The Psychopathology of Everyday Life (Penguin Modern Classics) Book

This collection of writings is famous for giving us the phrase 'Freudian slip'. It also builds up a strong social history of Vienna and the middle-class social milieu of Freud and his patients. Through a series of case histories some no longer than a few lines long Freud explores how it is that normal people make slips of speech writing reading and remembering in their everyday life and reveals what it is that they betray about the existence of a sub-text or subliminal motive to our conscious actions. As he explains most of these slips tend of be of a relatively anodyne nature but some are a little more sinister particularly those where pride or thwarted love are concerned...

The most trivial slips of the tongue or pen, Freud believed, can reveal our secret ambitions, money worries and sexual fantasies. The Psychopathology of Everyday Life ranks among his most entertaining and accessible works.