6 An Essay Marking Its Centenary: Some Observations On The Sources of Freud's The Psychopathology of Everyday Life

This article was downloaded by: [Adelphi University]
On: 19 August 2014, At: 23:39

Publisher: Routledge
Informa Ltd Registered in England and Wales Registered Number: 1072954 Registered office: Mortimer
House, 37-41 Mortimer Street, London W1T 3JH, UK
Neuropsychoanalysis: An Interdisciplinary Journal

for Psychoanalysis and the Neurosciences
Publication details, including instructions for authors and subscription information:
http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/rnpa20
An Essay Marking Its Centenary: Some Observations

on the Sources of Freuds The Psychopathology of
Everyday Life
a
Professor Riccardo Steiner

a
12A Belsize Lane, London NW35AB, England, e-mail:

Published online: 09 Jan 2014.
To cite this article: Professor Riccardo Steiner (2001) An Essay Marking Its Centenary: Some Observations on the Sources
of Freuds The Psychopathology of Everyday Life, Neuropsychoanalysis: An Interdisciplinary Journal for Psychoanalysis and
the Neurosciences, 3:2, 221-241, DOI: 10.1080/15294145.2001.10773357
To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/15294145.2001.10773357
PLEASE SCROLL DOWN FOR ARTICLE

Taylor & Francis makes every effort to ensure the accuracy of all the information (the Content) contained
in the publications on our platform. However, Taylor & Francis, our agents, and our licensors make no
representations or warranties whatsoever as to the accuracy, completeness, or suitability for any purpose of
the Content. Any opinions and views expressed in this publication are the opinions and views of the authors,
and are not the views of or endorsed by Taylor & Francis. The accuracy of the Content should not be relied
upon and should be independently verified with primary sources of information. Taylor and Francis shall
not be liable for any losses, actions, claims, proceedings, demands, costs, expenses, damages, and other
liabilities whatsoever or howsoever caused arising directly or indirectly in connection with, in relation to or
arising out of the use of the Content.
This article may be used for research, teaching, and private study purposes. Any substantial or systematic
reproduction, redistribution, reselling, loan, sub-licensing, systematic supply, or distribution in any
form to anyone is expressly forbidden. Terms & Conditions of access and use can be found at http://
www.tandfonline.com/page/terms-and-conditions
221
An Essay Marking Its Centenary: Some

Observations on the Sources of Freud's The
Psychopathology of Everyday Life
Downloaded by [Adelphi University] at 23:39 19 August 2014
Riccardo Steiner (London)
I was one day relating a visit to the Epileptic Hospital, and

intending to name a friend, Dr. Bastian, who accompanied me,
I said "Dr. Brinton"; then immediately corrected this with
"Dr. Bridges," this also was rejected and' 'Dr. Bastian" was
pronounced. I I was under no confusion whatever as to the person, but having if!lperfectly adjusted the group of muscles necessary for the articulation of the one name, the one element
which was common to that group and to the others, namely B,
served to recall all three. [Lewes, 1879, pp. 128-129].
This anecdote, drawn from the English scholar

Lewes's Problems of Life and Mind (1879), is cited
by none other than Ribot, the eminent psychologist
and theoriest of French psychophysiology, in Les Maladies de la Memoire (1881, p. 19). This book, alongside Ribot's other works (1870, 1883, 1889, 1895),
was considered for years, to use the words of Janet,
his pupil and successor at the College de France, as
"Ie breviaire des psychologues et des medecins"
(1912). This was not exclusively in France: Due homage to Ribot's book was paid by Forel (1885), Binet
(1889), James (1890), and Wundt (1893, 1896), just
to mention a few authors belonging to the scientific
context in which some of Freud's interests originated.
I was originally asked to write this essay as an Introduction to Freud's
The Psychopathology of Everyday L(fe by Ilse Grubrich-Simitis, General
Editor of Fischer Verlag, who republished the book (in the original German, together with my Introduction) in December 2000. Another version
of it was published (in English) in the Bulletin of the British PsychoAnalytical Society, 36(5): 19-41 (July 2000).
Acknowledgments. I take this opportunity to thank Professors G. Lanaro and E. Ronchetti of Milan University, M. Solms of London University, and 1. Scholz-Schlosser of the Freud Museum in Vienna, for their
invaluable assistance.
Riccardo Steiner is a member of the British Psycho-Analytical Society, and Professor of Psychoanalysis and the History of Ideas, University
of Westminister, London.
I The associationist aphasiological theories of the British neurologist
Henry Charlton Bastian (1837-1915) were cited more than once, with
approval, by Freud in his (1891 a,b) monograph on aphasia.
Even Charcot, in his Le~ons sur les Maladies du Systeme Nerveux Faitts a la Salpetriere, returned frequently to Ribot and to his theories regarding
"memoires partielles" (Ribot, 1881, pp. 108-111)
(material-specific memory) developed on the basis of
Gall's (1825) and Gratiolet's (1839) research, and
Galton's (1883) "mental vision for objects" (visual
mental imagery). In particular, Charcot referred to Ribot in his discussion of forms of aphasia and paraphasia and of those mental disorders which Kussmaul
(another writer well known to Freud) had termed die
Wortblindheit (word blindness), (1877, p. 168).
But what is the point, the reader may wonder, of
beginning an introduction to The Psychopathology of
Everyday Life (1901a,b; PEL) with a kind of "Who's
Who" of late 19th-century scientific neurology, psychology, and psychiatry? One reason is that Freud was
well acquainted with Charcot's writings, as attested
by his references to Charcot in his study on aphasia
(1891a, p. 82, 1891b, pp. 142-145) and by the fact
that he had already translated into German in 1886
the text I have mentioned, "several months before its
French edition" (Freud, 1886, p. 19). The allusion to
Ribot is not, therefore, far-fetched and these matters
will soon become clearer. Above all, references to
Lewes and Ribot in the early stages of this discussion
will help the reader to understand a dramatic shift of
perspective which took place in the course of only a
few years. This becomes evident if we compare assertions of Lewes and Ribot with the positions put forward by Freud in the PEL, where a radically different
universe of hypotheses and observations unfolds before our eyes. Indeed, hardly more than 15 years separate the text in which Ribot relays Lewes's opinions
from Freud's early self-analyses, through which he
attempted to grasp the significance of certain failures
222
of memory in his everyday life. These analyses can
be found in two letters to Fliess. The first was penned
on August 26th, 1898, and the second, of greater importance, on September 22nd of the same year (Masson, 1985, pp. 324, 327):2 Here, Freud hints for the
first time at his tendency to forget the name of the
Italian painter, Signorelli. In this same letter, he
stresses that his forgetfulness is induced "only" by
"genuine repression and not genuine forgetting" (p.
327). He also alludes, albeit rather synthetically and
elliptically, to that extraordinary chain of mechanisms
which led-or rather compelled-him to be unable to
remember Signorelli's name and to recall instead
those of Boltraffio and Botticelli. Such mechanisms
include concealments, distortions, displacements, and
phonemic condensations based on phonological analogy or identity and on "the possibility of establishing
an external association between the name in question
and the element previously suppressed," as Freud
would later state in the PEL (Freud, 1901a, p. 6). In
the same letter of September 22nd, 1898, Freud also
anticipates later developments in his thought by speculating about the hidden roots of his repression and
substitution of Signorelli's name, and suggesting that
his inner conflicts and his forgetfulness are tied to
certain unconscious phantasies related to the themes
of sexuality and death. These ideas, further elaborated
and transformed in complex ways, would later constitute the nucleus of the famous story about the forgetting of proper names which opens the first chapter of
the PEL (1901a, pp. 1-7). Like many other chapters
of the PEL, this section contains, not by chance, legion
autobiographical elements derived from Freud's own
personal life.
Now, if we go back to the quotation with which
I introduced this essay, one could claim that the presence of the letter B, in both the autobiographical incident cited by Ribot and the anecdote related by Freud,
would seem to suggest a felicitous coincidence. At the
same time, however, the disparate vicissitudes incurred by that letter become, in Freud's case, a veritable catalyst for the encounter with unconscious
meanings. They also give us a sense of that universe
of profoundly different (at least at first sight) hypotheses and observations to which I have already referred
and which separate Lewes and Ribot from Freud. In
their attempts to explain a particular kind of parapraxis, both the English scholar and the French one
focus on poorly coordinated muscular movements,
2 Quotations from the Freud-Fliess letters are taken from the Masson
(1985) edition.
Riccardo Steiner
through which vowels and consonants come to life,
disappear, and reappear in a sort of magical trick.
There is something rather mechanical about this process, as letters slip in and out and "beneath the threshold of consciousness" (PEL, 1901a, p. 57), to use the
expression drawn by Freud from a study by Meringer
and Mayer (1895) based on principles of association
closely linked to the supposed neurophysiology of
mental processes, as understood by Lewes and Ribot
(see also Binet 1899, p. 124).3
A more detailed examination of Ribot's text
could help us gain a clearer understanding of some of
the issues under discussion. Beside the anecdote I have
already referred to (Ribot, 1881, pp. 20-21), the
French theorist mentions his own slips of the pen and
adduces the following reasons for word substitution:
The initial letters of certain words which are in the
process of being written, and which are already present in the writer's mind and the focus of his attention,
affect and attract subsequent words to be written. Due
to the speed of the writing process, words are often
distorted, especially if they happen to begin with the
same letters as the words that have already been written. This gives rise to very peculiar fusions and errors.
As the letters of Fliess and later the PEL bear witness,
Freud follows a different trajectory, as if in what he
says or describes we could watch something which
could remind us of the reemergence of the sort of
mysterious animated alphabet which characterizes the
tradition of the Kabbalah, energized, metaphorically
speaking, and uncannily dislocated by an unconscious
activity, which, in maintaining partial contact with
consciousness, seems almost to play hide-and-seek
with phonemes, the "wandering speech images"
(PEL 1901a, p. 58) to use the beautiful expression
derived by Freud from Meringer and Mayer (1895).
This unconscious activity disjoins and alters vowels
and consonants and causes them to interact with other
fragments of words. As Freud demonstrates in the
course of his study, this same unconscious activity and
the conflicts tied up with it constitute the foundation
of a whole series of faulty actions; not only the forgetting of names, slips of the pen, and misreadings, but
blunders of all kinds which may affect how we act,
.1 In the interests of accuracy, reference should also be made to
Wundfs writings, the (1893) Grundzuge der physiologische Psycho!ogie
with which Meringer and Mayer (1895) were acquainted. In Freud's case,
certain expressions should be traced back not only to Wundt but also to his
youthful studies and to a tradition which, in German-speaking countries, is
connected to the names of Herbert and Fechner-as pointed out by Jones
with Bernfeld and Dorer's support (Jones, 1956, pp. 405-416); see also
Decker (1977), E. Funari (] 981), Nitzschke (] 989), and Ritvo (1990).
Centenary Essay
what we wear, and all the most disparate manifestations of our everyday life.
From a descriptive point of view, even Freud
would find corroboration for these ideas in the old, yet
valid, laws of association psychology, for which his
sources (Wundt, Meringer, Mayer) and his own youthful training were indebted to English empiricism of
the 18th and especially 19th centuries. However, in
order to explain both verbal and nonverbal lapses,
Freud adds to the relationships of resemblance and
contiguity of traditional associationism, the principles
of condensation, displacement, overdetermination,
and symbolism, foregrounded with respect to the dynamics of the dream work in The Interpretation of
Dreams (1900). Even the laws of old association psychology, then, become animated, pervaded, distorted,
and revitalized by the unconscious activity of the' 'unconscious wish," of the "unconscious phantasy,"
which Freud's letter to Fliess of September 22nd,
1898, already linked to sexuality and death. Through
conflicts, defenses, and repressions, which block the
resurfacing of desires and fantasies (though not as serious and enduring as those which distinguish disorders such as hysteria and obsessive neurosis), even
parapraxes bear witness, therefore, to the existence
of unconscious mental activity, a subject of intense
fascination for psychologists, neurologists, physiologists, philosophers, and scholars from the second half
of the 19th century, both within and outside Europe
(Ellenberger, 1970; Gauchet, 1992).
Yet, in drawing attention to ways in which the
unconscious, so far as he understood it, manifests itself
even in minor mistakes made by normal people (hence
the title The Psychopathology of Everyday Life) Freud
addresses the fundamental questions of who we are,
what and why we remember, how and why we forget
what speaks or acts inside us. In order to grasp fully
the import of Freud's letters to Fliess and the imaginative conjectures through which he seeks to create a
bridge between aspects of normal life, art, jokes, and
mythology, and the psychopathology of hysteria, obsessive neurosis, and even paranoia (through both his
patients' symptoms and dream interpretation), it
would be necessary to reconstruct in detail the truly
epic moments in the history of psychoanalysis that are
tied to the years of Freud's first discoveries. One
should therefore study in detail the years which followed Freud's return to Vienna from Paris in 1885,
deeply influenced by the clinical research of the
French neurologists and particularly by Charcot. The
latter had already creatively questioned the most inflexible and mechanical aspects of psychophysiologi-
223
cal reductionism in the field of mental illnesses, by
psychologizing the latter while never losing sight of
the relationship between the mind and the body.
Aware of these ideas, and wor king on a handful of
so-called hysterical patients and on his own psyche
through self-analysis, Freud was beginning to discover
(and to report to Fliess) the importance of an unconscious life related not so much to his clinicoanatomical
correlations as to repressed infantile fantasies of a sexual nature, where fantasies were distinguished from
actual traumas suffered in infancy by either himself
or his patients. It is also helpful to remember the vital
role played amongst those various fantasies by specifically oedipal fantasies gleaned from the study of
dreams, which Freud had considered an integral part
of normal psychology and not simply a pathological
phenomenon. Forgotten or repressed due either to their
extreme intensity or their penchant for generating anxieties, fears, or terrible anger, such fantasies were seen
by Freud as emerging through symptoms, compromise
formations, and conflicts, not only in clinical cases
but also in those fleeting short-circuits of our memory,
attention, or will, of which faulty actions consist. Although reconstructing in detail the complex history of
the beginnings of psychoanalysis in the present context
would be inappropriate, a few essential points of reference must be mentioned because it would be equally
preposterous to ignore that history altogether, given
its relevance to both internal aspects of Freud's
thought and the external context in which the PEL
originated.
The examination of this context is rendered necessary by the particular ways in which Freud presents
some of his book's themes and endeavors to establish
a dialogue with his sources and, indirectly, with what
such sources, in turn, refer to and presuppose. Therefore, the allusion to Lewes and Ribot in the opening
section of this essay is not, as I will try to demonstrate,
merely an erudite curiosity intended to show the distance that separates Freud from those who had dealt
with analogous issues before him. But, first of all, it
is important that we situate the PEL chronologically
within the developmental trajectory of Freud's
thought, even though this is inevitably an arbitrary,
reductive, and framing operation. Indeed, we should
conceive of the PEL itself as a multilayered palimpset
of themes, intuitions, revivals of older theses, memories, authors, and wor ks previously researched by
Freud, moving incessantly between texts and between
various letters to Fliess written in the same years.
Those years could be recalled as something of an extraordinary galaxy of creativity, in which already con-
224
solidated these and hypotheses in their embryonic

