The Psychopathology of Everyday Life  (English, Paperback, Freud Sigmund)

The Psychopathology of Everyday Life starts with the author, Sigmund Freud’s anecdote about forgetting an Italian painter’s name, to illustrate how small, everyday errors actually stem from deeper psychological preoccupations.

Summary Of The book

The Psychopathology of Everyday Life was published in 1901. In the book, Freud delves deeper into the reasons for common, everyday happenings that one tends to brush off, like forgetting people’s names or well-versed quotations, suddenly.

Freud uses one of his own essays titled On the Psychic Mechanism of Forgetfulness, published in 1898, as the basis for beginning The Psychopathology of Everyday Life. He explores the underlying causes for seemingly insignificant instances of forgetfulness and attempts to explain them, rather than brushing them off. He concludes that the high number of instances in which these slips of memory occur point to the fact that boundaries between the abnormal and normal human psyche are blurred and are apt to cause “neurotic” tendencies in most individuals. According to Freud, this can cause severe disruptions to regular work, sexual relations, eating patterns and interpersonal communication.

The Psychopathology of Everyday Life has twelve chapters. Some of them are Forgetting Proper Names, Forgetting Foreign Words, On Childhood Memories and Screen Memories, Slips of the Tongue, Inadvertent Actions, Making Mistakes and Forgetting Impressions and Intentions.

About Sigmund Freud

Sigmund Freud is known as the father of psychoanalysis. He was an Austrian citizen and a neurologist by profession. Some other books written by Freud are The Neuro-Psychoses of Defence, The Interpretation of Dreams, Jokes and their Relation to the Unconscious, Creative Writers and Day-Dreaming, and An Outline of Psycho-Analysis.

Having qualified from the University of Vienna as a doctor of medicine in 1881, Freud went on to develop psychoanalysis, which remains an influential treatment method within psychiatry and psychotherapy. Freud was the child of his father’s third wife and the eldest of 8 siblings. He had a strong love of literature, in particular Shakespeare, and was also proficient in multiple languages like French, Spanish, Greek, Latin, Hebrew and German. He married Martha Bernays in 1886 and they had 6 children together. Freud passed away on 23 September 1939, after a long fight with cancer.