Freud argues for everyday material's ‘admission’ to science, subject to ‘stricter methods of verification’. Darwin learned as much from the worms in his Down House garden as from Galapagos finches. Parapraxis arises out of what we now see as ‘affect phobia’.īut was Freud right? True, scientific curiosity does not shy away from the everyday. Displeasure lies in the anxiety associated with such feelings. Sexuality, and the desire for fame and recognition, are no less unconsciously ‘motivating’ than resentment, shame and disappointment. It is not the feelings in themselves that are ‘displeasureable’. He touchingly exposes his professional failures: an analysand's suicide patients he mis-diagnosed with ‘hysteria’ who had a brain tumour or multiple sclerosis.įreud's mission is threefold: (1) to illustrate the continuity between normality and pathology, counteracting the prevalent view of mental illness as manifestation of ‘degeneracy’ (2) following The Interpretation of Dreams, to show that ‘dream-life’ continues during the day (3) to convince that ‘faulty action’ – including speech – is ‘motivated’ by warded-off affective states: ‘forgetting in all cases is proved to be founded on a motive of displeasure’. We learn of his marital tiffs his daughter's life-threatening illness sexual attraction to a younger woman omitting to pay bills and losing his keys rivalry with colleagues and, despite his famed photographic memory, forgetting the name of a famous Renaissance painter, Signorelli. Many examples come from his own life, professional and personal. The Psychopathology of Everyday Life reveals Freud at his most scintillating. The ‘Freudian slip’, with its double entendre of a revealing/concealing female undergarment, appeared in 1959. ‘Fehlleistungen’ was changed by Strachey from Brill's ‘faulty action’ to the pseudo-medical ‘parapraxis’. Written in 1901, published in 1904, it was first translated into English by Brill in 1914. The book belongs to Freud's middle period, while still a passionate clinician reveling in free-associationism, and relatively unencumbered by meta-psychology.

But The Psychopathology of Everyday Life fully deserves the epithet: a glorious collection of anecdotes, spoonerisms, lacunae, ‘speech blunders’ and odd actions – revealing, he argues, the cauldron of repressed feelings lurking below consciousness. Joyous is not a word normally associated with Freud despite being the true meaning of his name.

The psychopathology of everyday life