The Psychopathology of Everyday Life

By Sigmund Freud (1901)

1. The father of psychoanalysis loved to chain-smoke cigars, yet he didn’t encourage his colleagues to ponder the unconscious significance of his addiction. “Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar,” was his famous (and contested) retort. But Freud did believe there was significance to the ways we mysteriously forget the names of people well known to us, or to the seemingly innocuous slips of the tongue. When we forget a name, we “are robbed by an unknown psychic force.”...