The Psychopathology of Everyday Life

A forgotten painter's name on a carriage ride in Herzegovina opens the case that no slip or forgetting is an accident.

German, the original language

Original title: Zur Psychopathologie des Alltagslebens
First published: 1901(aged 45)
Original language: German

Overview

On a carriage ride from Ragusa, on the Dalmatian coast, into Herzegovina, Sigmund Freud asked a stranger whether he had seen the famous frescoes at Orvieto, and could not recall the painter's name. Botticelli and Boltraffio came to mind instead, and he knew both were wrong. When someone else supplied Signorelli, Freud traced the gap back through the conversation. They had been talking about the Turks of Bosnia and their calm acceptance of death; he had held back a second story, about how highly the same men valued their sexual lives; and a few weeks earlier, at Trafoi in the Alps, he had heard that a patient he had worked hard to help had killed himself over a sexual disorder that could not be cured. The book argues that the small failures of ordinary life — a forgotten name, a slip of the tongue, a misread word, a bungled action — are not accidents. Each comes from a thought that has been pushed out of awareness but not fully silenced, the same mechanism Freud had found in dreams and in neurotic symptoms, so that healthy people show in miniature what the ill show at full size. The study first appeared in 1901 in the Monatsschrift für Psychiatrie und Neurologie, a psychiatric journal, and as a book from S. Karger in Berlin in 1904, and twelve foreign translations appeared in his lifetime. In 1974 the Italian classical philologist Sebastiano Timpanaro answered it with Il lapsus freudiano, applying what editors of ancient texts know about copyists' errors. He took up Freud's second example, a young man who drops the word aliquis, "someone", from a line of Virgil, and whose lapse Freud traces to his fear that a woman's period was late. The young man's version, Timpanaro pointed out, was simply easier Latin.

Key concepts

What is a parapraxis?

A parapraxis is Freud's general name for the small failures of ordinary functioning: forgetting a name or an intention, a slip of the tongue or pen, misreading, mislaying, a bungled action. What unites them is a single mechanism: an intended act is disturbed by a second, unwelcome thought that the person has pushed out of awareness.

What is the disturbing thought behind a slip?

It is the second intention that interferes with the one a person consciously means. Often it has just been suppressed, sometimes it is long repressed. It rarely speaks openly; it takes what lies to hand, a similar sound or a word just used, and bends the intended act with it. The slip is then a compromise: half of what was meant, half of what was held back.

What is a screen memory?

A screen memory is an early memory that is kept not for its own content but because it stands in for another, more important one that was repressed. Its content is usually trivial, a scene of no importance remembered in sharp detail, while the significant event close to it in time or meaning has vanished. The vivid trifle screens the real matter from view.

What are symptomatic and chance actions?

They are the things people do seemingly without purpose: jingling coins, kneading bread into shapes, twisting a beard, doodling with a pencil. Freud treats them as small symptoms. The person regards them as meaningless and pays them no attention, which is exactly why they can express a thought that would be refused if it tried to reach awareness directly.

Themes of the book

What this book returns to, gathered into themes and ordered by how much of the text each one occupies.

What a Slip Gives Away

Why does a familiar name vanish at the worst moment, or the wrong word come out? Freud bets that each small failure is a hidden thought finding a way to speak.

A forgotten name, a misread word, a slip of the tongue: Freud collects hundreds, many his own, and in each traces a second thought that has been pushed aside but not silenced. It does not invent new material; it borrows a sound, a neighbouring word, a memory, and bends the intended act just enough to show through. Even our earliest childhood memories, often scenes of no importance, can be stand-ins kept in place of something nearby that was repressed.

memory
forgetting
motivated forgetting
speech errors
slips of the tongue
reading errors
parapraxis
repression
unconscious motivation

Enter a dialogue

Nothing Happens by Chance Inside

If nothing in the mind happens without a cause, what is left of chance, and of the superstitious who see signs everywhere? The final chapter draws the consequence of all the examples before it.

Freud believes in chance in the outside world but not in the mind: a number picked at random, an idle gesture, a cut finger after a disappointment all have motives. The superstitious person, he argues, makes the opposite mistake, knowing nothing of his own motives and so projecting them onto events as omens. Because the same mechanism produces slips in the healthy and symptoms in the sick, the boundary between normal and neurotic life becomes a matter of degree.

determinism
causation
superstition
action
intention
unconscious processes
numerical cognition
symptom formation

Enter a dialogue

Within this work

passages held: 198
distinct concepts: 221
by passages held, corpus-wide: #354

What this book thinks together

The wheel takes this book’s leading concepts and shows how often they come up together. The wider the band between two, the more of its passages speak of both. Among them, most often together: “memory” and “repression”.

