Failure
The term “ failure” was coined by Sigmund Freud and in his psychoanalysis stands for unintentional actions and linguistic utterances, which are commonly referred to as “ slip of the tongue ”, “interrogation” or “oversight”, but which, according to Freud, make perfect sense on an unconscious level surrender. Freud developed the theory of failures in his treatise On the Psychopathology of Everyday Life from 1901.
Term in Freud
Sigmund Freud also added temporary forgetting , misplacing objects, losing things like abilities and other "errors" and a "number of similar phenomena" to these failures . Mistakes as well as dreams and neurotic symptoms are compromise formations between from it coming impulses and the I -determining reality principle. Especially when blunder though, is that by the acting person, a goal they consciously pursued, replaced by another, which the unconscious impulses can manifest themselves. Therefore, in a certain sense, they could also be referred to as correct performance .
Freud sees the cause for the emergence of the failures in the existence and activity of unconscious motives, which, for reasons of decency, are subject to psychological censorship and cannot be consciously expressed. The unconscious nevertheless expresses itself in the failure , even if the ego- consciousness mostly dismisses this expression as a mere oversight. As an example, Freud cites a case in which someone expresses that something has come to the "pre-pigments" (instead of "glimpses"). When asked, the speaker hesitantly admits that he considered the machinations to which his “accidentally” (apparently) unsuccessful sentence was meant to be a real mess.
According to Freud, there are three groups worth mentioning, each of which deals with the failures differently:
- a first group that notices the failure in the beginning and tries to make it unrecognizable immediately.
- The second group does not notice the failure and after being asked about it, their relatives either deny at all, e.g. B. to have promised, or attribute it to sheer coincidence.
- A third group also does not notice their failure, but after being asked about it, they can understand and also see why this failure probably occurred.
According to Freud, failures result, among other things, from impulses that are suppressed or warded off in everyday life (see defense mechanism ). By pushing back these impulses, an impulse accumulation arises, which is expressed, among other things, in failures.
criticism
One can see evidence of Freud's theory of the structure of the psyche in the unconscious , preconscious and conscious in the fact that there are failures . Nevertheless, not all failures can be traced back to processes in the unconscious of the psyche; Instead of psychological reasons, there can be purely organic ones that cause memory and language disorders. In the case of persistent, also acutely life-threatening disorders, Freud urgently recommended accompanying or priority consultation with a physiologist in order to be able to clearly confirm or exclude an organic disorder.
Behavioral therapy deals particularly critically with the theory of the unconscious in psychoanalysis , in that it does not care so much about uncovering any unconscious motives. Reference is made primarily to Karl Popper's philosophy of science .
See also
swell
- Sigmund Freud: On the psychopathology of everyday life . (1901)
- Sigmund Freud: Lecture to introduce psychoanalysis and new consequences. In: Study edition, Volume 1. Frankfurt a. M .: Fischer. ISBN 3-10-822721-1
