Psychopathology of Everyday Life

According to Freud, our daily lives teem with unwitting expressions of the wishes and ideas we try to keep hidden. These suppressed notions elude our conscious control and take the form of slips of the tongue, jokes, and seemingly accidental gestures. In this classic of psychology, Freud explores the phenomenon of parapraxes: slips of the tongue commonly known as Freudian slips, acts of forgetfulness, misinterpretations, and «accidents.» These simple and apparently trivial events, he explains, can possess deeper meanings with subconscious motivations — meanings that can be revealed by analysis and can ultimately offer a clearer perception of the self.Psychopathology of Everyday Life remains one of Freud’s most widely read books, full of anecdotal accounts (many of them quite amusing) and free from jargon and technical terminology. Freud draws from his personal experience to illustrate his points, citing many incidents of his own deliberate forgetting or «inexplicable» mistakes, and his conviction that these actions cannot be called truly accidental or uncaused is the primary lesson of this book. As the title suggests, this work has helped unravel the mysteries of the ordinary events of our daily lives, offering us a deeper understanding of ourselves and our motivations.