In general, Freud's slips are overrated and overused. Gricean slip seems a better term.
In general, Freud misses the intentional axis. If you smoke a pipe, that's a phallic symbol, etc. If you dream of water, your Oedipus complex is unresolved, etc.
D. F. Pears, in Motivated Irrationalty, has addressed some of the Freudian paradoxes in more or less Gricean terms. But Pears -- I can say this aloud since he died last year -- is a bit of a bore to read. I mean, I loved him.
Pears considers it all boils down to 'self-deception'. The Freudian is self-deceived.
So, if you commit a slip (Freudian, Griceain slip) you MEAN-N (naturally) that p, whereas you go on record as NOT meaning that p. Those slips are then meant to show your 'inner nature', or something like that. You cannot 'feign' a 'slip' -- and so on. But I don't think it's as easy as that.
Freudians HAVE to study slips. They get paid for it. Griceians don't.
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ReplyDeleteHumans do manifest verbal tics, or one might say, strange patterns which may be...a symptom of some disorder or another. Of course with the truly insane, that might be completely chemical or neurological--the sort of speech made fun of in 'toons, etc--WHICH WAY DID HE GO GEORGE, WHICH WAY DID HE GO.
But you will hear "normal" people, even educated ones, use certain words repeatedly. Repetition seems to be one nearly pathological implicature. Repeat names, terms, labels, etc. And rabid political types--both right and left-- do that. LIB-RAWL! Foxnews, America's favorite psychotics. Listen to Hitler's broadcasts--he was doing the same (my bad deutsch I pick up some...) with the jews, degenerate, immoral, etc. So did reds at times--bourgeois pig, so forth.
No sh*t you probably say--yet it all shows that like humans are just a few steps away from rabid baboons--their words generally a type of weapon.
Yes, people tend to repeat themselves, or theirselves, as I would prefer. But Kramer would disagree. "themselves", he'd go.
ReplyDeleteAnother think, the trick, "you know" as used in conversation, meriting a separate blog post.
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