In getting to cultivate, neural nodes that have something to do with the concept (nurturing, tending, developing, fostering) are set in motion until the one word with the strongest activation, cultivate, is selected, and placed in the frame of the sentence.

The phonological network then needs to activate all the sounds of the chosen word: the k sound, the u sound and so on, avoiding interference from competing nodes for sounds like the pesky p and others. For cultivate to be grammatically correct in a sentence, the lexical network also kicks in and activates nodes that represent the parts of speech in the word string—nouns, verbs, adjectives, suffixes, prefixes—as well as tenses.

Sometimes nodes for a sound that occurs later in a sentence are activated prematurely and the later sound is substituted for the correct one. The result is a slip known as an anticipation, or forward error. Exhibit A is Ted Kennedy's "breast and brightest" slip: the r sound from brightest rushed into the sentence and corrupted best. In Bush's sexbacks the x sound at the end of the word setbacks turned set into sex. Tiger Woods's "bulging disk" in his back became another part of his anatomy when the node for the k sound at the end of back was activated too soon.

Spreading activation helps explain another type of slip: perseveration, or backwards error. "I love you" becomes "I love loo" because the node for the l sound remains activated too long.

When one node for a phrase is activated prematurely and another is delayed, we make spoonerisms (named for the blunder-prone Reverend William Archibald Spooner, an Oxford don who collected humorous slips). Enter "homely cousewife" and "time wounds all heels."

Activations within and between networks can overlap, and nodes that represent thoughts, syntax, and sounds can cross, creating confusion about the strongest activation. When a competing node is similar to the correct one, it sometimes gains primacy and replaces it. Hence malapropisms with similar associations: We ask for a yellow crayon when we really want orange, say final but mean midterm, and call a friend her older sister's name. The more often you say a word, the stronger the activation.

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Node competition can also encourage us to slip on words that are similar sounding, absurdly turning Osama into Obama, hospitality into hostility, insinuate into incinerate, and creating faux pas like social leopards. When nodes representing different words compete, their sounds can blend: Gratification and satisfaction become gratifaction; captivate and cultivate become Miss X's cuptivate.

The overwhelming majority of verbal slips are nothing more than incorrect activations of nodes in the speech network. No one process is at fault. As in any other system, errors occur and not every mistake has a meaning. Most bananas are just bananas.

Yet some slips sound suspiciously revealing, fueling a temptation to dig deeper. Is it possible that a repressed and unconscious wish to captivate or to be captivated activated the wrong nodes in Miss X's speech network?

Freud relied on "after-the-fact interpretation of a small set of slips in the wild, and with wild abandon," says a doubting Dell. "What's the scientific evidence that [Miss X]'s thoughts about captivate are unconscious and repressed?" he asks.

A likelier explanation is confusion with a word that one recently thought,