stages circulated and merged, thus giving rise to fresh
speculations and vistas. Some of these were only
hinted at in the text of the PEL, others were forgotten,
still others were later returned to in myriad guises. If
Freud's corpus in its entirety should not be read in a
purely diachronic fashion, this is particularly the case
with the PEL. Here the reader is confronted with many
staggering examples of the cornucopian richness of
Freud's intellect, and of his stature as a veritable conquistador of the inner world-as he was fond of dubbing himself in the early years of his psychoanalytic
career-who sometimes seemed uninterested in fully
pursuing the clues proffered by his genius or in instantly reaping the products of what he had been sowing. An emblematic example is provided by the
complex pages dedicated to paranoia, superstition, and
telepathy in the closing chapter of the PEL entitled
"Determinism, Belief in Chance and Superstition:
Some Points of View" (1901a, pp. 229-279).
In examining some of the PEL's leading threads,
it is first of all necessary to contextualize it in relation
to Studies on Hysteria (Breuer and Freud, 1893-1895)
including the famous' 'Project for a Scientific Psychology" (1895), to The Interpretation of Dreams (1900),
to Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious
(1905b), and also to the case history of Dora (1905a),
which Freud wrote at the same time as the PEL (Letter
to Fliess of January 10th, 1901; p. 432). It is also
noteworthy that Freud would later emphasize the divulging thrust of his studies of parapraxes undertaken
in the PEL (1901a, p. 272), which presupposed the
theoretical aspects of the nature of the unconscious
discussed in his already published major works. 4
The PEL was published in 1901 by Karger in
Berlin after a long and difficult labor, as attested by
several letters to Fliess written in the course of the
book's composition. Freud discontinued writing the
PEL halfway through (Letter to Fliess of January 30th,
1901; p. 434), partly because he was totally absorbed
in Dora's case and partly because he was dissatisfied
with the' 'Dumfheit" (idiocy) of his own style (Letter
to Fliess of February 15th, 1901; p. 436), to the point
that, in the process of correcting the first draft of the
manuscript, Freud declared to Fliess, "I dislike it tre4 Freud's observations on this aspect of the PEL can only be found
in a note added to the 1924 edition in The Standard Edition (1924, p. 272).
But in the Introductory Lectures on Psycho-Analysis (1916-1917, p. 36),
Freud stresses that parapraxes, however trivial by comparison with much
more serious disorders, are experienced by anyone and for this reason
they support psychoanalysis in demonstrating the existence of unconscious
processes even in normal people.
Riccardo Steiner
mendously and hope others will do so even more. The
essay is entirely without structure and contains all
sorts of + + + forbidden things" (Letter to Fliess of
May 18th, 1901; p. 441).5 Freud was here referring to
the manuscript of the first version of the PEL, published in two successive installments in Die Monatschrifts fur Psychiatrie und Neurologie in July and
August 1901, with slight yet interesting differences
from the final form which the book would later take.
In order to demonstrate how unsmooth and how deeply
interwoven with autobiographical factors the creation
of the PEL really was, it should also be remembered
that the famous anecdote regarding the forgetting of
Signorelli's name first appeared in an intriguing essay
entitled "Zum psychischen Mechanismus der Vergesslichkeit" (' 'On the Psychical Mechanism of Forgetfulness"), published in Die Monatschrifts fur Psychiatrie und Neurologie in December 1898 (Freud,
1899, pp. 436-443). This rendition of the anecdote
differs in interesting ways both from the version presented in 1901 and the version which features in the
text of 1904. Molnar provides some acute observations
on the modifications undergone by the anecdote in its
several versions (1995, pp. 77-80). Moreover, part of
chapter 4 of the PEL, both in the 1901 version and in
the text of 1904, consists of materials already delineated in an essay published in Die Monatschrifts fur
Psychiatrie und Neurologie (Freud, 1899, pp.
215-230) in September 1899. The essay bears the title
"Uber Deckerinnerung" ("Screen Memories") and
contains many crucial observations on the progressive
and regressive nature of screen memories. This phenomenon bears affinities with that of name substitution, as it consists of covering certain original names
which we wish to forget in order to avoid the conflicts
associated with them. 6
Incidentally, when in this essay Freud is describing the role played by screen memories, he is alluding
not so much to the conflicts connected with sexuality
and death as to the unconscious fantasies associated
with the drives as the cause of memory and attention
disorders. At one point, he refers to "hunger and
5 According to Masson, "Freud mocks here, making the sign of the
cross three times to protect himself from evil as he did in another letter
to Fliess of the 5th of November, 1899" (Masson, 1985, p. 441). However,
according to Mark Solms (personal communication) it is more likely that
Freud was simply using the conventional medical shorthand for' 'severe."
6 These observations are connected with one of Freud's fundamental
convictions of those years: his belief in the "nachtraglich" character of
infantile memories, which features already in "A Project for a Scientific
Psychology" (1895, p. 356) and again in the letters to Fliess of April 6th,
1897 (p. 234)~ November 14th, 1897 (pp. 279-281)~ and June 9th, 1898
(p. 316). The nachtraglich effect always implies a distortion of the original
experience through the process of memorization itself.
Centenary Essay
love," drawing these terms from Schiller's Die Weltweisen (1795; Freud, 1934, p. 316). The essay also
contains autobiographical elements related to Freud's
childhood and to his sexual fantasies about his little
niece Pauline, his stepbrother's daughter. Freud mentions Pauline and his stepbrother more than once in
The Interpretation of Dreams (Freud, 1900, pp. 25,
483, 486) but he does not explicitly reveal his sexual
fantasies either in this text or in the PEL. In the latter,
they are replaced by an episode coupled with another
from Uber Deckerinnerung (Freud, 1899), which features Freud as a child, standing in front of a cupboard,
demanding something and screaming at the absence of
his mother, whom he thought to be inside the cupboard
(PEL, 1901a, pp. 51-52). This occurrence was first
mentioned by Freud in a letter to Fliess of October
15th, 1897 (pp. 271-272). In speaking about his sexual
fantasies in the paper Uber Deckerinnerung, and in
speaking about the episode of the cupboard in the PEL,
Freud makes an interesting mistake: He is incorrect
about his age at the time when the episodes took place
(see Breuer and Freud, 1893-1895, p. 302, and 1901a,
note 2, p. 49). The paper" Uber Deckerinnerung" of
1899 was published only in 1925, and a fuller explanation of the cupboard episode was only given by Freud
in a note to the 1924 edition of the PEL, where it
was linked to his mother's pregnancy and to his own
fantasies on the subject (1901a, p. 51).
In spite of Freud's initial reservations about the
PEL and the complications surrounding its composition, he would return with growing pride to the theme
of parapraxes in order to underline his ability to apply
psychoanalytic methodologies to this phenomenon.
This is attested, for instance, by the Introductory Lectures on Psycho-Analysis (1916-1917), in which three
introductory lectures are devoted to that theme (see
also Freud, 1913, p. 166, 1916-1917, p. 40, 47). In
1923, Freud was to triumphantly declare that "they
[parapraxes] were shorn of their psychological explanation, if any such had been attempted" (1923, p.
240).
Furthermore, convinced of its novelty and originality, Freud grew increasingly fond of his book, kept
returning to it, drawing examples from it, and adding
new illustrations to it. In his London library, there is
even a copy of the 1904 edition with additions in
Freud's own hand, for the most part incorporated in
later editions and adopted in the Standard Edition. A
brief but fascinating article written by the aging Freud
in 1935, "The Subtleties of a Faulty Action," should
also be mentioned (1935, pp. 233-235). In this piece,
it is still possible to hear the old Freud, intent on self-
225
analysis and self-observation. He draws attention to

one of his innumerable parapraxes (which would have
multiplied exponentially over the years) and helps the
reader understand its import by recourse to his daughter Anna. This short essay antedates by barely one
year an undoubtedly more famous essay, "A Disturbance of Memory on the Acropolis," which also
makes reference, in away, to a faulty action (1936,
pp. 239-248).
"The Subtleties of a Faulty Action" could easily
have been one of the many examples added to the
copious revised editions of the PEL that were published when Freud was still alive: According to Strachey, there were 13 editions (Freud, 1901 a, pp. ix-x)
and 15 translations into various languages (1901 a, p.
10). This record makes the PEL along with the Introductory Lectures on Psycho-Analysis, the most popular
book in Freud's entire corpus. A letter written by
Freud to Jung on May 26th, 1907, bears witness to
Freud's belief in the value of his book: "But just let
five or ten years pass and the analysis of 'aliquis',
which today is not regarded as cogent, will have become cogent though nothing in it will have changed"
(McGuire, 1974, p. 54). Here Freud is referring to the
PEL (1901a, p. 9). It is also worth considering Freud's
response to certain objections to his theory of parapraxes raised by Roback (who, however, includes
Freud amongst the most prominent Jewish thinkers)
in a letter of February 20th, 1930: "My impression is
that if your objections to the conception of lapses are
justified, I have very little claim to be named beside
Bergson and Einstein among the intellectual sovereigns" (cited in Jones, 1957, p. 480).7
To understand its vast popularity, one has to consider that the PEL contains a huge and entertaining
repertoire of case studies assembled by Freud himself,
in the first place, and further extended, in the course
of various revised editions, by the contributions of
Freud's students, friends, and admirers including Brill,
Ferenczi, Jones, Reich, Rank, Sachs, Tausk, and, for
a certain period of time, even Jung, and many others.
However, the PEL is not supposed to be of interest
merely to experts in the field of psychoanalysis, for
even a public utterly unfamiliar with psychoanalytic
technicalities may find in it something curiously relevant. The book was intended from its inception to
reach a very broad audience, and Freud ultimately believed he had succeeded in addressing a series of prob7 Freud will revisit the theme of parapraxes in one of his very last
works, "Some Elementary Lessons on Psycho-Analysis" (1940, pp.
284-285).
226
lems which, however tangentially, in the case of

