Has it ever happened to you that you finished writing an email addressed to a colleague, commenting on something negative about your boss, and inadvertently directed it to your superior?
Have you never (just) left the paper that that person should not see on your desk?
Or to know that one of the Directors came today and stains his tie (which he never wears) with coffee?
One more: you know that you must deliver a job on Wednesday at the last minute, and when printing it you realize that you ran out of ink two days ago and forgot to notify the person in charge…
These and many other similar situations, typical of everyday life in any job can be read as simple mistakes, or be thought from another place.
How many times does it happen that we make mistakes, mistakes or lapses that surprise us? In those moments, if we are completely sure of something, it is that "We did not want to do that, but something else." Furthermore, we agree that although psychoanalytic language is well popularized in Argentina, its concepts seem to be more applicable when we see them in another person and not in oneself. When it comes to me, the one who errs without wanting to, then things get more difficult and we prefer to attribute it to a mere chance or to something of little importance.
Who first draws the veil to this, removing its appearance of naivety, is Freud, the inventor of the Failed Act concept: “Failed functions, that is, the occasional forgetting of words and names, of purposes, oral mistakes in reading and writing, the loss of objects, the definitive loss of them, certain errors contrary to our best knowledge, some habitual gestures and movements, all this that we gather under the common name of failed functions of the healthy and normal man has been, in general, very little attended by Psychology, being attributed to "distraction" and being considered derived from fatigue (or) lack of attention (..) Failed functions are true psychic phenomena and always involve a sense and a tendency, constituting the expression of certain intentions,that as a consequence of the given psychological situation they find no other means of externalizing themselves. Such a situation is, in general, the one corresponding to a psychic conflict and in it is deprived of direct expression, and the defeated tendency is derived by indirect ways ”.
In this way, admitting that consciousness is not the one that always prevails in our behavior is the necessary and indispensable condition to understand the fundamental reasons capable of explaining the aforementioned phenomena.
“If we want to consistently pursue our interpretation of failed operations (…) we will be forced to assume that there are tendencies in man that can be effective without him knowing anything about them. But with this we put ourselves in contradiction with all the prevailing opinions in ordinary life… ”.
Man tries almost systematically to deny the preponderance of the unconscious in his daily actions. A question that was also warned by Freud when establishing that one of the main insults of psychoanalysis towards the narcissism of humanity has to do with the fact that "The I is not master in its own house" which implies thinking that we are under the dominion of the Unconscious, whom we could place in a non-anatomical way as that part of the psychic structure in which we find repressed questions, insofar as intolerable if we follow Freud; o Unnameable if Lacan is our guide.
Thus, saying subconscious will not be the same, because it will mean "being below consciousness" than establishing a separate and independent entity that will strive to express itself: the Unconscious. And without going into details that exceed the pretensions of this text, it can be said without ambiguity that this permanent force (peremptory, according to Freud) will try to appear in some way. Examples of this will be symptoms, dreams, repetition, and failed acts.
“(…) Psychic processes are, in and of themselves, unconscious and conscious processes are only singular acts and parts of the total psychic life (…) we are used to identifying the psychic with the conscious… we consider consciousness the defining character of the psychic (…) His definition (of psychoanalysis) of the psychic says that it consists of processes of the type of feeling, thinking, wanting; and he is forced to maintain that there is an unconscious thinking, there is an unconscious wanting ”.
Returning to the beginning, the question of the nomination is imposed: Why that name? What exactly does it mean that it is an act and also failed?
The first thing to understand is that in the failed act there is a conflict. A fight between tendencies at levels outside of consciousness, and whose fight does not manifest itself in dreams or words, but in actions.
“Freud deduces that failed acts are equivalent to the symptoms, since ultimately they are nothing more than a return of the repressed. But the thing to keep in mind is that (…) the return is done as an act. Freud says it as 'it is linked to motility' ”.
And they are behaviors that are also failed, because in them the relationship with a specific objective or purpose is not clear. Their "why" remains in the dark in our consciousness, which assumes that these surprising acts do not really have a goal or are not linked to a specific cause.
However, it is established that the fact that they lack a logical explanation does not imply that they do not have a meaning. The point is that meaning is unconscious and as such we cannot understand it directly. So, and this is fundamental, it can be said that the meaning of the failed act is to process that conflict.
Once the above is understood, it is proposed to read the Freudian classification and from there to think about such strange situations or behaviors for waking life, in order to account for them under the psychoanalytic gaze.
1. The failed act as an attempt to avoid an upset (displeasure).
"What was the name of that guy who visited us a few days ago?… The one who sold such an interesting system… The one with the mustaches…. But if I have it on the tip of my tongue… ”.
"Did anyone see the pen Alberto brought, that I can't find it?"
