You’re always clicking on the wrong thing online. We asked a psychoanalyst what that says about your hidden desires.
Illustration by Chris Ritter/BuzzFeed
We live in a time when it is easier and more common than ever to make public mistakes. You know the ones: accidental retweets, reply-alls, Instagram favorites, and so on. We agonize over them, tell stories about the really bad ones, write advice columns about them.
But are our social media mistakes really mistakes? Sigmund Freud, the Austrian neurologist who founded psychoanalysis, famously believed that there is no such thing as an accident. To Freud, any human behavior we consider an accident or a mistake really reveals a subconscious motive from the id, the chaotic, buried part of human personality that comprises our basest desires. That's Freud 101.
So what do our social media mistakes tell us about our subconscious desires? To find out, we contacted William Braun, a Manhattan-based psychologist and psychoanalyst, to decipher the real motives behind some of our most common internet mistakes.
Before we get started, can you give us a little brush-up on Freudian theory?
William Braun: It can be boiled down to wish, defense, and compromise.
A wish means: I want something.
Defense (or prohibition) means: Oh, god, I couldn't want that!
Compromise means: I'll have some approximation of what I want.
Most people live in a kind of state of compromise. The problem is, a compromise is never as fulfilling as the satisfaction we initially imagined. A compromise by definition is lacking.
Slips, whether they be of the tongue, typos, or email gaffes, can be thought of as a way our original wish is trying to break through and get more satisfaction. It betrays us by bypassing our defense, the prohibition we put on ourselves for having such a, usually, unacceptable wish in the first place. This is why we usually react to such slips with embarrassment, shock, or horror.
