A chance event

This post has no real purpose; in the spirit of 'free association', I sit down to write this, because I have little else to do. I have, as you probably know, borrowed the expression from Freud; I would not, I suspect, have used it, unless I hadn't been reading one of his works very recently. To say that I have read it is, however, an exaggeration; I am currently reading it. To be exact, if you were by any chance wondering, the book is known as "Lectures on Psychoanalysis". It is an interesting book, thus far; I had hoped it would be. I bought it only last week at an antique store, for the decent price of 75 SEK, circa 7,5 Euros.
The first four parts of the book (Introduction, Parapraxes 1,2,3) deals mainly with so called 'parapraxes', which I guess could be translated into something like 'anti-practice'. With this concept, you will be more familiar than you might think. It might happen, as Freud explains, that sometimes, you make a slip of tongue; you mean to say one thing, but what comes out is another. You might make a slip of the pen that, naturally, is the same thing as the previous, but with an obvious difference. You might forget proper names that you know very well of. You might hear things wrongly, see things wrongly, or mislay various items. All of the above, are included in the concept of 'parapraxes'.
Freud deals with this over roughly 80 to a 100 pages, and what he seems to conclude in the end, is that none of these events are chance events. You might think that your slip of tongue was unintentional, that you had no desire or plan to say what you said, but that is, in fact, not true, in most cases. For instance, if someone at out graduation dinner had walked up on stage to hold a speech, and instead of saying that "all of you are nice", he or she would have said "all of you are mice", then there is a good reason to suspect this person for not really liking everyone that much, or maybe, that he or she really likes mice and wishes that everyone were mice.
This, says Freud, is one of the founding principles of psychoanalysis.

I am now on to another section of the book: dream interpretation. I have only read one part, but it already seems a bit more interesting than Introduction and Parapraxes 1,2,3.

Lisa wrote earlier inquiring about futures. I don't know for sure about mine yet, but it seems that things are going to slide, slide in all directions. I was just now discussing the topic with Poléo, and as he said, it would surely be splendid to make a living on obscure art. No one knows what art is, and being an ‘artist’ would allow for all the freedom in the world to be as incredibly bizarre as possible. I would dress in ragged woollen suits, always wear a hat, and smoke too many (I mean too many) cigarettes a day, still being able to defend it all the while with a plain: “I’m an artist you fucker.”

To end this with a quote, which I found very recently, by mere accident, and which applies to the people who write on this blog:

"Solitude and silence teach me to love my brothers for what they are, not for what they say."

It was said by Thomas Merton, about whom I know very little other than that he was an author.