parapraxes, had constituted one of the central concerns
animating the intellectual debates of the last decades
of the 19th century both within and outside Europe,
namely, what should be understood by "ego" or by
"consciousness" in light of research carried out by socalled scientific psychology, in its involvement with
ancient philosophical preoccupations such as those
concerning memory, attention, will, and their malfunctioning. Concurrently, the neurophysiology of that
time had generated great enthusiasm and stimulated
the interests of disparate researchers, thus uniting them
in spite of their diverse geographical locations and
different cultural and social milieux (Boring, 1950;
Woodward and Ash, 1982; Harrington, 1987; Danziger, 1990).
The reader may now begin to see more clearly
why I have cited some of the protagonists of those
debates in the opening part of my essay. Yet, in order
to better understand the external cultural context of
the PEL and the way Freud interacted with it, to the
scholars I have mentioned others should be added.
Practically all researchers concerned with the mind
and with psychology in the ambit of the English school
of the second half of the 19th century engaged with
these issues by utilizing discoveries based on the theory of nervous reflexes in neurophysiology, and by
relating them to association psychology. And in one
way or another the same happened in France and Germany and other countries too. If we focus specifically
on the question of memory, its disorders and its extension into the remote regions which many of these
thinkers regarded as the unconscious, it is tempting
to think-particularly in light of publication dates of
certain seminal wor ks-that what manifests itself in
the continual return to problems of memory and remembrance is one of the most significant syndromes
of the last fin de siecle. Consider, for example, the
audacious assertions made by a certain Myers of the
Society for Psychic Research (1887) or Hering's outstanding paper of 1870, an influential text in all German-speaking cultures and familiar to Breuer and
Freud. These researchers were seeking to extend the
boundaries of memory into both the organic and the
inorganic facets of the unconscious. Consider also, by
contrast, the momentous experiments on memory undertaken by Ebbinghaus (1885). The suggestive pages
on memory by Taine (1870), von Hartmann (1870),
Butler (1880), and Dessoir (1899) also deserve mention. On the topic of the comingling of normal and
pathological aspects of memory, Ribot (1881) and
Riccardo Steiner
other thinkers I have already cited, and will return to,
should be considered.
Freud's PEL, despite his warnings about the
book's modest theoretical assumptions, is actually embedded in this context and could be read as an attempt
to respond to the syndrome I hinted at earlier: an obsessive interest in the problem of memory which does
not concern exclusively academic psychology. After
all, Bergson devoted to the theme of memory a whole
book entitled Matiere et Memoire (1896) and shortly
after, Proust published A la Recherche du Temps
Perdu (1913), a work that is inconceivable outside the
cultural context I have outlined. No less intimately
related to the theme of memory are Joyce's Ulysses
(1922) and certain aspects of Woolf's fiction (1927),
and, outside Europe, some influential chapters of
James's Principles of Psychology (1890), just to cite
a few famous writers of those years.
What is striking, and the reader should bear this
in mind in order to grasp Freud's occasionally polemical attitude, is the conviction harbored by these authors that they were caught in a genuine scientific
revolution, their historical circumstances affecting
profoundly their approaches to issues of memory and
forgetfulness. In a sense, it may not even be necessary
to refer to writings produced over the past 50 years to
comprehend these ideas, although it is undeniable that
the studies of Canguilhelm (1955), Liddell (1960),
Young (1970), Clar ke and Jacyna (1987), Gauchet
(1992), and Hacking (1995) have delivered many interesting pages on the subject. By simply consulting a
few of Freud's contemporaries or near-contemporaries, we would readily see how great a significance
they tended to attribute to their historical and scientific
situation. Wundt, in particular, dedicated a very
lengthy chapter of the third edition of Grundziige der
physiologischen Psychologie (1893, pp. 259-282) to
the problems of memory and attention, spanning the
period from the ancient Greeks to his contemporaries.
Spencer's introduction to the third edition of The Principles of Psychology (1855) and statements made in
the third edition of Bain's work The Senses and the
Intellect (1855, pp. 3-7) corroborate my thesis. Another case in point is Taine's De l'Intelligence (1870),
a text with which Freud was acquainted (Letter to
Fliess of February 13th, 1896; p. 172) and which had
been deeply influenced by the English school of neurophysiology and association psychology. Last but not
least, we should remember some competent observations made by Ribot who, not accidentally, had already
felt the need to write a history of experimental English
psychology as early as 1870.
Centenary Essay
"Es denkt in mir ... es fiihlt in mir." Further

Notes on the Cultural and Scientific
Background of The Psychopathology of
Everyday Life
Freud may seem to passionately oppose those authors
in particular who relied on a purely neurophysiological explanation of parapraxes, but, on closer inspection, things prove far more nebulous, complex, and
even ambiguous, for many important allusions and
references demonstrate that Freud is more profoundly
indebted to his sources than at first appears to be the
case. Hence, it is necessary to take into account the
constant, however indirect, dialogue between the author of the PEL and the context of its creation. No
doubt, Freud's controversial attitude to those he will
term "the authorities" in the Introductory Lectures
on Psycho-Analysis (1916-1917, p. 45) is confirmed
by even the very first page of the PEL. It is even
tempting to name the hypothetical psychologist of
whom Freud asks certain questions merely to receive
answers which, in his opinion, do not solve anything,
the central question being why it is that the names one
most frequently forgets are those of people one actually knows. That psychologist would simply answer
"that proper names succumb more easily to the process of being forgotten than other kinds of memory
contents" (Freud, 1901a, p. 1). He would, Freud polemically maintains, "bring forward the plausible reasons why proper names should thus be singled out for
special treatment, but would not suspect that any other
conditions played their part in such occurrences"
(PEL (1901a, p. 1). These ideas were fairly current at
the time: no less an authority than Kussmaul had
voiced them (1877, p. 132), and the chapter on "Les
amnesies partielles" in Ribot's Les Maladies de La
M emoire (1881) legislates on the principles of mnemonic malfunctioning, starting with the loss of proper
names and referring to a sort of natural law of the
loss of memory redolent of Darwin's and Spencer's
evolutionism, which I will have to recall later on. According to Ribot, the names'that are most easily forgotten and erased are precisely people's names (1881, pp.
91-111, p. 164).
Freud's polemical vein is evident in those sections of the PEL in which he raises abstract objections
against the theories of the "mind's function," the
"psychological theory of remembering and forgetting" and the scientific psychology of his day, which
tell us precious little about our' 'mental life" (PEL,
1901a, p. 134). This disputatious mood becomes still
more obvious if we examine the passages in which
227
Freud interrogates Wundt's positions, albeit respectfully and constructively (PEL, 1901a, p. 61). Wundt
at the time could be deemed the most authoritative
representative of scientific psychology in Germanspeaking cultures, and his writings a reelaboration of
the entire experience yielded by psychophysiological
research in both the English and the French camps. In
his Introductory Lectures on Psycho-Analysis (19161917), Freud called Wundt a philosopher. It is feasible,
therefore, that Freud may have had Wundt in mind,
even in those parts of the PEL where, whilst accepting
their existence, he takes issue with those who sought
to explain parapraxes by recourse to physiological factors associated with "tiredness, circulatory disturbances and intoxication" (PEL, 1901a, p. 21) or to
mechanical factors in their own right, such as the failure of attention and memory. One has to say nevertheless that, at the time, these ideas were widespread and
Freud had already referred to them in his neuropsychological monograph on aphasia (1891a, p. 52). Yet
even in the Introductory Lectures on Psycho-Analysis,
Freud's particular bone of contention is with Wundt
and Wundt's physiological explanations-the' 'physical creation" (Freud, 1916-1917, p. 33)-of the
causes of many slips of the pen. More importantly,
the PEL radically questions Wundt's attempts to account
for
verbal
lapses-"speech
disturbances' '-merely on the basis of the "contact effect
of sounds" (PEL, 1901a, p. 61) and takes issue with
Wundt's convictions about the role played by the
"cessation or diminution of the attention" in the section entitled "Mistakes in Speaking, Reading and
Writing" (PEL, 1901a, p. 132).
As I have said, at one stage Freud is quite absorbed in the task of dismantling certain physiological
and mechanical/associative explanations in favor of
the "unknown psychic power" (PEL, 1901a, p. 37)
and of those repressed thoughts and fantasies which,
stemming from the unconscious, disturb the order of
our psychic apparatus and of language and our psychophysical balance. Indeed, one should not forget
that behind the theses embraced by Wundt lie some
of the most important positions advocated by the great
school of English associative and neurophysiological
psychology, and Freud is well aware of this fact in his
radical critique of those theses. It should be noted,
however, that English thinkers, like French and German ones for that matter, had only paid marginal attention to parapraxes as such, the only exception being
Meringer (1900) and Meringer and Mayer's (1895)
research into slips of the pen. Freud's decision to devote an entire book to these "small details," as he
228
terms them repeatedly in the Introductory Lectures

on Psycho-Analysis may help us better understand the
reasons underlying his particular reactions to his" Authorities.' ,
Indeed, the importance of physiological factors
such as the circulation of the blood, fatigue, and the
aging process as causes of faulty actions and memory
lapses had been brought to Freud's attention by several authors. It had been emphasized by Spencer in
the first edition.of his Principles of Psychology (1855)
and again in subsequent editions (1870, 1881), in tandem with Maudsley (1867, p. 189) and then Bain
(1855, pp. 467-482), not to mention Lewes (1879) and
many others. At the same time, both Bain and Spencer
had stressed the vital role played by emotions in either
facilitating or hindering the act of recollection (Spencer, 1855, pp. 234-236). Spencer's theses, dressed with
all the ingredients of Darwinian evolutionism, firmly
established themselves both in England and on the
Continent, and profoundly influenced Ribot's Le Maladies de la Memoire (1881, pp. 157-176). Amongst
the German authors of interest to Freud, besides those
he had already discovered in his youthful apprenticeship with Brticke, especially influential was Kussmaul,
whose Die Storungen der Sprache had made some
substantial observations on the physiological dimension of memory (1877, pp. 36-42). Even James, in
America, had opened his Principles of Psychology
(1890, pp. 6-7) by acknowledging his debt to Spencer,
and asserted the importance of the body's physiological rhythms in the operations of memory. No less interesting is the case of the Scottish philosopher Hamilton,
who could by no means be described as a wholehearted supporter of physiological psychology. However, in his Lectures on Metaphysics and Logic (1877,
pp. 487-494), even Hamilton, while dealing in a
highly sophisticated manner with the issues of memory
and forgetfulness, had emphasized the importance of
the body's physiological conditions. But the catalogue
of names to which these traces could lead, were one
to pursue them all, would not be easily exhausted.
Freud, then, was justifiably proud of his findings
and of his alternative explanations of the functioning
and meaning of memory in normal people. Yet, as I
hinted earlier, a careful reading of the PEL shows that
Freud is concurrently very cautious. A plausible reason for this wariness is that he must have been aware
of the reactions which some of his theses might provoke. It is in this light, perhaps, that one should interpret his claim that he does not wish to destroy his
colleagues' opinions, but rather add a further "motive" to their explanations (PEL, 1901a, p. 4). And it
Riccardo Steiner
is in this same light that one could read his assertion
that not all parapraxes, and particularly slips of the
pen, may be immediately explained by recourse to his
method. Only in the Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis will he come to the opposite conclusion (Cutler and Fay, 1978, p. xxviii).
However, as I said earlier, on closer inspection
matters prove much more complex than they at first
may seem to be. What should one make, for example,
of Freud's willingness to take seriously certain observations and theoretical suggestions put forward by his
predecessors? A case in point is the essay by Henri
and Henri (1897) to which Freud explicitly refers in
the second edition of the PEL (1907), having already
used it in his study" Uber Deckerinnerung" published
in 1899. Freud derives from Henri and Henri the observation that, with some people, it is possible to retrieve recollections that can be traced back to the sixth
month of the first year of their lives (PEL, 1901 a, pp.
45-46), although Freud argues that further investigation of these issues is required. A close reading of
Henri and Henri's study exhibits a peculiar feature
(pp. 184-198). Freud finds the essay inspiring in its
examination of the distortions incurred by infantile
memories, which can be based on an apparently trivial
event or recollection, or generally on the role played
by emotions and affects in the ability or inability to
remember. In this text, however, Freud also encounters two authors to whom Henri and Henri owe many
of their theoretical pointers: Taine and Ribot. Taine' s
De I'Intelligence (1870), which contains passages occasionally reminiscent of Proust (note again this coincidence), had studied the role played by certain
memories and hidden impulses in enabling the act of
recollection. What is most interesting is that Taine, as
I have already recalled, had been deeply influenced by
the associative and neurophysiological psychology of
the English school, and particularly by Spencer and
Bain who, on the premise of the importance attributed
by Darwin to the emotions, had established an incontrovertible connection between the affects, memory,
attention, and forgetfulness. Ribot, mentioned by Henri and Henri alongside Taine, had likewise stressed
the part played by emotional factors in fixing or erasing certain childhood memories in his La Psychologie
des Sentiments (Henri and Henri, ] 897, pp. 192-193).
As to the part played by affects and reminiscences
associated with repressed childhood memories in parapraxes, well, this is precisely what Freud's PEL was
intended to shed light upon, by linking them to certain
unconscious fantasies going back to childhood.
Centenary Essay
Yet, the PEL is often much more closely related
than may be at first apparent to the intellectual process
through which a certain tradition had established itself
throughout Europe in the previous decades. At times,
Freud even appears to revitalize certain physiological
positions. Although he never embraces them tout
court, he nevertheless emphasizes the necessity of remembering their existence and validity. He even contends that lapses may occur as a result of nervous
deviations independent of the lapses themselves, and
that structural relations between the physiological and
the psychophysical dimensions should not be ignored
(PEL, 1901a, pp. 270-271). These points must be
borne in mind because from a certain angle the PEL,
replete as it is with examples and even with analyses
of Freud's own personal lapses, is somehow an attempt to reintroduce a kind of Selbstbeobachtung, a
chain of discoveries based on introspection, which had
been one of the main characteristics of the old spiritualistic and metaphysical psychology based on the
"faculties" of consciousness. This is also true of The
Interpretation of Dreams, a text that would be inconceivable without Freud's personal dreams. Such "introspection" had been fiercely attacked in France,
England, and Germany (consider Wundt, for instance)
by the supporters of the new scientific psychology.
However, when Freud takes issue with theories of
memory, attention, and volition fashionable at the
time, he does not propose a return to the psychology
of the "faculties," which had dominated European
culture for centuries, or even millennia. While contesting his colleagues' assertions, Freud never loses
sight of the natural material and substratum that makes
the body a fundamental receptacle, our starting point,
and our destination, in the study of parapraxes; to the
point that one could say that for Freud, in the PEL,
the physiological and the neurological constitute, so
to speak, "a dependent concomitant," of the psychological, to use, in inverted form, a famous expression
attributed by Freud to Hughlings Jackson in his book
on aphasia (1891a). There he stated that "the psychic
is a dependent concomitant" of the physiological. Significantly, the famous term metapsychology, which
first appears in print in the PEL (1901a, p. 259), and
through which Freud seeks, with psychoanalysis, to
take metaphysics and certain aspects of religion onto
the level of natural and psychological explanation, actually features for the first time in a letter to Fliess of
February 13th, 1896; p. 172). Here Freud states that
he is absorbed in the reading of Taine's De l'Intelligence and finding it extremely stimulating. And Taine,
of course, was no supporter of the old spiritualistic
229
or metaphysical psychology, because he had actually

