Chris Malcolm

By ChrisMalcolm

F SCOTLAND -- Freudian slip?

A Freudian slip (or parapraxis) is when a mistake reveals unconscious or secret feelings. The photograph is of the Bank of Scotland branch at the junction of the Lawnmarket and George IV Bridge in Edinburgh. Some of the lights have gone out in one of its illuminated nameplates. That's the mistake. It now reads "F SCOTLAND". That's the Freudian slip. Or it would be if a large financial orgnanisation could be said to have a mind. Legally speaking organisations can enter into contracts, express opinions, own property, be held accountable for crimes, and so on. So they do have a recognised quasi-personhood and therefore some kind of a quasi-mind.

On the other hand rather than a Freudian slip from the quasi-mind of a bank, this might be an example of the well recognised tendency of the world to behave sometimes in a poetic or symbolic fashion, to show us signs & portents pointing to the quasi-intentions of the quasi-intelligences which control the machinery behind the scenery which appears to us to be the world. (That's an elaborated form of the Plato's allegory of the shadows on the cave wall.)

Seen in that light this failure of illumination (if failure it be) could be considered to be another kind of Freudian slip. If so then an illuminating illumination failure.

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