The Psychopathology of Everyday Life
Sigmund Freud, 1901
You remember a name all your life, and at the moment you need it, it vanishes. Sigmund Freud collected hundreds of such small things, from slips of the tongue to a broken inkwell, and saw in them not chance but thoughts and wishes pushed aside. You will learn his explanation, his most vivid cases, and where this theory remains debated.
Who it is for
For people who forget familiar names, lose their keys and slip up at the worst moment, and who want to understand how Freud himself explained such lapses, what in his explanation is worth taking and what to treat with caution.
I believe in external chance, but I do not believe in internal chance.
The Name That Would Not Come on the Road
In 1898 Sigmund Freud was travelling by carriage through the Balkans with a fellow passenger he hardly knew. The talk turned to Italy, and Freud asked whether his companion had seen the famous frescoes of the Last Judgment in Orvieto. The painter's name, which he knew well, would not come to him. Instead, two others kept pushing forward: Botticelli and Boltraffio. Freud knew at once that both were wrong, and he learned the right name only from another person.
Anyone would say: it happens, you were tired. Freud, a Viennese physician and the creator of psychoanalysis, did not wave this small thing away. In the book, first published in 1901, he gathered dozens of such cases: forgotten names and promises, slips of the tongue, misprints, lost keys, broken things. He offered a bold explanation: behind many of them stands a thought or wish that we do not want to notice, and it breaks through as a glitch.
This is Freud's theory, not an established fact. He built it mainly on observations of himself and on accounts from colleagues, and he admitted that for many of his interpretations he had no proof. Modern psychology explains most slips more simply. Yet the question he asked still works: what if a slip sometimes tells us something important?
You will learn why, in Freud's account, these two names came instead of the right one, why promises you did not want to make are so easily forgotten, and how Freud told chance from outside apart from chance from inside. Let us begin with that journey.
How the Painter Signorelli Turned into Botticelli
Freud began to recall what he had been talking about with his companion a minute earlier. The subject was the Turks from Bosnia and Herzegovina. A doctor he knew had told him that they trusted doctors completely and accepted their fate meekly: “Sir, what can one say? If he could have been saved, you would have saved him.” Next came to mind a second story from the same doctor, about how desperately these people suffer from sexual disorders. Freud did not tell that story to a stranger.
Behind the story he had set aside stood the theme of death and sexuality, and behind that, news he had received a few weeks before the journey, in the Tyrolean village of Trafoi: a patient whom Freud had treated for a long time had killed himself because of an incurable sexual disorder. On the road he was not thinking about this, at least not consciously.
Now the chain that Freud built is visible. The painter was called Signorelli, and “signor” means “sir”, in German Herr. Through the words “Bosnia”, “Herzegovina” and “Herr”, the name became linked to the pushed-aside theme. The start of the name dropped out, and in its place came the syllable “Bo” from Bosnia; the tail “elli” survived in Botticelli, and Trafoi echoed in Boltraffio. Freud wanted to forget one thing, and he forgot another, bound to it by sound. He calls this process repression. The thought, he says, leaves consciousness but goes on acting, and the stand-in names become a compromise: they remind us at once of what we wanted to recall and of what we wanted to forget.
Freud believes that names touching us personally slip away most often: family, profession, self-esteem. Once he could not recall the name of the station Rosenheim, which he had passed many times. An hour earlier he had been a guest of his sister, and his sister's name was Rosa. The psychiatrist Jung described a man whose beloved had married his acquaintance. From then on, again and again, he forgot the rival's surname, although he did business with him.
Freud does not claim that all forgetting works this way: some of it is simple, from tiredness. His method for a stuck name is this: do not press, but recall what was being discussed a minute before, and say out loud everything that comes to mind, without criticism.
About the author
Sigmund Freud (1856–1939), Austrian physician and neurologist and the creator of psychoanalysis. This book, first published in 1901, is considered the most popular of his works; the English translation by Abraham Brill appeared in 1914.
All books by this author: Sigmund Freud
Terms from the book
- Darwin
- Jones
- psychoanalysis
- repression
- Jung
- Nietzsche
- Orvieto: A town in central Italy. Its cathedral holds the frescoes of the Last Judgment by Luca Signorelli.
- Botticelli: Sandro Botticelli (about 1445–1510), Italian painter, author of The Birth of Venus.
- Boltraffio: Giovanni Antonio Boltraffio (about 1467–1516), painter from Milan, a pupil of Leonardo da Vinci.
- Trafoi: A village in the Alps, in Tyrol. Today it lies in northern Italy.
- Signorelli: Luca Signorelli (about 1450–1523), Italian painter of the Renaissance, author of the frescoes of the Last Judgment in the cathedral of Orvieto.
- Bosnia: A historical region in the Balkans. In Freud's time it was under Austro-Hungarian rule; today, together with Herzegovina, it forms one state.
- Herzegovina: A historical region in the Balkans, the southern part of today's Bosnia and Herzegovina.
- Rosenheim: A town in Bavaria with a large railway station.
- bisexuality: Here, a concept from Freud's early theory: the idea that every person is born with both a masculine and a feminine principle. It is not about sexual orientation.
- galley proofs: Printed sheets of set text that an author reads through and corrects before printing.
- counter-will: An expression from the book, not a scientific term: a wish that works against a person's intention, although they do not admit it in themselves.
- Brill: Abraham Brill (1874–1948), American psychiatrist, Freud's translator into English. For this edition he added some of his own cases.
- symptomatic action: A concept of Freud's: an act performed as if by accident, in which he sees the expression of an unconscious thought or wish.
- cabman: A person who drove passengers for a fee in a horse-drawn carriage, the town forerunner of a taxi driver.
All terms
Similar books
- Games People Play, Eric Berne
- God Is Not One, Stephen Prothero
- Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies, Jared Diamond
- Hillbilly Elegy: A Memoir of a Family and Culture in Crisis, J.D. Vance
- Homo Deus: A Brief History of Tomorrow, Yuval Noah Harari
- How to Avoid a Climate Disaster: The Solutions We Have and the Breakthroughs We Need, Bill Gates
- From Strength to Strength, Arthur C. Brooks
- Game Theory: A Very Short Introduction, Ken Binmore
Read in Livria