fought for the introduction on the French scene of a
new scientific and materialist psychology.
Having acknowledged the PEL's distinctive character and originality and clarified Freud's vis polemica
toward colleagues and mentors, it is also necessary to
highlight what Freud owes, both directly and indirectly, to a certain cultural context. This context encompasses the central axes of Freud's major works
since, as we know even from a reading of the PEL,
one of its main concerns is the attempt to establish
what should be meant by terms such as the I, consciousness, attention, volition. It is within this context
that, only a few years prior to the composition of the
PEL, Exner, one of Freud's closest friends and mentors, pointing to a purely neurological unconscious
(Gauchet, 1992), even maintained that one should talk,
in the case of Denkfehler (false reasoning), not of an
Ich denke (I think), Ich fuhle (I feel), but rather of es
denkt in mir (it thinks in me), es fuhlt in mir (it feels
in me), and adds: "Wir sind eben nicht uberschrankte
Herren unsereres Associations, wenig wir uberhaupt
Herren unserer Gefuhle sind" (we also do not completely own our associations or have control of our
feelings) (Exner, 1889, p. 109). Of course, Freud endows this es denkt, es fiihlt in mir with a distinctive
content defined by his own understanding of the unconscious and of parapraxes, and he later will designate the unconscious with the term das Es, drawing
on Groddeck's definition. Yet it is also impossible to
ignore, despite their occasional ingenuousness, certain
texts by French authors with whom Freud had directly
or indirectly interacted. In these texts, notions of consciousness, memory, attention, and volition were presented as tenuous, fragmentary, unstable, weak, and
devoid of any genuine autonomy, mere "epiphenomena added to the psychophysiological process."
Yet, just think again of Binet's and Ribot's wor k.
Although there are important differences between the
two, insofar as Binet exhibits subtler psychologizing
traits than Ribot, their works share one important factor. Indeed, both had drawn on, and elaborated in their
own fashions, theses formulated by Huxley and
Maudsley: Ribot in Les Maladies de la Memoire
(1881, pp. 21-25,45-51) and Binet in Les Alterations
de la Personnalite (1892, pp. 38-40). And both had
transformed the old certainties into circus performers
walking the tightrope without a protective net, facing
the impenetrable abyss of the organic and neurophysiological unconscious by which all aspects of normal
life were, in their view, affected and motivated. Attention (Lampl, 1988) has even been drawn to close af-
230
finities between Ribot and Nietzsche (who knew Ribot

and had been influenced by his understanding of the
ego and consciousness generally). I assume the reader
will be aware, moreover, of the complex relationship
between Nietzsche and the most problematic and profound aspects of Freud's thought. Therefore, Freud,
as author of the PEL, should be situated, however cautiously, within this broad cultural context. Matters
would become even clearer and, in a sense, "unheimlich, " if other clues offered by the PEL were pursued
of which the reader should be aware in order to grasp
the text's complexity.
One of the pillars of Freud's research is his conviction that in order to construct a psychology of the
normal, it is necessary to start from the pathological,
where certain phenomena are more plainly manifest.
Such a position is also voiced in the PEL (1901a, p.
250). Yet even in this case, we must again take into
consideration the resonance of the French school, and
of the famous theses put forward in Bernard's tract on
experimental medicine (1865) which had influenced
Charcot, Ribot, and Janet (1894, p. 298) and were in
circulation at the time of Freud's stay in Paris. We
must also pay heed to Freud's crucial observations on
various "types" of memory and on his own type of
memory in particular, which he describes as "visual"
(PEL, 1901a, p. 39). Here the influence of Ribot
(amongst other sources) can be felt, even though Freud
attributes his classification of different kinds of memory to Charcot, in one of his many memory lapses! I
mentioned the relationship between Ribot and Charcot
at the beginning of this essay and hope that the reader
is now in a better position to see my reasons for doIng so.
In a very interesting section of the PEL, Freud
hints at "the architectonic principle of the mental apparatus," and at the fact that superior "agencies" can
be inhibited by inferior ones (PEL, 1901a, p. 147).
Here we witness another example of Freud's far from
negligible debt to the scientific and cultural scenario
of his times. Understanding this debt can help us better
understand Freud's work in its entirety. It is worth
recalling, in this regard, Freud's discovery and reinterpretation in his own fashion of Hughlings Jackson's
neurological theories. Freud's allegiance to Hughlings
Jackson is already evident in his Zur Auffassung der
Aphasien (1891a, p. 132), where he cites the great
English neurologist and what he terms his theory of
the "disinvolution" of the "nervous apparatus,"
which Hughlings Jackson had, in fact, defined as dissolution. 8 Through this theory, Hughlings Jackson had
x In Zur AujJasung der Aphasien (1891 a, p. 132), Freud talks of disin-
valution. This term was never employed by Hughlings Jackson. The same
Riccardo Steiner
sought to provide a neurophysiological explanation for
the phenomenon whereby certain higher arrangements
of the nervous apparatus control lower ones, yet dissolve and disappear in the case of some mental illnesses, thus allowing more primitive arrangements to
resurface. What must also be remembered, in this context, is Hughlings Jackson's debt to the evolutionism
theorized by Spencer, from whom the term dissolution
is directly derived. Ribot, in France, had based on
this same notion of dissolution his own law of the
dissolution of memory advocated in Les Maladies de
la Memorie (1881, pp. 45-49, pp. 90-102, 121-124).
Freud, transforming yet not forgetting that notion,
turns it into a general principle of the "mental apparatus" through which he tries to explain the causes of
certain types of forgetfulness.
But just think now of Freud's explicit references
to posthypnotic tasks, through which he explains the
analogies between the ability to remember certain intentions at the right moment and what is experimentally achieved with patients subject to hypnosis (PEL,
1901a, p. 250). Equally interesting is Freud's recurring
emphasis on his own "security of the sleepwalker"
(PEL, 1901a, p. 250), through which he seeks to elucidate his modus operandi in the retrieval of forgotten
numbers, or in certain parapraxes connected with
faulty actions which, in their eeriness and sometimes
violence, appear to be purely physiological or muscular, yet bear close affinities to the unconscious intentionality that manifests itself in the motor syndromes
of hysteria. Freud returns one last time to the subject
of hysteria and to the "formes frustes" of neurosis in
the closing page of the PEL (1901a, p. 278) as though
to bid them farewell. Through this French expression,
which he would have come across at the time he wrote
his Preface and footnotes to the translation of Charcot's clinical neurological lectures, "Le~ons du Mardi
de La Salpetriere" (Freud, 1892-1894, p. 34), Freud
pays homage to the school from which he learned
most. Echoing, as I have already mentioned, Bernard's
well-known theses (1865), he examines what links
parapraxes to mental illness and its more serious
symptoms, and what distinguishes them from the latter-their intensity, their duration, the functions and
social aspects of individual life which they tend to
disrupt-stressing that the dividing line between sanity and insanity is extremely tenuous and that we are
all a bit neurotic.
applies to the concept of dependent concomitant~ for Hughlings Jackson,
mind and brain were independent concomitants. Even in these cases, we
are confronted with Freud's own parapraxes!
Centenary Essay
Earlier in this discussion, I underlined that it is
important to contextualize the PEL in relation to those
neuroscientific theorists of the unconscious who had
succeeded in anchoring the notions of memory, attention, and consciousness to their organic roots, in order
to avoid dangerous misunderstandings which may
seem to point to a revival of spiritualistic and metaphysical positions. However, to comprehend the pages
of the PEL to which I have just referred, and Freud's
observations on the relationship between hysteria,
somnambulism, and parapraxes, it is necessary to inspect more closely certain texts in which the neurological conception of the unconscious and the physiology
of consciousness, memory, and attention had already
been dealt with in highly sophisticated ways. These
texts endeavored to describe, without ever denying
their relation to organic bodily processes, the psychological phenomena of double consciousness and split
personality peculiar to hysterical patients. They introduced the hypothesis of a thinking subconscious, of
a more primitive and active hidden personality that
triggers faulty actions, causes forgetfulness, inhibits
volition, and so on. Those were the theories promoted
by the great French school of research into hysteria
of the fin de siecle and they have to be considered,
too, because they transpire in these, as in many other
pages of the PEL, as having influenced Freud in the
early stages of his explorations. The reader may remember Breuer and Freud's celebrated dictum "Die
Hysterische leidet grossentheils an Reminiscenzen"
(hysterics suffer mainly from reminiscences), borrowed enthusiastically by Janet as confirmation of his
own long held convictions (Janet, 1894, pp. 269-270).
The "reminiscences" that afflicted hysterical subjects
were somewhat comparable to strange memory lapses,
because the traumatic origins of those reminiscences
are unconscious. Some of the key texts that ought to
be surveyed, however superficially, to notice certain
significant reverberations, are Bernheim's writings,
translated by Freud and cited by him on the subject
of posthypnotic tasks; and alongside the works of the
often quoted Charcot, Janet's Etat Mental des Hysteriques (1894) and Binet's Les Alterations de la Personnalite (1892) are of particular interest in this
context. In Janet's case studies of Lucie, Isabelle, and
Berthe, these patients showed a propensity to describe
an "other" that acted and spoke inside them. Sometimes, curiously, they used the same neutral expressions to be found in Exner (1889) but with the higher
degree of personification: "On me vole ma pensee, on
ecrit ce que je pense . .. " (Janet, 1894, p. 41). The
patients confronted by Janet, Binet, and many others
231
were sleep-walking hysterical women trapped in peculiar amnesias and sudden recollections that could be
revived through hypnosis and revealed the presence
of a type of mental activity describable as unconscious
or, at any rate, drastically severed from the subjects'
conscious personalities. In the face of such cases, Janet, Binet, and many others had tried more than once
to establish the difference between hysterical syndromes characterized by prolonged and massive amnesia, or what was defined as the total anesthesia of
consciousness and even of certain psychomotor processes, and what they termed amnesias, forms of
, 'partial" anesthesia of memory, of consciousness, or
of certain gestures and actions that did not affect substantially the subject's personality and were evident
in the lapses committed by even normal people (see
Binet, 1892, pp. 140-147,235-242; here Binet draws
on previous studies undertaken by Charcot, Janet, Richet, and others).9
The PEL repeatedly draws attention to analogies
between dreams and lapses, to the point of maintaining
that parapraxes bear witness to the fact that certain
processes characteristic of dreams are active even
when we are awake. In other words, we dream during
the day no less than at night and this is why we lose
concentration, forget things, or perform bizarre actions. I hope that the following remarks will not be
misunderstood. It is worth wondering, however,
whether it is merely a coincidence or an erudite curiosity that Freud (possibly without knowing or remembering it) confirms, through his assertions and in his
own fashion, what had also been inferred in a wor k
by the French psychiatrist Macario, quoted by Janet
in the chapter on "Les accidents mentales" of his Etat
Mental des Hysteriques (1894, p. 29). Macario had
already maintained in the mid-nineteenth century that
"les reves ont une grand analogie avec les distractions, qui sont pour ainsi dire, les reves de I'etat de
la vielle" ("dreams exhibit a significant analogy with
moments ofabsent-mindedness, which are, so to speak,
the dreams of our waking hours"; emphasis added).
It would be inadvertent indeed to ignore all these connections; we, too, could end up daydreaming too much
while reading the PEL.
There is one further aspect of the relationship
between the PEL and a certain tradition which I believe the reader should take into consideration. The
PEL partly owes its popularity to the amazing range
<) See also an echo of all those old discussions in Freud's "Fragment
of an Analysis of a Case of Hysteria" (1905a, pp. 16-17). As I have
already reminded the reader, in 1901, for a while at least, Freud wrote the
case of Dora and the PEL simultaneously.
232
of case studies collected by Freud and, to some extent,

