Inner thoughts: should guide or guard?
Once I was privileged to attend a Conference held in Calcutta
University in India which is one of the most prestigious universities of
our region. I represented Monash University and there were another 300
plus academics from around the world.
The conference was interesting to me as a linguist, as I came across
a variety of latest findings and trends of modern linguistics, but the
most interesting (and funny) language moment occurred during the closing
ceremonies.
The conference was held in one of the campuses of Calcutta
University, and the 300+ people attending were each assigned rooms in
Calcutta’s Ramakrishna Mission Hall. So, everybody was staying in dorms,
with the same shared bathrooms, roommates, and tiny rooms as any visitor
would have in there. By no means were these luxury accommodations, but
they didn’t have to be, and after all it was manageable particularly for
me with my good old ‘Vishrama Shaala’ experiences, and what was provided
was quite sufficient for that four days.
Something very linguistic and funny happened during the closing
ceremonies for this conference. So, I and 300+ other people were sitting
in the main arena, and one of the conference coordinators was speaking
to the entire group. He’s going through and thanking each different
group or committee that made the conference possible, and then finally,
he says (paraphrased) “I’d like to thank Ramakrishna Mission Hall for
providing us with our unremarkable accommodations”.
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Sigmund
Freud |
A long moment passed, and then a good portion of the arena burst into
laughter. He realized several seconds later what he had said, but by
then, it was too late, and his correction was overwhelmed by the
laughter, and his original meaning of “remarkable accommodations” was
lost to history.
This is a truly amazing example of a “Freudian slip”.
A Freudian slip is a verbal or memory mistake that is believed to be
linked to the unconscious mind. Common examples include an individual
calling his or her spouse by an ex’s name, saying the wrong word or even
misinterpreting a written or spoken word.
Discovered by Sigmund Freud, he described a variety of different
types and examples of Freudian slips in his 1901 book The
Psychopathology of Everyday Life. According to Freud, these errors
reveal an unconscious thought, belief or wish.
“Two factors seem to play a part in bringing to consciousness the
substitutive names: first, the effort of attention, and second, and
inner determinant which adheres to the psychic material,” Freud
suggested in his book. “Besides the simple forgetting of proper names
there is another forgetting which is motivated by repression,” Freud
explained. According to Freud, unacceptable thoughts or beliefs are
withheld from conscious awareness, and these slip help reveal what is
hidden in the unconscious.
The term is popularly used today in a humorous way when a person
makes a mistake in speech. In these situations, observers often suggest
(in a comic way) that the mistake reveals some type of hidden emotion on
the part of the speaker.
Because everybody knew that the accommodations were, in fact, quite
unremarkable, when he misspoke, it was both extremely funny and
extremely telling. He unconsciously violated the social norm as well as
catching himself in his own distortion of the truth in front of 300+
people.
So, the moral of this story is that you’re never safe from your own
inner thoughts. Although some people can become very adept at lying (or
mild distortion of the truth), a single speech error could pop up and
blow your entire cover.
You can pay close attention to your words, and try to suppress your
subconscious, but sooner or later, everybody slips up.
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