Many a slip between Freud and the interpretation of dreams; The

A worried man goes to see his analyst because he can't stop himself saying inappropriate things. "Take this morning for instance" he tells her. "I talked to the girl in the corner shop as usual but, instead of saying 'Twenty Embassy tipped please', out came, 'Nice pair of tits dear.'"

The analyst gives him a comforting smile. "Don't worry about it" she says. "It's called a Freudian slip. Happens to everyone. I did it myself this very morning. I meant to say to my husband, 'Darling, could you pass the butter please ?' To my surprise, out slipped, 'You, you fat bastard, you ruined my life.'"

That's one of the best jokes I've ever heard - though perhaps I've revealed a little too much about my inner self by saying so. The way I was told it, the analyst was a man.

But thanks to my complex neurosis and need for approbation, I've deployed the strategy of making the joke - and therefore my entire persona - more acceptable, in the hope of sounding like a man in touch with his feminine side.

Thus retaining a modicum of respect from you, my peer group. That's the problem with Freudish. Everyone speaks it; few have got the foggiest what any of it means.

Invented 100 years ago last week with the publication of The Interpretation of Dreams, the language of dimly-understood psychoanalysis has become the modern age's plaything.

Any halfway interesting pub conversation will be stuffed full of taboos, split personalities, wish-fulfilment, fixations, and parapraxis (well, okay, maybe not parapraxis). By the fourth round everyone will be affectionately addressing each other as schizo or psycho. At 18 years old I had a ferocious fight with my best mate (mate? There's no possibility of homoerotic repressed desire in that, is there?) about whether the modern age began with Darwin or Freud. The fact that neither of us had read these great luminaries didn't stop us nearly coming to blows. It might have been down to a lack of experience of brandy (make that Cognac, perhaps my subconscious motivated me to use a word containing "randy") but we brandished "survival of the fittest" and "dream-distortions" at one another like subliminal flick-knives. No other two great thinkers (not me and my mucker, the other two) have supplied the world with such an open invitation to knowing so dangerously little.

Freudish invades every part of modern life. As parents, my partner and I have anxious debates about Oedipus complexes and infantile repression. I used to tell the story about my five-year-old son and seven-year-old daughter's bath conversation. The wee man lay back, a touch louchely I thought, and eyed his sister. "You've got a nice vagina" he ventured. She covered herself coyly and beamed "Thank you very much". I reckoned this was proof of our modern, mature tell-it- like-it-is child rearing approach. Then a weegie west end pseudo- shrink alarmed us. Hadn't we, by falling about the bathroom floor, roaring and laughing, regressed our children's sexual development ?

In relationships, the semiotics of analysis aren't half knackering the chances of romantic bliss. In the pre-Freudian bucolic Arcadia, did couples question the deeper meaning behind simple everyday statements ? ("You make mince just like my mother.") Then again, there would have been no great Woody Allen lines (being thrown out of his metaphysics exam, for looking into the soul of the boy sitting next to him) and no psychiatrist /lightbulb jokes (only one sychiatrist, but the bulb must really really want to change).

For the last century, writers have had their sleep patterns interrupted, fretting that the inexplicable dream they've just had may be the key to their magnus opus.

Every writer has a story of jotting down great insights at four in the morning, only to discover in the cold light of dawn that the scrawl reads "the dentist detective falls from the pavement" or "do the shopping Tuesday". Shrinkspeak is a kind of second language that undermines all the sensible things we think we're saying. But we all know someone who has Freudish for a mother-tongue. The type of person who accuses you of, for example, paranoia, and when you try to defend yourself cites infantile rage resulting in aggression. Don't defend yourself and you're manifesting repressed anger and exploiting manipulative Oedipal/Electral tactics. By the end of which you are genuinely and incurably paranoid. Armchair analysis is a sophisticated weapon in the armoury of office, pub and sexual politics.

After all, science is always political. The thinking behind The Origin of the Species and The Interpretation of Dreams - or for that matter the human genome project - is dependent not only on the scientific data available, but on the political consciousness of the time.

Grand theories open up entirely new spaces within human experience, and the concepts behind them enter into daily life, like GM seeds into the air. Suddenly they're part of everything, though we're not quite sure where they are or how they work.

There are more half-arsed freudianisms around than you can shake a phallic symbol at.

Sigmond himself advises that you - all three of you, persona, ego and id - should try, not to conquer your complexes, but come to terms with them. I may be suffering from pre-penile dementia, but I reckon the simplest (if delusive) way to dispute accusations of mother- complexes, deep-seated denial or Freudian slippery is to say, No comprendo. I'm a Jungian.

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