to others on reading and writing lapses. I have referred
more than once, in this regard, to Wundt and to Meringer and Mayer, from whom Freud derives a descriptive terminology of philological and linguistic
orientation, to .the point of adopting the famous word
play "Versprechen und Verlesen" that had constituted
the title of the two Austrian writers' text. 10 This is not
the place to enter into a detailed discussion of these
matters. The reader will become immediately aware
of how Freud used the descriptive terminology I refer
to by perusing certain passages of the PEL (1901a;
particularly pp. 58-63). A close analysis of the ways
in which Freud uses Wundt, Meringer, and Mayer
could shed light on Freud's debt to the linguistic context that had molded him and still influenced him.
Indeed, as I said, it should not be forgotten that
the PEL is not only connected with The Interpretation
(~f Dreams (1900) and the case of "Dora" (1905a,) but
is also contemporaneous with another text of applied
psychoanalysis, Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious (1905b), which testifies to Freud's debt to
certain philosophers of language, linguists, and philologists (Steiner, 1982). In the particular case of the
PEL, nevertheless, I wish to draw the reader's attention to some very specific data. Let us consider, for
example, the term paraphasia, to which Freud often
refers in this work (see, for instance, PEL [1901a, p.
53]). This term harks back to one of the most important texts in Freud's preanalytical work and was
bound to profoundly influence subsequent developments in his thought (Steiner, 1982; Solms and Saling,
1990; Greenberg, 1997). I am referring to the already
mentioned Zur Auffassung der Aphasien (1891 a)
where Freud argues, on the basis of his sources, that
paraphasia constitutes a nonlocalizable characteristic
of certain aphasic disorders. It was Freud's contact
with these phenomena and with researchers intent on
describing them that drew his attention to manifestations of these disorders in normal people. The study I
have just cited reverberates with the massive inventory
of descriptive cases found by Freud in Kussmaul
(1877), where a whole chapter is devoted to the clinical neurological phenomenon of paraphasia (pp.
157-192). However, Kussmaul is only one of numer10 It is worth noting that Meringer and Mayer's Versprechen und Ver!esen (1895) is quoted and used by Wundt in Vij!kerpsycho!ogie (1900), a
text to which Freud repeatedly refers in the PEL (Wundt, 1900b, p. 371).
Freud became acquainted with Meringer and Mayer's writings by reading
what was contained ""in a short essay designed for a wider circle of readers" in the Neue Freie Presse, August 23rd, 1900. The essay was entitled
"Wie Man Sich Versprechen Kann" (PEL, 1901a, p. 59).
Riccardo Steiner
ous scholars whom one could cite in this context. Furthermore, and this is something of a sure importance,
in his seminal study on aphasia Freud had already
linked paraphasia to certain disorders, to certain
"Wortwechslungen" (confusion of words), "Worterstummlung" (speechlessness), of healthy and normal
people. In those cases the paraphasia was due to the
"Ermudung" (fatigue), or to "geteilter Aufmersamkeit" (split attention), but also to the "Einfiuss
storender Affekte" (influence of disturbing affects).
His explanations of a purely physiological kind therefore were already linked to the attempt to take into
account also these "storender Affekte" (1891a, p. 52).
In his search for explanations at that time, Freud,
like many others, was simultaneously fascinated and
confused by his subject matter, moving between hysteria (hysterical patients, too, suffer from "paraphasia' '), aphasia, and other disorders, trying to grasp
their differences, and beginning to call into question
the positions put forward by his sources and colleagues. After all, even Charcot, in Paris, had dealt in
depth with the various forms of aphasia and their clinical and psychological features. Situated between
Freud's work on aphasia and, before that, his Parisian
experiences with Charcot and the French school, on
the one hand, and the PEL, on the other, was the discovery of the unconscious. Yet, elements of earlier
observations, hypotheses, attempts to find partially alternative solutions, had survived; as I have tried to
show. What is more, I think it is worthwhile remembering, in this context, that even the famous diagram-which could be regarded as something of a
recalling or guiding image-with which Freud opens
the PEL, referring to his attempt to reconstruct the
vicissitudes of his forgetting of Signorelli's name, is
the product of a cultural heritage once again associated
with the study of aphasia.
Of course, in that famous diagram the unconscious is mysteriously represented, for, as Molnar has
rightly pointed out (1995, p. 88), missing from it are
the connections that could explain the transition from
unconscious fantasies to the various name distortions
that mask "Signorelli." Consciousness is a kind of
concomitant receptor of something that is no longer
unconsciously "physiological," but rather related to
such processes as condensation or displacement that
characterize the waking dream wor k through which
are created the concealments and false remembrances
peculiar to everyday memory disorders. All this happens, however, without us knowing it. It is intriguing,
from a descriptive point of view, that this diagram
should be so similar to the diagrams that feature in
Centenary Essay
Freud's work on aphasia (1891a, p. 75, 121) and that
the charts sketched by Freud in that text should, in
turn, hark back to analogous charts present in his
sources on the subject of aphasia, albeit in a context
that attempted to find neuroanatomical and neurophysiological explanations for that disorder, and which
Freud had begun to question through his own research
(see also Greenberg, 1997, p. 105, 156). It would seem
that at a semiotic level-after all, Freud describes
himself as a classic visual memory type in the
PEL-Freud wishes to pay homage to that tradition
of thought and research which had compelled him for
the first time to reflect upon and elaborate the model
of "Sprach Apparatus" that echoes throughout subsequent developments in his thought. And one could go
on pursuing similar traces.
Having traced, however cursorily, some aspects
of the cultural and scientific trajectory that led Freud
to the composition of the PEL, it is arduous to prescribe any clear reading strategies. What I will try to
show should therefore be taken as a purely indicative
and personal choice. As I hope to have conveyed in
the preceding pages, we must avoid the danger of
viewing the PEL as a text of an exclusively divulging
nature. Just consider the theme of memory and its
relationship with childhood and unconscious recollections. Ultimately, despite Freud's modesty, it is precisely in the PEL that we find some of the most
interesting statements on his understanding of mnemonic operations in general, and not only in the context of parapraxes, particularly where-returning to
his earlier essay "Uber Deckerinnerung" (1899)-he
discusses the possibility of recalling the events of early
infancy. It is in these pages, for example, that we encounter the theme of Nachtraglichkeit. Freud's complex and intricate grasp of the temporal dimension
of psychic existence reveals itself precisely where he
proposes a paradoxical and "unheimlich" model, according to which we do not merely use recent occurrences to explain, through distancing, earlier ones, but
also use remote events to distort and make sense of
what has actually taken place in the more recent past
(PEL, 1901a, pp. 40-42). These observations are enormously relevant to the present scenario, considering
what is being written today about the possibility of
veridically remembering the past in general. At the
same time (and nowadays we forget this far too often),
in a note added in 1907 to the last chapter of the PEL,
entitled "Determinism, Belief in Chance and Superstition: Some Points of View," Freud advances one
of his most daring and, in a way, optimistic assertions
regarding the possibility of remembering the repressed
233
past of the unconscious. Here he maintains that from
a theoretical angle, the traces of memory, contained
and stratified in the unconscious, may be utterly retrievable by circumventing defenses and repressions
and somehow eliminating even the nachtraglich distortions (PEL, 1901, pp. 274-257).
It is also worth considering certain observations-yet to be developed, but potentially seminal-on the application of psychoanalysis to historical
research. Here Freud endeavors to establish a link between the inevitably distorted modality through which
we remember our past and the ways in which mythological and historical traditions of various peoples
have been constructed, on the basis of ineluctably and
progressively misconstrued recollections of their origins and of unpleasant events consigned to forgetfulness (PEL, 1901a, pp. 48, 147). These issues will
occupy Freud's research in later years, as attested by
his assertions in "The Unconscious" (1915a, p. 187)
and the essay on Leonardo (1910, pp. 83-84), not to
mention the subsequent "Constructions in Analysis"
(1937, pp. 266-269) and Moses and Monotheism
(1939, pp. 128-130).
One final reference should be made to those enlightening words-courageous and for some rather
, 'uncanny' '-through which Freud attacks the metaphysical pretensions of religious thought, thus displaying the conquistador attitude that animated him in
those years, and the desire to deconstruct any available
facet of culture and thought via psychoanalysis. It is
in this same context that Freud comes across as a laic
and positivistic scientist, recalling his youthful enthusiasm for Feuerbach and his critique of religion, as
testified by his letters to Silberstein of November 8th,
1874, and March 3rd, 1875 (Boehlich, 1990). It is also
in these extremely involuted and not always clear
pages, where Freud attempts to unite superstition,
paranoia, telepathy, and prophetic dreams, that we find
some famous statements concerning religious beliefs
which point to Freud's quest to "transform metaphysics into metapsychology," having maintained that "a
large part of the mythological view of the world which
extends a long way into the most modern religions,
is nothing but psychology projected into the external
world'~ (PEL, 1901a, pp. 258-259).
"Quo Vadis, Austria?" Some Notes on the

