Citation

Tannenbaum SA. J. Abnorm. Psychol. Soc. Psychology 1923; 18(3): 246-257.

Copyright

(Copyright © 1923, R.G. Badger)

DOI

10.1037/h0066411

PMID

unavailable

Abstract

Lapses in psychic functioning, i.e., the occurrence of certain psychological mishaps, e.g., making a slip of the tongue, reading the wrong word, stumbling in walking, forgetting to carry out an intended purpose, accidentally breaking or mislaying something, failing to recall what one ought to be able to recall, etc., have been attracting a great deal of attention during the past fifteen or twenty years. Unfortunately for psychology, those who gave the subject this attention approached it with a bias resulting from preoccupation with the system of psychotherapeutics known as psycho-analysis. Owing to this bias these investigators found in these lapses confirmation of their theories about "unconscious mental processes," and they have used these lapses and their interpretations of them as a means of introducing the uninitiated into the mysteries of the so-called "new psychology." According to this "new psychology" such lapses are not explainable by the principles of orthodox psychology, are due to the operation of mental processes of which the individual is not and cannot be aware at the time of the lapse, are the manifestation of the activity within "the unconscious" of desires of a painful or disgusting or unthinkable nature, and betray something which the individual does not want to know or have known about himself. In the following analyses of such lapses (slips of the tongue, etc.) as have recently come under my notice or have been studied by me, I shall show that such psychic mishaps or accidents can be satisfactorily explained by the principles of orthodox psychology, do not involve unknown or unknowable mental processes, are not the manifestations of repressed desires, are not "unconscious" betrayals of the individual's secret self, and that they furnish not the slightest basis on which to construct a psychology of the unconscious. The careful scrutiny of the circumstances surrounding lapses (slips, forgettings, accidental breakages, etc.) proves that these "mistakes" are the results of verifiable psychophysiological processes, that the known laws of orthodox psychology are adequate to explain them, that they are psychologically determined (not "psychically determined"), that they are not "valid psychic acts" and do not give expression to repressed, unknown, and unknowable motives of an undesirable, discreditable, or disgusting nature. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2006 APA, all rights reserved)