Freudian Slip - Feb 20 2023

 

Freudian Slip

Feb 20 2023

There are no accidents

Freud said,

spoken like a scientist

who believes 

everything can be explained.

Even the alchemy

of the subconscious mind.

So when the collision happened

I resisted that loaded word

and searched for a cause.

My inattention?

The other driver's fault?

The bad weather

poor lighting

worse road?

It would help

if the collision itself

   —  the moment of impact, the aftermath  —

has not been wiped clean;

no memory,

or at least no conscious one.

And if there really are no accidents

would life not be perfect,

good intentions

be good enough?

As if we could always be

in control.

As if there was no such thing

as coincidence,

serendipity,

bad luck.

As if there was no black ice,

no blind intersections

in space and time.

2 tons

of steel and glass

at 80 k times 2.

A frictionless slip,

and the simple physics

of force and mass.

The hard problem

of the subconscious mind

is not so easily quantified.

The trauma

you can spend a lifetime talking out.

It's been suggested that car “accident” is a misnomer: these are strictly collisions; and in what way are they accidental if there is always something that could have been done better? Driver training. Road design. Lighting. Signage.

The Freud quote immediately came to mind, a quote that has been popularly reduced to the expression “Freudian slip”: as if nothing is ever inadvertently said. A cigar is never just a cigar; the phallic implications unavoidable! Since the poem began after reading a piece about someone's struggles with a brain injury received in a collision, I thought Freud had something to say about both subjects: the pedantic concern for language, as well as the psychological ramifications of trauma. So what else but losing control on black ice: a literal Freudian slip!

I'm not fan of Freud's theories or the rigour of his methods, although I do respect his role in pioneering our understanding of the complexity of the human mind. He was trained as a neurologist, so very much a scientist. Even though I would say that his work — as the poem avers — veers closer to alchemy than science.