Table of Contents

The Psychopathology of Everyday Life - Sigmund Freud Introduction
Translator's Preface
I. Forgetting Proper Names
II. Forgetting Foreign Words
III. Forgetting Names and Sequences of Words
IV. On Childhood Memories and Screen Memories
V. Slips of the Tongue
VI. Slips in Reading and Slips of the Pen
VII. Forgetting Impressions and Intentions
VIII. Inadvertent Actions
IX. Symptomatic and Fortuitous Actions
X. Making Mistakes
XI. Combined Slips
XII. Determinism - Belief in Chance and Superstition - Some Points of View

About the Author

Sigmund Freud (1856-1939) was born in Moravia and lived in Vienna between the ages of four and eighty-two. In 1938 Hitler's invasion of Austria forced him to seek asylum in London, where he died the following year. Freud's career began with several years of brilliant work on the anatomy and physiology of the nervous system. He was almost thirty when, after a period of study under Charcot in Paris, his interests first turned to psychology, and another ten years of clinical work in Vienna (at first in collaboration with Breuer, an older colleague) saw the birth of his creation: psychoanalysis. This began simply as a method of treating neurotic patients by investigating their minds, but it quickly grew into an accumulation of knowledge about the workings of the mind in general, whether sick or healthy. Freud was thus able to demonstrate the normal development of the sexual instinct in childhood and, largely on the basis of an examination of dreams, arrived at his fundamental discovery of the unconscious forces that influence our everyday thoughts and actions. Freud's life was uneventful, but his ideas have shaped not only many specialist disciplines, but the whole intellectual climate of the last half-century.

Anthea Bell translated E. T. A. Hoffman's The Life and Opinions of the Tomcat Murr for Penguin Classics and has received a number of translation awards.

Paul Keegan is the poetry editor at Faber and Faber.