The Psychopathology of Everyday Life

Freud's study of the small failures of everyday mental life. It examines the forgetting of proper names, foreign words and intentions, screen memories, slips of the tongue, of the pen and in reading, bungled and chance actions, superstition and errors. Freud traces each of these parapraxes to the interference of a disturbing thought or wish that has been suppressed or repressed, and takes them as evidence that mental life is determined in healthy people as well as in neurotics. The work first appeared in two parts in the Monatsschrift für Psychiatrie und Neurologie in 1901, was published as a book by Karger in 1904, and was much enlarged in later editions.