Sociopolitical and Cultural Context of the The
Psychopathology of Everyday Life
Beside these general themes, to which I shall return
shortly in relation to Freud's views on determinism
234
presented in the last chapter of the PEL, what should

be underscored are the extraordinary, sleight-of-hand
tricks with which Freud the prestidigitator seeks to
convince the reader of the validity of his theses-namely the unconscious causes of parapraxes-by recourse to legion exempla and anecdotes.
Following Freud's discourse by simply looking at the
titles of his chapters, as they move from "Vergessen
von Eigennamen" (The forgetting of proper names),
to "Vergessen vom Fremdsprachigen Worten" (The
forgetting of foreign words) to "Vergessen von Namen
und Wortfolgen" (The forgetting of sets of words), to
the sections entitled "Das Versprechen" (Slips of the
tongue), "Das Verlesen und Verscwreiben" (Misreadings and slips of the pen), "Das Vergessen von Eindrucken und Vorsatzen' , (The forgetting of
impressions and intentions), "Das Vergreifen" (Bungled actions), and so on; we witness something of a
linguistic crescendo, expressed by the constant repetition of the prefix Ver which, as Freud himself declares,
seems to reflect and allude to a kind of "internal similarity" amongst various phenomena (PEL, 1901 a, p.
239). It also, I would suggest, seems to encapsulate
the omnipresence of those ghosts to whom Freud refers, citing Goethe's Faust, Part II, as the "logo" of
the PEL: "Now fills the air so many a haunting shape,
that no one knows how best he may escape" (PEL,
1901 a, p. vii). Of course, there is no need for exaggerations and I would not like what I have said to imply
that the "haunting shape" can be reduced to a repetition of prefixes where, from a linguistic point of view,
the ghosts that animate it appear to nestle in an oppressive and pervasive fashion. Indeed, the PEL also contains a series of examples and stories based on lapses
of a motor type. In these cases, too, there is evidence
for that unconscious intentionality, that counterwill
(PEL, 1901a, p. 154) that governs our quotidian malaise and incessantly reveals the existence of a terra
incognita inside us that renders us strangers to ourselves, errant at the gate of our psyche. However, the
PEL's most striking pyrotechnics are undoubtedly located with verbal lapses. This is largely due to Freud's
exceptional linguistic and associati ve flair for detecting their unconscious motivations. At times, the
sense of awe and surprise elicited by the text is such
as to make the reader think: "Well, only the intelligence and creativity of Freud's unconscious could engineer this ludic confusion of one's memory and
perception." I believe that the presence and quantity
of autobiographical anecdotes pertaining to Freud
should be emphasized. Clearly, through the passing of
time, various editions, and the help of friends, admir-
Riccardo Steiner
ers, and colleagues, the book has grown to such an
extent as to suggest that the yearning to collect ever
new examples may mirror, in the PEL, another mania
or passion on Freud's part. Even this passion was
linked to the desire not to forget and to the desire to
accumulate, yet it was a more mundane and expensive
passion, which curiously parallels the PEL's various
editions, that of the collector not only of stories based
on parapraxes or jokes but also of Greek, Roman,
Egyptian, and eventually Eastern relics that would
gradually fill Freud's study in Vienna over the years.
Of considerable importance to understanding
Freud are the famous autobiographical dreams discussed in The Interpretation of Dreams (1900), to
which practically all the most recent of Freud's biographers and scholars have drawn attention (Anzieu,
1975; Grinstein, 1980), not least the extremely subtle
observations of Grubrich-Simitis (1993) on the relationship between autobiography and writing in Freud,
and Mahony's observations (1987). However, nowhere more than in the PEL is it possible to capture
the sense of Freud as a conquistador intent above all
on conquering, more or less successfully, himself and
the reasons for his everyday malaise. At times we witness, in his attempts to explain certain associations, a
real fibrillation of his thought connections, almost lost
in the labyrinth of all those "Einfallene" (sudden
words, ideas) that lead from one to another, animated
by the unconscious conflicts and desires to which they
are tied. In these pages, the reader may find some
of the most revealing moments of Freud's biography.
Consider, beside what I have already observed, the
colossal parapraxis, which contributed decisively to
the end of Freud's friendship with Fliess, concerning
the correct attribution of the discovery of infantile bisexuality (PEL, 1901a, p. 144). Consider also Freud's
significant errors a propos Charcot, and inaccurate citations in The Interpretation of Dreams, indicative of
his strong ambivalences toward his father and relatives, and later thrown into relief by some of his biographers. It would suffice, as an example, to read the
chapter on "Errors" (PEL, 1901a, pp. 218-229). At
times, Freud attributes his forgetfulness of proper
nouns to minor disasters connected with his migraine
attacks (PEL, 1901a, p. 19). We are sometimes presented with lists that unfold in a tragicomic crescendo:
An example of this can be found in the eighth chapter,
"Bungled Actions" (PEL, 1901a, pp. 163-170),
where Freud describes various forms of absent-mindedness culminating in the grotesque and potentially
rather dangerous mistake of squeezing morphine instead of eye drops in the eyes of an almost centenarian
Centenary Essay
female patient, the error reawakening in Freud "oedipal fantasies"! It is impossible, in this context, to
provide a detailed account of Freud's enormous personal casebook, which even informs us about the extraordinary retentive power of Freud's youthful
memory, now weakened by the passing of time (PEL,
1901a, p. 135).
The PEL demonstrates how really quotidian the
psychopathology of everyday life is. Yet, as we follow
certain themes and certain developments of the examples and anecdotes supplied by Freud and his colleagues and friends, we realize that the text is not
merely concerned with strictly personal occurrences,
with the more or less tragicomic games of hide-andseek that the unconscious of single individuals likes to
play with their consciousness. In fact, what gradually
emerges is a kind of social psychopathology of the
everyday, which obviously characterized a certain
elite or, at any rate, a certain social class, typically the
middle class in Central Europe, Britain, and North
America during those years. But, as we know, Freud's
intention was more general and universal. Here the
everyday changes, according not only to personal
events and histories but also to History with a capital
"H," as this more than once shows through, in forms
that would have been most distressing and traumatizing for both Freud and his friends. For example, it is
no coincidence that from the third edition of the PEL
(1915), Freud begins to add anecdotes and examples
of parapraxes based on the events and conflicts of the
First World War and on the anxieties and concerns
created by it in his unconscious and in that of his
friends and colleagues (PEL, 1901a, pp. 22, 70-77,
186). At some point, even the aftermath of the war
makes its fleeting appearance through references to
Berlin, its tumults, and strikes.
What must be stressed is that the examples and
stories constitute, even from a formal and stylistic
point of view, the most persuasive rhetorical instrument needed by Freud to convince the reader of the
validity of the psychoanalytic method by virtue of
their very simplicity and also, at times, of their absorbing, albeit fragmentary, narrativity. Undoubtedly,
in these inane and uncannily amusing tales, Freud's
skills as a writer express themselves in compressed
and miscrocosmic form. He experiments with a kaleidoscopic variety of techniques and narrative genres
that range from first- to third-person narration, from
reportage to extremely lively dialogue in which the
comic (it is not by chance that Freud compares many
parapraxes to condensed jokes [PEL, 1901a, p. 64])
often transmutes into the deeply tragic, as attested by
235
parapraxes related to fatal accidents or self-destructive
acts which can unconsciously lead to suicide (PEL,
1901a, pp. 185-186). In all this, it seems possible to
capture in nuce the range of expressive registers that
can subsequently be found in the great Kranken
Geschichten. Dora's case, for instance, is unthinkable
without taking into consideration many stories and
dialogues of the PEL, especially from a formal viewpoint. Indeed, as I have already mentioned, the writing
of that case was contemporaneous with that of the
PEL. In order to better understand these ideas, it would
be necessary to inspect some so-called minor literature
characteristic of the Vienna of that period. It would
be useful, for example, to go back to some salacious
vignettes of Die Wiener Spaziergangers by Spitzer,
which Freud himself cites in the PEL, and to the literature of the fragment and the ''feuilleton'' that was
being read and sampled in those years both at home
and in the cafes (Magris, 1996). Not accidentally, the
first example of "misreading" reported by Freud refers to the Leipziger Illustrierte, which Freud, like
hundreds of his fellow citizens, liked to "durchblattern" in his favorite cafe, the Corb Cafe.
In a beautiful article entitled "Der Kobold im
Hirnkasten" (the goblin in the cranium), published in
Neue Freie Presse on April 10th, 1904, an anonymous
reviewer of the PEL, signing himself as "St.g," highlights Freud's skills as a hound or detective in pursuit
of the unconscious. Following this lead, it may be
worth recalling some other illustrious figures, Sherlock Holmes, for example. However, the project undertaken in the PEL should not be regarded as a minor
virtuoso performance in comparison with the great
prose of Die Kranken Geschichten. The fact that certain tales, dialogues, and narrative sketches, so perfect
at times in their brevity, should proliferate ad infinitum
is in itself telling. Perhaps there is no work in Freud's
entire corpus that enables us to experience more
closely the everyday reality of a particular portion of
Europe, especially prewar Vienna (Janik and Toulmin,
1973; Pick, 1976; Schorske, 1979, 1998; Johnston,
1981; Barea, 1992); to imagine the interiors of houses
full of expensive and lovely, small and tasteless trinkets with which a certain bourgeoisie was keen on
surrounding itself; to perceive at an almost tactile level
the weight of certain house keys and the somnolent
heaviness of certain doors and desks; to visualize the
fashion of the period, the styIe of dresses, suits, hats,
and overcoats (Gay, 1988), the comforting solidity of
silver-pummeled walking sticks and the amplitude of
leather cases filled with medical instruments, which
today would belong in a museum. Perhaps there is no
236
other book by Freud that succeeds in evoking more
vividly the drone of large streets to be slowly crossed
on foot, where long-bearded men would gallantly take
off their hats in the presence of any female acquaintance, or the noise of horse-drawn carriages and
coaches, and the first motor cars, and the chit-chat of
the coffee shops. And perhaps there is no other book
by Freud that manages more successfully than the PEL
to help us understand the place that trains occupied in
Central European culture: the trains on which people,
on interminable journeys, avid for interminable conversations, would cross the entire Austro-Hungarian
empire and the whole of Europe, as if those trains
were somehow symbolic of that Austrian felix to
which Magris devoted some of his most beautiful
pages in his acclaimed book Ii Mito Asburgico (1996).
This was the Austria of the "guten alten Zeit" (the
good old days), where a common train was always
available in a common station, on which "man sich
setzen konnte' , (one could sit oneself down) and forget
time "in die Heimat zuruckfahren" (and go back to
one's home town), to use Musil's ironical words in
Der Mann ohne Eigenschaften (The Man Without
Qualities) (1956, p. 33). With those words Musil describes "{las Keisertum Oesterreichs" (the Austrian
Empire) in the famous chapter of his book entitled
"Kakanien": a world which Zweig had also defined
as "die Welt von Gestern" (the world of yesterday),
"die Welt von Sicherheit" (the world of certainty),
"die geordnete Welt mit klaren Sichtungen und gelassenes Ubergangen" (the ordered world with clear visions and calm transitions) (Zweig, 1968, pp. 20-42),
although his description of the world erased by the
First World War was more naive and rhetorical than
the manner used by Musil with his ironical nostalgia.
Finally, there is no work by Freud that succeeds
more than the PEL in conveying how illusory that
sense of security and order really was (Le Rider,
1990). This is not only because in that country of "Kakanien," to return to Musil's term, due to either absent-mindedness or stupidity "wurde inmer nur ein
Genie fur einen Lummeln gehalten"(a genius would
always be considered a rascal), an idea to which Freud
would perhaps also have subscribed, at least in terms
of the response of a certain cultural establishment to
his work.
The fact remains that the pervasiveness of autobiographical elements in the PEL makes Freud the
