[1] In 1895 an investigation into verbal slips was undertaken by a philologist and a psychologist, Rudolf Meringer and Karl Mayer, who collected many examples and divided them into separate types.
[4] According to Freud's early psychoanalytic theory, a lapsus represents a bungled act that hides an unconscious desire: “the phenomena can be traced back to incompletely suppressed psychical material...pushed away by consciousness”.
[5] Jacques Lacan would thoroughly endorse the Freudian interpretation of unconscious motivation in the slip, arguing that “in the lapsus it is...clear that every unsuccessful act is a successful, not to say 'well-turned', discourse”.
Freud objected that such factors did not cause but only "favour slips of the tongue...in the immense majority of cases my speech is not disturbed by the circumstance that the words I am using recall others with a similar sound...or that familiar associations branch off from them (emphasis copied from original)".
[17] J. L. Austin had independently seen slips not as revealing a particular complex, but as an ineluctable feature of the human condition, necessitating a continual preparation for excuses and remedial work.