Book
The Psychopathology of Everyday Life
Zur Psychopathologie des Alltagslebens
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.
Main ideas
- Forgetting, slips, screen memories, bungled actions and superstition are treated together as parapraxes.
- Each parapraxis results from the interference of a suppressed or repressed thought or wish.
- Parapraxes show that mental life is determined in the healthy as well as in neurotics.
What it shows
- 1901
Sigmund Freud introduced Parapraxis
Freud set out the theory of slips in Zur Psychopathologie des Alltagslebens, printed in the Monatsschrift für Psychiatrie und Neurologie in 1901 and as a book in 1904: the forgetting of names and intentions, slips of the tongue and pen, misreadings, bungled and chance actions are treated as meaningful acts with unconscious motives rather than accidents. In the Dora case he refers readers back to that treatise, and Jones in 1908 cites its sections on slips of the tongue and pen, bungled actions and chance actions as Freud's.