The Psychopathology of Everyday Life

Psychopathology of Everyday Life is a 1901 work by Sigmund Freud, based on his researches into slips and parapraxes from 1897 onwards-one which became perhaps the best-known of all his writings. Freud examines the psychological basis for the forgetting of names and words, the misuse of words in speech and in writing, and other similar errors. It is filled with anecdotes, many of them quite amusing, and virtually bereft of difficult technical terminology. Through its stress on what Freud called 'switch words' and 'verbal bridges', it is considered important not only for psychopathology but also for modern linguistics, semantics, and philosophy.


About the Author
Freud, Sigmund: - Sigmund Freud (1856-1939) is one of the twentieth century's greatest minds and the founder of the psychoanalytic school of psychology. His many works include 'The Ego and the Id', 'An Outline of Psycho-Analysis', Civilization and Its Discontent, and others. He was an Austrian neurologist who became known as the founding father of psychoanalysis. Freud qualified as a doctor of medicine at the University of Vienna in 1881, and then carried out research into cerebral palsy, aphasia and microscopic neuroanatomy at the Vienna General Hospital. He was appointed a university lecturer in neuropathology in 1885 and became a professor in 1902. In creating psychoanalysis, a clinical method for treating psychopathology through dialogue between a patient and a psychoanalyst, Freud developed therapeutic techniques such as the use of free association and discovered transference, establishing its central role in the analytic process. Freud's redefinition of sexuality to include its infantile forms led him to formulate the Oedipus complex as the central tenet of psychoanalytical theory. His analysis of dreams as wish-fulfillments provided him with models for the clinical analysis of symptom formation and the mechanisms of repression as well as for elaboration of his theory of the unconscious as an agency disruptive of conscious states of mind.