Concept co-occurrence, strongest first 8 concepts, joined by 27 pairings. 81 pairings reach beyond these concepts and are not drawn.
Concept	Paired concept	Shared passages
memory	repression	24
association	memory	20
memory	unconscious motivation	15
memory	unconscious	14
association	unconscious	13
language	speech errors	12
forgetting	memory	11
repression	unconscious	11
association	speech errors	9
association	unconscious motivation	9
association	repression	8
association	language	7
repression	unconscious motivation	7
speech errors	unconscious	7
forgetting	unconscious motivation	5
language	memory	4
language	unconscious	4
forgetting	unconscious	3
speech errors	unconscious motivation	3
memory	speech errors	2
association	forgetting	1
forgetting	language	1
forgetting	repression	1
forgetting	speech errors	1
language	repression	1
language	unconscious motivation	1
repression	speech errors	1

Works held

The author's work in order, this book marked in place. Your-language title first, the original beneath it where the two differ; side chips show which full texts are held.

1900 The Interpretation of Dreams (Die Traumdeutung)
Begun from his own dreams in the 1890s and enlarged in edition after edition, this is where Freud sets out the method of interpretation that his later books apply to slips of the tongue, jokes and myths.
DE
1901 The Psychopathology of Everyday Life (Zur Psychopathologie des Alltagslebens) you are here DE
1905 Jokes and their Relation to the Unconscious (Der Witz und seine Beziehung zum Unbewußten)
Freud's only book-length study of comedy, and the one most built from borrowed material: puns, anecdotes and Jewish jokes, each taken apart in turn.
DE
1907 Frühe Schriften zu Religion und Dichtung
Two early excursions from the clinic, gathered here in one volume: the seed of Freud's later books on religion, and his short account of where a writer's stories come from.
DE
1910 Zur Theorie des Unbewußten
Four theoretical papers written between 1910 and 1915 and gathered here in one volume, on the road from the dream book to the metapsychological essays of 1915 — the last of the four is one of those essays.
DE
1913 Spätere Schriften zu Dichtung und Mythos
Two essays from 1913 and 1917, gathered here in one volume, that show Freud the reader of Shakespeare and Goethe: the dream-book method applied to a stage motif and to the first page of a famous autobiography.
DE
1913 Totem and Taboo (Totem und Tabu)
The first of Freud's books on society and religion, where he moves from the patient to the human species; Group Psychology, The Future of an Illusion and his last book, on Moses, all build on its story of the murdered father.
DE
1914 On Narcissism: An Introduction (Zur Einführung des Narzißmus)
A short essay written as Jung was breaking with Freud, and the hinge between his early theory of the drives and the later picture of ego and super-ego.
DE
1915 Instincts and their Vicissitudes (Triebe und Triebschicksale)
The paper that opens Freud's 1915 theoretical series by defining its basic term; the companion essays on repression and on the unconscious build on it.
DE
1915 Schriften aus dem Weltkrieg
Freud's direct responses to the First World War, gathered in one volume on this site: a long essay of 1915 on disillusionment and death, and a short one of 1916 on transience and mourning.
DE
1915 The Unconscious (Das Unbewußte)
Freud's fullest account of what he meant by the unconscious, written in wartime Vienna eight years before The Ego and the Id redrew his map of the mind.
DE
1917 Introductory Lectures on Psycho-Analysis (Vorlesungen zur Einführung in die Psychoanalyse)
Freud's own introduction to his work, and the closest thing he wrote to a textbook: his books on dreams and on everyday slips retold for listeners, then carried on into a general theory of neurosis.
DE
1919 The 'Uncanny' (Das Unheimliche)
A rare venture by Freud into aesthetics, a field he says psychoanalysts seldom feel drawn to, written in 1919 beside the first draft of Beyond the Pleasure Principle.
DE
1920 Beyond the Pleasure Principle (Jenseits des Lustprinzips)
The hinge of Freud's later work: the 1920 book that introduces the death drive, followed within three years by the new map of the mind in The Ego and the Id.
DE
1921 Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego (Massenpsychologie und Ich-Analyse)
The bridge between Freud's speculations on prehistory and his new model of the mind: its chapter on a "grade in the ego" sets out the ego ideal that The Ego and the Id would rename two years later.
DE
1923 The Ego and the Id (Das Ich und das Es)
The book in which Freud's later model of the mind takes its final shape; the essays and books that follow it, on anxiety, religion and civilisation, all speak its language of ego, id and super-ego.
DE
1924 Späte Schriften zur Ich-Psychologie
Three short papers of the mid-1920s, gathered here in one volume, in which Freud tests the model of The Ego and the Id on psychosis, on memory and on laughter.
DE
1926 Inhibitions, Symptoms and Anxiety (Hemmung, Symptom und Angst)
Written three years after The Ego and the Id, it rebuilds the theory of neurotic symptoms in that book's terms, starting from the difference between a symptom and an inhibition, a restriction the ego places on itself.
DE
1927 The Future of an Illusion (Die Zukunft einer Illusion)
Freud's most direct case against religion, written fourteen years after Totem and Taboo had traced it to the murdered father, and the opening of the late cultural writings that continue in Civilization and Its Discontents.
DE

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