hurry home to my mom. Do you know what he said?”
“What did he say?”
“He said, she’s stupid!”
“Yes, that was definitely a case of rationalizing. The boy didn’t mean
what he actually said. He meant it was stupid you had to go, but he was too
shy to say so. Another thing we do is project.”
“What’s that?”
“When we project, we transfer the characteristics we are trying to
repress in ourselves onto other people. A person who is very miserly, for
example, will characterize others as penny-pinchers. And someone who will
not admit to being preoccupied with sex can be the first to be incensed at
other people’s sex-fixation.”
“Hmm.”
“Freud claimed that our everyday life was filled with unconscious
mechanisms like these. We forget a particular person’s name, we fumble with
our clothes while we talk, or we shift what appear to be random objects
around in the room. We also stumble over words and make various slips of
the tongue or pen that can seem completely innocent. Freud’s point was that
these slips are neither as accidental nor as innocent as we think. These
bungled actions can in fact reveal the most intimate secrets.”
“From now on I’ll watch all my words very carefully.”
“Even if you do, you won’t be able to escape from your unconscious
impulses. The art is precisely not to expend too much effort on burying
unpleasant things in the unconscious. It’s like trying to block up the entrance
to a water vole’s nest. You can be sure the water vole will pop up in another
part of the garden. It is actually quite healthy to leave the door ajar between
the conscious and the unconscious.”
“If you lock that door you can get mentally sick, right?”
“Yes. A neurotic is just such a person, who uses too much energy trying
to keep the ‘unpleasant’ out of his consciousness. Frequently there is a
particular experience which the person is desperately trying to repress. He
can nonetheless be anxious for the doctor to help him to find his way back to
the hidden traumas.”
“How does the doctor do that?”
“Freud developed a technique which he called free association. In other
words, he let the patient lie in a relaxed position and just talk about whatever
came into his or her mind—however irrelevant, random, unpleasant, or em-
barrassing it might sound. The idea was to break through the ‘lid’ or ‘control’
that had grown over the traumas, because it was these traumas that were
causing the patient concern. They are active all the time, just not consciously.”
“The harder you try to forget something, the more you think about it
unconsciously?”
“Exactly. That is why it is so important to be aware of the signals from
the unconscious. According to Freud, the royal road to the unconscious is our
dreams. His main work was written on this subject—The Interpretation of
Dreams, published in 1900, in which he showed that our dreams are not
random. Our unconscious tries to communicate with our conscious through
dreams.”
“Go on.”
“After many years of experience with patients—and not least after