Joe Biden: slips of the tongue can project our own hidden thoughts, fears and anxieties

• He also referred to Vice President Kamala Harris as “the first lady”.
• Biden recently visited Ireland and gave a speech in a pub in Dundalk in Country Louth, where part of his family comes from.
• Some media pounced on this slip as a symbol of an anti-British attitude and the danger it could cause a political storm.
• The White House had to issue a press statement saying that it was “very clear” what the president was referring to.

What would Freud say?

• However, Sigmund Freud would say that slips reveal unconscious and repressed thoughts.
• Founder of psychoanalysis Freud collected examples of slips of the tongue from consultations with patients and said that he could hardly find one example solely attributable to “the contact effect of sounds”.
• When Freud asked a woman patient how her uncle was, she answered: “I don’t know, nowadays I only see him in flagrante (while engaged in sexual activity).” Next day she told Freud that she had meant to say en passant (in passing), but Freud later discovered that she had previously been caught in flagrante.
• Other psychoanalysts accept the concept of repression but believe that Freud had put too much emphasis on sex.
• Freud may also have been particularly sensitive to mishearing certain types of slips, given his sexual theory, perhaps indicative of what is now called confirmation bias.