Faulty and Symptomatic Acts - What are They?

What are faulty acts? Common mistakes such as forgetting names, projects or book titles, lecture errors such as reading instead of the word written in a newspaper another one, pronunciation errors, when instead of saying the word we want to say we say another one, writing errors - when we write something else than what we had intended. There are many slips and mistakes of this type - generally called lapses - studied and analyzed by Freud in order to prove they are not hazardous but meaningful acts.

Then there are the symptomatic acts, the most frequent one being to play with the wedding ring on your finger. These acts indicate serious unconscious drives that are revealed only after a thorough analysis.

A simple symptomatic act is committed by a man who has to call his girlfriend in order to break up with her. He would not want this in fact and then, when he calls her, he unconsciously uses an expired phone card so that his conscious idea of saying goodbye would not be completed.

Freud approached in-depth these faulty acts in his dedicated book The Psychopathology of Everyday Life. This book had an enormous success because it was addressed not only to specialists but to the wide public too, offering reliable explanations about what these faulty acts are and how they can be analyzed.

Freud offers many examples concerning the interpretation of faulty and symptomatic acts in his book. We will do the same with an example of analysis of of a writing error (lapsus calami). Other examples will come soon. AROPA

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