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Public-domain ebook sourced from Project Gutenberg #67332.
Freud’s Psychopathology of Everyday Life is a scholarly work that applies the principles of psychoanalysis to the seemingly trivial mistakes of daily living. The book opens with a concise history of Freud’s own shift from treating severe neurotic cases to probing the “border‑line” phenomena that reveal the thin line between normal and pathological minds. He then explains how this insight led him to examine ordinary lapses, forgetting names, misreading words, and other slips, as windows onto hidden motives, repression, and associative processes. The opening chapter presents a detailed case study of a forgotten artist’s name, illustrating how displaced thoughts, external associations, and repressed themes intertwine to produce faulty recollection. The structure follows a systematic catalog of such errors, each analyzed with the same rigor that characterized Freud’s clinical investigations.
Written in the formal, lecture‑like style of late‑19th‑century Vienna, the text combines clinical observation with theoretical exposition. Readers who appreciate careful argumentation, historical insight into the development of psychoanalysis, and a scientific approach to everyday cognition will find it rewarding. It especially appeals to students of psychology, scholars of language and memory, and anyone curious about how ordinary blunders may reveal deeper mental currents.
The opening · free to read
Professor Freud developed his system of psychoanalysis while studying the so-called border-line cases of mental diseases, such as hysteria and compulsion neurosis. By discarding the old methods of treatment and strictly applying himself to a study of the patient’s life he discovered that the hitherto puzzling symptoms had a definite meaning, and that there was nothing arbitrary in any morbid manifestation. Psychoanalysis always showed that they referred to some definite problem or conflict of the person concerned. It was while tracing back the abnormal to the normal state that Professor Freud found how faint the line of demarcation was between the normal and neurotic person, and that the psychopathologic mechanisms so glaringly observed in the psychoneuroses and psychoses could usually be demonstrated in a lesser degree in normal persons. This led to a study of the faulty actions of everyday life and later to the publication of the Psychopathology of Everyday Life, a book which passed through four editions in Germany and is considered the author’s most popular work. With great ingenuity and penetration the author throws much light on the complex problems of human behaviour, and clearly demonstrates that the hitherto considered impassable gap between normal and abnormal mental states is more apparent than real.
This translation is made of the fourth German edition, and while the original text was strictly followed, linguistic difficulties often made it necessary to modify or substitute some of the author’s cases by examples comprehensible to the English-speaking reader.
A. A. BRILL.
NEW YORK.
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