Or write down the phone number and data of a key customer on any piece of paper, which, magically, gets lost…
According to Freud: “The motive that most frequently moves us to repress an intention, thus forcing it to be content with finding indirect expression in a failed act, is the avoidance of displeasure. In this way, we stubbornly forget a proper name when we harbor a secret anger towards the person to whom it corresponds or we fail to carry out purposes that we would have carried out only reluctantly, forced, for example, by social conveniences. We lose an object when we have fallen out with the person whom it reminds us of or who has given it to us. We took the wrong train when we started the trip unwillingly and we wanted to stay where we were to move to a different place.The avoidance of displeasure as the cause of these functional failures is most clearly shown to us in the forgetfulness of impressions and experiences (…) Memory is very partial and presents a great disposition to exclude from reproduction those impressions to which a painful affection, although it does not always achieve it ”.
It can be seen in this explanation what was established at the beginning. A conflict between tendencies: Discomfort towards a person versus the need to be “politically correct”. Or disgust for going to a certain place and forgetting the ticket or taking another bus. It can also be thought of when you have to present an important report to the line of managers and you go to the wrong office, entering another that is not related to that one.
2. Errors in speech.
When you want to say one thing and say another, or when something that you were trying to hide is manifested, or directly when the opposite of what was planned is expressed.
Regarding the last case, perhaps one of the most commented examples in recent Argentine history occurred when a candidate for vice president manifested in a mass event choosing the Unit before the Liberation (with respect to the foreigner) pretending to shout just the opposite.
In a work the examples can be funny or tragic, depending on the position of the protagonist. Having a boss to whom the woman was unfaithful and confusing the word "croissants" with "horns" could be fatal.
“The most common and also the most striking type of stumbling is the one in which the exact opposite of what was intended to be said is said. This, of course, takes us very far from the relationships between sounds and the effects of resemblance, and instead it can be argued that the opposites have a strong conceptual kinship with each other and are situated in a particular proximity within the psychological association ”.
3. The Displacement.
As with dreams, there are mechanisms that, based on conscious censorship, make us believe things that are not.
In these situations, the understanding of the failed act is more complex, because the psychic representations (call them ideas or thoughts) have been dressed in different clothes. They disguised.
“When we forget the name of a person against whom we have nothing, the analysis makes us see that said name has associatively awakened the memory of another person with the same or similar name that inspires us disgust. Forgetting the name of the innocent person has been a consequence of such a relationship, thus resulting in the intention to forget has suffered a kind of displacement along a certain associative path ”.
In the dream, the typical is. "Yesterday I dreamed of Juan, but it wasn't Juan." In the failed act, as another manifestation of the unconscious, the displacement mechanism appears in that a forgetfulness of a name may be as a result of the bond that we established between that person and another that causes us displeasure.
Possibly one of the most common examples of this occurs when we try to remember the name of a movie actor in the middle of a funny talk. It would not be a force to think that this actor has something in common with a person who generates displeasure (a friend, neighbor, father, brother, just to name a few possibilities).
4. The loss of objects and the failure as a magical act.
During these winter days of 2014 you can see on Argentine TV screens a very funny advertisement of people who, unable to travel because of money, whip with great joy the gifts-souvenirs (souvenirs) that their friends bring them, in a clear show of envy.
In a similar way, an accidental breaking of a thing, an oversight and also a forgetting of the object are inscribed within this unconscious logic, which shows the existence of a struggle between tendencies.
Thus, “we lose objects when we have fallen out with the giver and we do not want to remember him anymore, or also when they have stopped liking us and we want to create a pretext to replace them with better ones. The same purpose in relation to an object is also used by dropping, breaking, destroying (…) The temporary loss of objects is not, usually, but the unconscious realization of the desire to see them disappear, and their breaking, the to replace them with better ones (…) Dropping the thing, spoiling it or smashing it can also serve the same purpose ”.
Freud, in his Conferences cited supra, notes that the deviations can be due to multiple causes, but that the common thing happens by "wanting to lose it", thus existing an unconscious desire. In this way, the variations occur in the specific motives and ends. For example, when it comes from someone with whom we have a bad relationship or we buy it in a situation that we do not want to remember anything about.
In companies, it can be observed that gifts made by travelers from other organizations, for example pens, are very vulnerable to being lost by those collaborators who observe that supplier or its commercial representative in a bad way.
In another vein, and as enigmatic, astonishing or disturbing as it may be, deviations can also be linked to beliefs, superstitions and magical acts.
Freud says: “Several great poets have understood this sense of such mistakes and have used them in their works. The loss of valuable objects often turns out to be a sacrifice, aimed at warding off a feared misfortune, and this is not the only superstition that still prevails on learned men in the form of a failed act. ".
It continues: “… Certain things can be condemned to be lost without their value detracting from anything; for example, when there is a purpose to offer something to destiny to defend against another feared loss. As the analysis tells us, such exorcisms of destiny are still very frequent among us; that is why many times our loss is a voluntary sacrifice ”.
Finally, in his "Psychopathology of Everyday Life", Freud again locates failed acts as "… results of compromise, which entail half success and half failure with respect to each of the two purposes; the threatened intention is not completely stifled nor (regardless of singular cases) it remains untouched ”.
In short, when you are surprised to have done or said something strange, and could even make you laugh, remember that these acts have a meaning: even when we do not know which one.
