Primary sourceBook1914
Psychopathology of Everyday Life: Forgetting of Proper Names
Sigmund Freud · 1914
The opening chapter of Freud's book on everyday slips, analysing why people forget names, in Brill's English translation.
Freud's own analytic text demonstrating his psychoanalytic method applied to a common mental slip.
About this source
What it is
This is the first chapter of Psychopathology of Everyday Life, written by Sigmund Freud and published in 1914 (building on an earlier 1898 essay). This version is an English translation by A. A. Brill. In it Freud examines common cases of forgetting proper names.
Why it matters
The chapter shows Freud's method in action: taking a trivial, everyday mental slip and arguing it has a hidden psychological cause. This approach became central to psychoanalysis and influenced how people think about memory and the unconscious.
Look closer
- Why might Freud choose something as ordinary as forgetting a name to make his argument?
- What kind of evidence does he use to support his claims?
- How might a psychologist today respond differently to the same question?
This book is part of the curated material that grounds the AI version of Sigmund Freud on Humy.ai — when students ask about related events, the AI can quote it and cite it.
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