book's true protagonist, notwithstanding the fragmentary manner in which he speaks about himself, or
maybe because he speaks about himself in so fragmentary a fashion. In those anecdotes, which, if the anal-
Riccardo Steiner
ogy does not sound too disrespectful, bring to mind
Charlie Chaplin's "sublime" gags, we find signs of
the same Jewish humor present in the almost contemporaneous Jokes and their Relation to the Unconscious
as that sometimes pathetic need to display and make
mockery of one's shortcomings and lapses, an indicator of the complex cultural identity of Freud the Jew
in search of a universal integration with the culture
that surrounded him (Wistrich, 1988; Beller, 1989; R.
Gay, 1992; Gilman, 1993a,b).
Yet all this becomes also the very symbol of the
disintegration of a certain way of understanding consciousness and identity which was, as I have mentioned, concurrently personal, social, and historical,
exactly because it was so graphically encapsulated by
Freud himself, in the description of his own mnemonic
flaws. It is as if we were watching the sudden reemergence, the coming to life again of a series of flashes
from old photographs yellowed with time, or an old
film in slow motion. Just imagine Freud's suspended
and confused gestures at home, in the face of some of
his patients; imagine him in the streets, in the cafe,
on a train journey, intent on trying to remember, on
recapturing inside and outside of himself, syllables,
names, numbers, memories, keys, hats, temporarily
mislaid, just like thousands of his contemporaries engaged in similar efforts. Particularly if one considers
them all to be acting in the social, cultural, and historical context of Vienna, the capital of an empire that in
those last pre-First World War years seemed at times
itself to be encapsulated in an extraordinary and pathetic cultural and sociopolitical lapsus.
Quo Vadis Austria? is the extremely poignant title of a novel published in 1913 by a rather obscure
Austrian writer, G. Sieber (Foster, 1990). Its title
seems to condense marvelously the comments I have
just made. And in 1915 a famous satirical poem by
Kraus, published in Die Fackel, speaks of "Die Letzten Tage der Menscheit" (the last days of humanity)
to refer to that world (Timms, 1989; Timms and Robertson, 1990). Yet, paradoxically, it is also necessary
to remember, when thinking of Freud, that' 'Glucklich
ist were vergisst" ("happy is he who forgets") as had
been so enthusiastically sung a few years earlier in
Strauss's Die Fledermaus (Magris, 1996), as though
to symbolize an attitude based on the cult of social
oblivion so fashionable in Vienna, and in an empire
where, in spite of its impending political and social
collapse, time seemed to have come to a halt; where
a whole world was burying itself, seeking to forget or
to forget itself, daydreaming in the cradle of that music, yet trying to maintain and project its own illusory
Centenary Essay
identity and stability and that of its people's memories
and consciousness, hanging onto the almost hieratic,
motionless smile framed by the shrivelled moustaches
and sideboards of Franz Joseph and his court, which
too looked eternal. By contrast,. one has just to think
of the bicipital eagle, everywhere to be seen spreading
its wings as the symbol of the age-long stability of
imperial power, but also paradoxically embodying that
sense of the fragility, duplicity, and constant uncertainty of our self and of our consciousness, which
Freud was so intent on illuminating even by rummaging in the leftovers, in the psychic garbage of everyday
life, and there finding disturbing-if not conclusive-evidence of the power of the unconscious.
If the PEL, as I have said, elicited immediately
enthusiastic responses amongst Freud's friends and
collaborators, it also provoked many negative reactions; for example, from Havelock Ellis (Clark, 1982,
p. 205) and, with increasing momentum, from Meringer and Mayer (1895) to Cutler and Fay (1978).
Amongst the most rec~nt, fierce, and in a way justifiable critiques, we should remember those of the Italian
classicist Timpanaro (1976), who devoted an entire
book to a demonstration of the preposterousness of
Freud's theses.
Conclusion
The PEL can only be adequately understood in relation to the historical context I have discussed, and as
an example of the crisis of rationalism that traversed
European culture in those years. However, one further
aspect of the book must finally be addressed. From
the very first pages of the book, Freud emphasizes his
conviction that parapraxes follow very precise laws
and that he intends to shed light upon them. It is here
that we catch a glimpse of Freud's other face: that of
the scientist who questions the naive certainties and
the banality of those who believe that "what is mental
is conscious'" (1916-1917, p. 22). Freud attacks this
position, guided by his extraordinary intellectual rigor
and by an occasionally desperate faith, I would say,
in the powers of reason. This may help the reader
understand why Freud devotes a complete chapter, the
final one, to the determinism of psychic life, which is
a veritable tribute to a certain scientific vision. And it
is the theme of parapraxes that leads him to formulate
some of the most significant observations on the scientific method even in the Introductory Lectures
(1916-1917, pp. 26-28). The closing pages of the PEL
revive a debate that had characterized virtually the
237
whole of European culture, and particularly psychology, at least from the beginning of the 19th century
and, where Freud was concerned, could be traced back
even further, especially to Spinoza (Cassirer, 1939;
Hook, 1959, 1965; Berlin, 1969; Hacking, 1983; Pomian, 1990). This debate had accompanied Freud from
his early university studies-not to mention his youthful reading of Buckle (1857), the great English historian and promoter of a deterministic conception of
history (see Freud to Braun Vogelstein, October 30th,
1927; E. L. Freud, 1960, p. 375)-and at least since
Brentano had exposed him to the work of J. S. Mill,
with which Freud was already partly familiar. Indeed,
Mill's second volume (p. 242) of his System of Logic:
Ratiocinative and Inductive (1875) contained the
chapter "On Liberty and Necessity." Then Freud had
begun his study of the neurosciences with the great
masters of the Viennese school, particularly Brticke
who, with Dubois Reymond, had sworn only a few
years before Freud met him that he would find a research method for psychic forces based on the deterministic and causal methods of physics and
mathematics. When Freud declares in the PEL with
total certainty and confidence that "Nun gibt es aber
nichts Willkiirliches, Undeterminiertes im Psychischen" (However, nothing in the mind is arbitrary or
undetermined) (1901 a, p. 242), one is reminded of the
faith and convictions of his mentors. And again those
statements remind us of the necessity not to isolate
Freud from his cultural context. These same themes,
just to give one example, had indeed been touched
upon by Exner (1894), one of Freud's teachers, who
echoed ideas that at that time were in circulation
throughout Europe, as attested by the final pages of
Ribot's Les Maladies de la Volonte (1883) and above
all by Bernard (1865), who was mindful of Schopenhauer's teachings, a philosopher who was extremely
popular among Freud's teachers and masters. It would
suffice to read Exner's chapter' 'Das Causale Denken
und der Freie Wille" in his Enwurf zur einer Physiologischen Erklarung der Psychischen Erscheinungen
(1894, pp. 362-373). If we remain in the field of
Freud's readings, in our effort to comprehend his desire to make his own personal contribution to this
debate, it is also worth mentioning Wundt's very complex chapter on "Wille und das Causale Denken"
present in his Grundziige der Physiologischen Psychologie (1893, pp. 573-582), an actual microhistory
of the issues of determinism and free will from ancient
Greek philosophy onwards. These, however, are only
some of the names that could be cited, for the problem
had already been addressed by Griesinger (1845, pp.
238
36-37), whom Freud greatly admired, by Kussmaul
(1877, p. 137), and by many others. Therefore, in order to grasp the PEL's prismatic character, we must
bear in mind Freud's aversion to the triteness of certain rationalistic positions, but at the same time his
desire to arrive at a rational and universal explanation
himself. In the editions following those of 1901 and
1904, Freud refers repeatedly to the possibility even
of finding experimental confirmation for his discoveries on the basis of materials and data gleaned by his
colleagues and pupils (PEL, 1901a, p. 254). Nowadays, some would no doubt smile in the face of Freud's
earnest belief in the existence of this order, an unconscious deterministic tie that connects everything and
explains even the minutiae of mental life according to
a frame of reference based on sexuality and destructiveness, especially in the light of certain developments in modern science and in psychoanalysis itself,
particularly that of a hermeneutic orientation. It has
to be said, however, that for various reasons, some of
a strictly defensive and autobiographical nature, Freud
never claimed to have totally succeeded in explaining
a parapraxis.
This said, one can also state that the PEL is far
from totally outmoded. After all, its amazing approach
to the everyday and its continuous references to people
and events, beside unconscious motivations and fantasies, makes it readable today in terms of object-relations theory. There is more. Let us focus one last time
on the fact, which I have already emphasized, that in
order to explain his first lapsus, Freud made reference
not only to sexuality but also to death and hence to
aggressive and even destructive impulses. In the case
of this first lapsus, it had been a matter of self-destruction, suicide on the part of a patient who had killed
himself as a result of an incurable sexual disorder. We
all know how central the issues of destruction and selfdestruction became in Freud's later wor k, to the point
that he postulated the existence of a "death drive."
Let us think specifically about those stories and examples that report dangerous lapses, which may damage
ourselves and others and even, in some cases, lead us
to commit murder or suicide for unconscious reasons.
The social and economic consequences of these
hypotheses are huge and anything but dated! And I
am not thinking exclusively about their implications
for insurance companies or for those in the field of
criminal law attempting to pass judgment on the single
individual. Let us try to reassess all this in the light
of our experience and our historical and social context:
a context that has witnessed, in the space of about a
century, the horrors of two world wars and the foster-
Riccardo Steiner
ing of destructive powers potentially capable of engineering the whole planet's annihilation. These events
have run in tandem with the most extraordinary and
disturbing technological revolution ever experienced
in the millennia of human history, whereby the possibility of both micro- and macroparapraxes with terrifying
destructive potentialities has increased exponentially.
Simply consider the errors which can occur in the ultimate control rooms and which no system is really in a
position to avoid.
At times, reflecting on the catastrophic consequences of such blunders, it is tempting to consider the
necessity of writing another-desperate and science
fictional-psychopathology of everyday life, one
linked to the machines and electronic memories by
which we are increasingly controlled and which seem
to embody the dream of expunging or eliminating the
unconscious, a dream of total domination and total
recall that is invariably shattered. At first sight,
Freud's anecdotes about lapses may seem to belong
to prehistory, in comparison with what could happen
today in an automated universe. Yet the PEL, like
many of Freud's writings, confronts us with something
ineluctable. Even the mistakes and slips made by machines ultimately hark back to responsibilities and intentions that are not mechanical but human, that
pertain to those who have constructed such machines
and blindly placed faith in them.
Following Warburg, a great scholar and in his
way admirer of Freud's PEL, even in Freud's case it
could be stated that' 'God is in the particular" (Ginzburg, 1986, p. 158). However, as we have seen, this
is not a metaphysical god. To help us to understand it
and make sense of the message which, even through
the PEL, Freud has placed in the bottle and consigned
to the ocean of both his own times and the future, he
recalls Socrates' dictum, Gnothi s' Guton (know yourself) (PEL, 1901a, p. 211), the response of the Delphic
Oracle to Oedipus' question, which had crossed and
recrossed European culture in its entirety from the 5th
century B.C. And whatever our doubts concerning
Freud's deterministic faith, there is no doubt that in
reappropriating that message, Freud has been one of
its most authoritative interpreters in a century and a
millennium that have now drawn to a close. Not to try
to rescue his message would be a lapse of catastrophic
proportions for all who face the unpredictable ocean
of the unconscious of everyday life in this new millennium.
Centenary Essay
References
