Sigmund Freud - The Psychopathology of Everyday Life

PENGUIN CLASSICS

THE PENGUIN FREUD GENERAL EDITOR:
ADAM PHILLIPS

THE PSYCHOPATHOLOGY OF EVERYDAY LIFE

SIGMUND FREUD was born in 1856 in Moravia; between the ages of four and eighty-two his home was Vienna: in 1938 Hitlers invasion of Austria forced him to seek asylum in London, where he died in the following year. His career began with several years of brilliant work on the anatomy and physiology of the nervous system. He was almost thirty when, after a period of study under Charcot in Paris, his interests first turned to psychology; and after ten years of clinical work in Vienna (at first in collaboration with Breuer, an older colleage) he invented what was to become psychoanalysis. This began simply as a method of treating neurotic patients through talking, but it quickly grew into an accumulation of knowledge about the workings of the mind in general. Freud was thus able to demonstrate the development of the sexual instinct in childhood, and largely on the basis of an examination of dreams, arrived at this fundamental discovery of the unconscious forces that influence our everyday thoughts and actions. Freuds life was uneventful, but his ideas have shaped not only many specialist disciplines, but also the whole intellectual climate of the twentieth century.

ANTHEA BELL was born in Suffolk and educated at Somerville College, Oxford. She has worked as a translator for many years, primarily from German and French. Her translations include works of nonfiction (biology, politics, social history, musicology and art history), literary and popular fiction, and books for young people including classic German works by the Grimm brothers, Clemens Brentano, Wilhelm Hauff and Christian Morgenstern. Recent translations include E. T. A. Hoffmanns The Life and Opinions of the Tomcat Murr (1999), Lilian Faschingers Vienna Passion (2000) and W. G. Sebalds Austerliz (2001). Anthea Bell has also served on the committee of the Translators Association and the jury panel of the Schlegel-Tieck German translation prize in the UK, and has received a number of translation prizes and awards, including the 1987 Schlegel-Tieck award for Hans Bemmanns The Stone and the Flute. She lives in Cambridge and has two adult sons.

PAUL KEEGAN was formerly editor of Penguin Classics, and is now Poetry Editor at Faber & Faber. He is the editor of The New Penguin Book of English Verse (2000).

ADAM PHILLIPS was formerly Principal Child Psychotherapist at Charing Cross Hospital in London. He is the author of several books on psychoanalysis including On Kissing, Tickling and Being Bored, Darwins Worms, Promises, Promises and Houdinis Box.

SIGMUND FREUD

The Psychopathology
of Everyday Life

Translated by ANTHEA BELL
with an Introduction by PAUL KEEGAN

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Zur Psychopathologie des Alltagsleben first published 1901 in

Monatsschrift fr Psychiatrie und Neurologie 10 (1/2)

English translation published in Penguin Books (U.K.) 2002

This edition published 2003

9 10 8

Sigmund Freuds German text collected in Gesammelte Werke (194052)

copyright Imago Publishing Co., Ltd. London, 1941

Translation and editorial matter copyright Anthea Bell, 2002

Introduction copyright Paul Keegan, 2002

All rights reserved

LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING IN PUBLICATION DATA

Freud, Sigmund, 18561939.

[Zur Psychopathologie des Alltagslebens. English]

The psychopathology of everyday life / Sigmund Freud; translated by Anthea Bell with an introduction by Paul Keegan.

p. cm.

Includes bibliological references.

ISBN: 978-1-101-64478-2

1. Psychoanalysis. 2. Memory. 3. Repression (Psychology)

4. Paragrammatism. 5. Freud, sigmund, 18561939. I. Title.

BF173.F82513 2003

150.1952dc21 2003043308

Printed in the United States of America

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There is a house where twice every day for six years, at regular hours, I used to wait to be let in outside a door on the second floor

While doing things, or in the interstices between doing things, we do other, less obvious things. The Psychopathology of Everyday Life is the inventory of what goes on when nothing much is going on, or of what we do when we think we know what we are doing. Its concern is ordinary life, using as its optic the not-so-ordinary life of the bourgeoisie at the centurys turn, in Vienna and other Hapsburg capitals and resorts. The stage is largely given over to what Veblen termed the performance of leisure. Doing nothing much, circa 1900, is all-consuming: we sit in coffee houses, wait in rooms, stand in trams; we visit each other, and effect introductions; we return from honeymoon, compose letters, consult watches and timetables; we take holidays, stay at pensione, in sanatoria, at health resorts and spas; we stroll zoos, walk mountains, wander museums. We are in thrall to travel, or to the rituals of displacement as if places are more important than where they are. And wherever we are we repeat ourselves: we window-shop, stare at statues, scrutinize business plates, study menus. We are addicted to signs of every description, describing anything.

Above all (and Karl Kraus ridicules us for it) we read magazines and newspapers, by the avalanche. We drown in print. By the 1920s in Germany more than a thousand magazines were being founded annually. Added to which the streets are aswarm with advertisements, hoardings, billboards, displays. The metropolis of Everyday Life is as much a lexical as a visual field. And print is the omnipresent occasion for misprints, for wandering meanings. Suddenly the field of nonsense seems to have been exponentially enlarged. (Item: Our readers will be well aware that we have always promoted the common good in the most [un]self-interested manner.) This extends to the