Customer Reviews

The Psychopathology of Everyday Life

5 star:		(4)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(3)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(3)

 

 

This is a great book, but I would advise against this edition for your Kindle. After the first 10% there is an inexcusable amount of typos. It makes for a frustrating read of what would otherwise be a very engaging and beneficial work.

This is a fantastic, captivating book. The theories and ideas outlined in "Psychopathology of Everyday Life" are logical and seem more applicable, plausible, and realistic (i.e. more easily seen in everyday life) than some of Freud's other theories. Highly recommended for anyone interested in psychology, character, human behavior, or Freud's work. Covers a lot about human memory. A very good resource to have.

This book has possibly done more than any other book to popularise psychology. Freud wrote it deliberately for the ordinary reader at the turn of the 20th century and, as fresh editions appeared, constantly added new illustrations and anecdotes without changing his basic theories.
Here, with brief examples, we have the simple but convincing explanations of things that are familiar to everybody: the sudden forgetting of proper names, of sets of words, impressions and intentions, childhood and 'screen' memories; bungled actions and other errors; and all those little, significant mistakes of tongue and pen that have come to be called 'Freudian slips'.

The book is great but the enormous number of typos in the Kindle edition makes it almost unreadable. i strongly recommend the book to anybody interested in the origins of psychoanalysis. However
, you should do yourself a favor and buy an alternative edition.

I know this writer is a genius but this book doesn't really get my attention. I find myself reading pages over again because I forget what the page was about. Just not for me, not a book that I can't put down. I need a dictionary to read this book lol.

This 1901 book was probably Freud's most popular book during his lifetime, and the kinds of memory lapses and slips of the tongue he discussed herein have even entered the mass vocabulary as "Freudian slips" (of the tongue). Here are some repesentative quotations from the book:

"The mechanism of forgetting, or rather of losing or temporarily forgetting of a name, consists in the disturbance of the intended reproduction of the name through a strange stream of thought unconscious at the time... To avoid the awakening of pain through memory is one of the objects among the motives of these disturbances."
"The forgetting in all cases is proved to be founded on a motive of displeasure."
"As a matter of fact it can be generally affirmed that everyone is continually practicing psychoanalysis on his neighbors, and consequently learns to know them better than each individual knows himself."
"(M)any persons argue against the assumption of an absolute psychic determinism by referring to an intense feeling of conviction that there is a free will. This feeling of conviction exists, but is not incompatible with the belief in determinism."
"I do not believe that an occurrence in which my mental life takes no part can teach me anything hidden concerning the future shaping of reality; but I do believe that an unintentional manifestation of my own mental activity surely contains something concealed which belongs only to my mental life---that is, I believe in outer (real) chance, but not in inner (psychic) accidents."

The republication of this authorized English edition which appeared in 1914 will enable libraries to replace aging volumes with a fresh, affordable paperwork. This remains one of Freud's most widely recognized titles, blending anecdotal accounts with his personal experience and psychological insights. His first-person, chatty tone makes it easy for the lay reader to understand his concepts of underlying psychological influences.

This book was stolen from a Canadian sight and is riddled with omissions of words that make many sections incomprehensible. Shocking that it made it in print, but this so-called "publisher" has no integrity. Find another edition.

This book may be read as a necessary sequel to Freud's major opus The Interpretation of Dreams, cause the object of the two are the same, that is, to demonstrate trough a lot of very detailed personal and third person's examples, how the unconscious work, or even better, how it betrays itself trough its concealed (condensed and displaced) actions shown in our parapraxis of everyday. Parapraxis is a term which could be translated into faulty acts, which are, for instance, "slips of the tongue", "slips of the pen", misreadings, mislayings of objects, undeliberate forgetness of sentences, names and places, etc ...
The book is written in a very casual style and one is again admired how could such a genius as Freud convey his ideas in such an easy style.
Why no 4 stars? Because I think this book is not so fascinating as The Interpretation of Dreams, an opus which deserves 5 stars.

The huge amount of research over the past 50 years is enough to convince even Freud's most loyal votaries that his science amounted to little more than--wish fulfillment!

But so what? Does anyone read Freud for science anymore? I hope not, but he's still an absolutely essential author.

The Freudian system of the unconscious was used by scored of brilliant artists in the 20th century. If we want to understand Faulkner, Anderson, Larsen, Dali, or Picasso, we'll need to read at least two books by Mr Freud: this one and The Interpretation of Dreams (only James Strachey's translation!).

Are they good science? Few believe that anymore. Insteadm they serve as excellent and useful metaphors for better understanding art and literature. What you do from there is up to you: you could just as easily use Freud's "nonsense" to call the art "nonsense," or you could marvel at the meaning inhered in the metaphor as used by the author. The situation and philosophical background would of course determine the matter.

Anyhow, you can't go wrong with this one here. It's a quick read; it's full of great stories; it's full of wonderful nonsense; and it's so, so very useful for literature without being offensive. Moreover, this book is easily Freud's most innocent.

Bad science. Bad philosophy. Bad theology. Useful artistic metaphor. Necessary material. Great reading!

(Only read the Alan Tyson translation as edited by James Strachey.)