The Psychopathology of Everyday Life

Freud assembles a catalogue of ordinary error: forgotten names, misread words, mislaid objects, slips of the tongue and pen, actions performed against conscious intention. Each case is worked through to show that the mistake was determined rather than random, that a suppressed wish or a competing train of thought forced its way past intention into the act. The method is the one Freud uses on dreams and symptoms, applied to material anyone produces in a single day.

For the clinician, the book supplies the everyday counterpart to what the consulting room stages. It argues that parapraxes carry meaning as reliably as the more dramatic productions of neurosis, and that watching one's own slips opens onto the same unconscious that transference and resistance disclose. The tone is demonstrative rather than theoretical, reasoning from concrete instances toward the claim that nothing in mental life is truly accidental. Freud published it in German in 1901; the first English translation appeared in 1914.