Slip of the Tongue

I am not an ardent or even tepid supporter of Freud. The far fetched ideas in his Oedipus Rex and Electra complex theories are off-putting, and seem to be products of his frequent cocaine use at the time. But there's something to be said about his theory of the unconscious. Freud believed that unacceptable ideas or fears are repressed or pushed into the unconscious, where they remain until they are morphed enough to pass the guardian censor, which controls access to the conscious. These ideas, though in the unconscious, can still manifest in our dreams, or in extreme cases, as psychosomatic disorders.

When I was studying for the MCAT, I would often have a dream where I was in some sort of danger, and took out my cell phone to dial 911, but I kept pressing the wrong numbers. I am assuming Freud would have interpreted this as my fear or anxiety of the MCAT. Since the second set of scores came out, I have not had this dream. I guess he was on to something.