Anzieu, D. (1975), L 'Autoanalyse de Freud et la decouverte
de la Psychoanalyse. Paris: Presses Universitaires de
France.
Bain, A. (1855), The Senses and the Intellect. London:
Longmans, 1894.
Barea, I. (1992), Vienna, Legend and Reality. London:
Pimlico.
Beller, S. (1989), Vienna and the Jews (1867-1938) A Cultural History. Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University
Press.
Bergson, H. (1896), Matiere et Memoire. Paris: Alcan.
Berlin, I. (1969), Four Essays on Liberty. Oxford: Oxford
University Press.
Bernard, C. (1865), Introduction a I' Etude de la Medicine
Experimentale. Paris: Balliere et Fils.
Binet, A. (1889), La double conscience. In: Le cerveau et la
pensee: textes meconnus d 'Alfred Binet, Cahiers BinetSimon, Vol. 650. Paris: Eres.
- - - (1892), Les Alterations de la Personnalite. Paris:
Alcan.
- - - (1899), The Psychology ofReasoning, 2nd Ed. London: Kegan Paul.
Boehlich, W., Ed. (1990), The Letters of Sigmund Freud to
Eduard Silberstein 1871-1881. Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press/Harvard University Press.
Boring, E. G. (1950), A History of Experimental Psychology. New York: Appleton-Century-Crofts.
Breuer, J., & Freud, S. (1893-1895), Studies on Hysteria.
Standard Edition, 2. London: Hogarth Press. 1955.
Buckle, H. T. (1857), History of Civilization in England.
London: J. W. Parker.
Butler, S. (1880), Unconscious Memory. London: Bogue.
Canguilhelm, G. (1955), La Formation du Concept de Refiexe aux XVII et XVIII Siecles. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France.
Cassirer, E. (1939), Determinism and Indeterminism in
Modern Physics. New Haven, CT: Yale University
Press, 1956.
Charcot, J. M. (1886-1887), Lec;ons sur les maladies du
systeme nerveux faites ala Salpetriere. Bourneville Progres Medical (Paris). Vol. 3.
Clark, F. W. (1982), Freud, the Man and the Cause. London: Granada.
Clarke, E., & Jacyna, L. S. (1987), Nineteenth Century Origins of Neuroscientific Concepts. Berkeley: University
of California Press.
Cutler, A., & Fay, D. (1978), Introduction to R. Meringer
and C. Mayer's Versprechen und Verlesen. Amsterdam: Benjamin.
Danziger, K. (1990), Constructing the Subject: Historical
Origins of Psychological Research. Cambridge, U.K.:
Cambridge University Press.
Decker, H. S. (1977), Freud in Germany. Psychological
Issues. Mongr. 41. New York: International Universities Press.
239
Dessoir, M. (1899), Das Doppel-Ich. Leipzig: Giinthers
Verdag.
Ebbinghaus, H. (1885), Uberdas Gediichtnis. Leipzig: Duncker Humbolt.
Ellenberger, H. F. (1970), The Discovery of the Unconscious. New York: Basic Books.
Exner, S. (1894), Entwurfzur einer Physiologischen Erkliirung der Psychischen Erscheinungen Deuticke. Leipzig:
- - - (1889), Uber Allgemeine Denkfehler. Deutsche
Rundschau (Berlin). Vol. 58:98-115.
Forel, A. (1885), Das Gediichtniss und Seine Abnormitiiten.
Zurich: Fiissli.
Foster, I. (1990), Quo Vadis Austria? G. Sieber's Conundrum. In: Vienna 1900 from Altenberg to Wittgenstein,
ed. E. Timms & R. Robertson. Austrian Studies Series.
Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.
Freud, E. L., Ed. (1960), Freud Briefe 1873-1939. Frankfurt-am-Main: Fischer Verlag.
Freud, S. (1886), Preface to the translation of Charcot's
Lectures on the Diseases of the Nervous System. Standard Edition, 1: 17-22. London: Hogarth Press, 1966.
- - - (1891a), Zur Auffassung der Aphasien, ed. P. Vogel & I. Meyer Palmedo. Frankfurt-am-Main: Fischer
Verlag, 1992.
- - - (1891b), On Aphasia. New York: International
Universities Press, 1953.
- - - (1892-1894), Preface and footnotes to the translation of Charcot's Tuesday Lectures Salpetriere. Standard
Edition, 1:129-143. London: Hogarth Press, 1966.
- - - (1895), Project for a Scientific Psychology. Standard Edition, 1:281-391. London: Hogarth Press, 1966.
- - - (1898), The psychical mechanism of forgetfulness.
Standard Edition, 3:287-297. London: Hogarth Press,
1962.
- - - (1899), Screen memories. Standard Edition,
3:299-322. London: Hogarth Press, 1962.
- - - (1990), The Interpretation of Dreams. Standard
Edition, 4 & 5. London: Hogarth Press, 1953.
- - - (1901a), The Psychopathology of Everyday Life.
Standard Edition, 6. London: Hogarth Press, 1960.
- - - (1901 b,) Zur Psychopathologies des Alltagsleben,
Gesammelt Werke, 4. Frankfurt-am-Main: Fischer Verlag, 1960.
- - - (1905a), Fragment of an analysis of a case of hysteria. Standard Edition, 7: 1-122. London: Hogarth Press,
1953.
- - - (1905b), Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious. Standard Edition, 8. London: Hogarth Press,
1958.
- - - (1910), Leonardo da Vinci and a Memory of His
Childhood. Standard Edition, 11 :58-137. London: Hogarth Press, 1957.
- - - (1913), The claims of psycho-analysis to scientific
interest. Standard Edition, 13:163-190. London: Hogarth Press, 1955.
- - - (1915a), The Unconscious. Standard Edition,
240
- - - (1915b), Das Unbewusste. Gesammelt Werke, 10.
Frankfurt-am-Main: Fischer Verlag, 1960.
- - - (1916-1917), Introductory Lectures on PsychoAnalysis. Standard Edition, 15. London: Hogarth
Press, 1961.
- - - (1923), Two encyclopaedia articles. (A) PsychoAnalysis. Standard Edition, 18:235-254. London: Hogarth Press, 1955.
- - - (1924), A short account of psycho-analysis. Standard Edition, 19: 189-209. London: Hogarth Press,
1961.
- - - (1935), The subtleties of a faulty action. Standard
Edition, 22:231-235. London: Hogarth Press, 1964.
- - - (1936), A disturbance of memory on the Acropolis.
Standard Edition, 22:237-249. London: Hogarth Press,
1964.
- - - (1937), Constructions in analysis. Standard Edition,
- - - (1939), Moses and Monotheism. Standard Edition,
23: 1-139. London: Hogarth Press, 1964.
- - - (1940), Some elementary lessons in psycho-analysis. Standard Edition, 23:279-286. London: Hogarth
Press, 1964.
Funari, E. (1981), Il Giovane Freud. Torino: Loescher.
Gauchet, M. (1992), L'Inconscient Cerebral. Paris: Editions
du Seuil.
Gay, P. (1988), Freud: A Life for Our Time. New York:
Norton.
Gay, R. (1992), The Jews of Germany: A Historical Portrait. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.
Gilman, S. L. (1993a), Freud, Race and Gender. Princeton,
NJ: Princeton University Press.
- - - (1993b), The Case ofSigmund Freud, Medicine and
Identity at the Fin de Siecle. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins
Uni versity Press.
Ginzburg, C. (1986), Miti, Emblemi, Spie. Torino: Einaudi.
Greenberg, V. D. (1997), Freud and his Aphasia Book. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.
Griesinger, W. (1845), Pathologie und Therapie der Psychischen Krankheiten. Stuttgart: Krabble.
Grinstein, A. (1980), Sigmund Freud's Dreams. New York:
International Universities Press.
Groddek, G. (1923), Das Buch Vom Es. Leipzig: Internationale Psychoanalytische Verlag.
Grubrich-Simitis, I. (1993), Zuriick zu Freuds Texten.
Frankfurt-am-Main: Fischer Verlag.
Hacking, I. (1983), Nineteenth century cracks in the concept
of determinism. J. Hist. Ideas, 23:35-47.
- - - (1995), Rewriting the Soul. Princeton, NJ:
Princeton University Press.
Hamilton, W. (1877), Lectures on Metaphysics and Logic,
Vols. 1&2, ed. H. L. Mansel & J. Veitch. London:
Blackwood.
Harrington, A. (1987), Medicine, Mind and the Double
Brain. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
Henri, V., & Henri, C. (1897), Enquete sur les Premiers
Souvenirs
de
l'Enfance.
Anne Psychologique,
3: 184-198.
Riccardo Steiner
Hering, H. E. (1870), Uber das Gediichtniss als Eine Allgemeine Function der Organisirten Materie. Vienna,
K. Hof.
Hook, S., Ed. (1959), Psychoanalysis, Scientific Method and
Philosophy. New York: New York University Press.
- - - (1965), Determinism and Freedom in the Age o.f
Modern Science. New York: New York University
Press.
Hughlings Jackson, J. (1887), Selected Writings of John
Hughlings Jackson, 2 vols., ed. J. Taylor. London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1931.
James, W. (1890), The Principles of Psychology. New
Yor k: H. Holt.
Janet, P. (1894), Etat Mental des Hysteriques. Paris:
Rueff Editeur.
- - - (1912), Preface. In: Theodule Ribot: Choix de
Textes et Etudes de l'Oeuvre, ed. G. Lamarque. Paris:
Michaud.
Janik, A., & Toulmin, S. (1973), Wittgenstein's Vienna.
New York: Simon & Schuster.
Johnston, W. M. (1981), Vienna, the Golden Age
1815-1914. New York: Claneson Potter.
Jones, E. (1956), Sigmund Freud: Life and Work, Vol. 1.
London: Hogarth Press.
- - - (1957), Sigmund Freud: Life and Work, Vol. 3. London: Hogarth Press.
Joyce, J. (1922), Ulysses. Paris: Shakespeare & Co.
Kussmaul, A. (1877), Die Storungen der Sprache. London:
Vogel Verlag.
Lampl, H. E. (1988), Flair du livre: Friedrich Nietzsche und
Theodule Ribot, eine Trouvaille. In: Hundert Jahre Zur
"Genealogie der Moral" 1887-1987. Zurich: Verlag am
Abgrund, M. Nyffeler.
Lewes, G. H. (1879), Problems of Life and Mind, second
series. London: Trtibner.
Le Rider, J. (1990), Modernite Viennoise et Crises de
l'Identite. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France.
Liddell, E. G. T. (1960), The Discovery of Reflexes. Oxford:
Clarendon Press.
Magris, C. (1996), Il Mito Asburgico Nella Letteratura Austriaca Mode rna, 3rd ed. Turin: Einaudi.
Mahony, P. (1987), Freud as a Writer. New Haven, CT:
Yale University Press.
Masson, J. M., Ed. (1985), The Complete Letters ofSigmund
Freud to Wilhelm Fliess 1877-1904. Cambridge, MA:
Belknap Press/Harvard University Press.
Maudsley, H. (1867), The Physiology and Pathology of the
Mind. London: Macmillan.
McGuire, W., Ed. (1974), The Freud-Jung Letters: The
Correspondence between S. Freud and C. G. Jung.
Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
Meringer, R. (1900), Wie man sich versprechen kann. Neue
Freie Presse. August 23rd, no. 12931.
- - - Mayer, C. (1895). Versprechen und Verlesen, ed.
A. Cutler & D. Fay. Amsterdam: Benjamin, 1978.
Mill, J. S. (1875), A System of Logic: Ratiocinative and
Inductive, Vol. 2. London: Longman.
Centenary Essay
Molnar, M. (1995), Reading the look. In: Reading Freud's
Reading, ed. S. Gilman. New York: New York University Press.
Musil, R. (1956), Kakanien. In: Der Mann Ohne
Eigenschaften, ed. A. Frisc. Hamburg: Rowohlt Verlag.
Myers, F. W. H. (1887), Automatic writing. In: Proceedings
of the Society for Psychical Research, Vol. 4. London:
Trtibner, pp. 12-34.
Nitzschke, B., Ed. (1989), Freud und die Akademische Psychologie: Beitriige zu einer Historischen Kontroverse.
Munich: Psychologie Verlags Union.
Pick, R. (1976), The Last Days of Imperial Vienna. New
York: Dial Press.
Pomian, K., Ed. (1990), La Querelle du Determinisme.
Paris: Gallimard.
Proust, M. (1913), Ii la Recherche du Temps Perdu. Paris:
Gasset.
Ribot, Th. (1870), La Psychologie Anglaise Contemporaine.
Ecole Experimentale. Paris: Ladrange.
- - - (1881), Les Maladies de la Memoire. Paris: Balliere.
- - - (1883), Les Maladies de la Volonte. Paris: Balliere.
- - - (1889), Psychologie de I 'Attention. Paris: Bibliotheque de Philosophie Contemporaine.
- - - (1895), Les Maladies de la Personnalite. Paris:
Alcan.
Ritvo, L. B. (1990), Darwin's Influence on Freud: A Tale
of Two Sciences. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.
Schiller, F. (1795), Die Weltweisen. In: Gedichte, ed. G.
Wendt. Berlin: Grotesche Verlags Buchhandlung, 1880,
pp. 261-262.
Schorske, C. (1979), Fin de Siecle Vienna: Politics and
Culture. New York: Knopf.
- - - (1998), To the Egyptian Dig: Freud's Psycho-Archaeology of Cultures. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
Solms, M., & Saling, M., Eds. (1990), A Moment of Transition: T)1;'o Neuroscientific Articles, by Sigmund Freud.
London: Institute of Psycho-Analysis/Karnac Books.
Spencer, H. (1855), The Principles of Psychology, 2nd ed.
London: Williams & Norgate, 1881.
241
Steiner, R. (1982), Es ludens ... ? In: La Communicazione
Spiritosa, ed. F. Fornari. Florence: Sansoni.
St.g. (1904), Das Kobold in Hirnkasten. Neue Freie Presse.
Vienna, April 10, no. 14233.
Taine, H. (1870), De l'Intelligence, Vols. 1&2. Paris: Hachett.
Timms, E. (1989), Karl Kraus: Apocalyptic Satirist, Culture
and Catastrophe in Hapsburg Vienna. New Haven, CT:
Yale University Press.
- - - Robertson, R., Eds. (1990), Vienna 1900: From Altenburg to Wittgenstein. Austrian Studies Series, Vol. 1.
Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.
Timpanaro, S. (1976), The Freudian Slip: Psychoanalysis
and Textual Criticism. London: NLB.
Von Hartmann, E. (1870), Philosophie des Unbewussten.
Berlin: Altenburg.
Wistrich, R. (1988), The Jews of Vienna in the Age of Franz
Joseph. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Woodward, W. R., & Ash, M. G., Eds. (1982), The Problematic Science: Psychology in Nineteenth Century
Thought. New York: Praeger.
Woolf, V. (1927), To the Lighthouse. London: Hogarth
Press.
Wundt, W. (1893), Grundzuge der Physiologischen Psychologie, Vols. 1&2. Leipzig: Engelman.
- - - (1896), Grundriss der Psychologie. Leipzig: Engelman.
- - - (1900a), Volkerpsychologie. Leipzig: Engelman.
- - - (1900b), "Die Sprache," Vol. 1. Leipzig: Engelman.
Young, R. M. (1970), Mind, Brain and Adaptation in the
19th Century. Oxford: Clarendon Press.
Zqwif, A. (1968), Die Welt von Gestern. Die Welt der Sicherheit: Wien vor 1914. In: Eine Auslese, ed. H. Freund.
Heidelberg: Uberreuter-Wien, pp. 6-15.
Professor Riccardo Steiner
12A Belsize Lane
London NW35AB
England
e-mail: ricst1945@aol.com

6 An Essay Marking Its Centenary: Some Observations On The Sources of Freud's The Psychopathology of Everyday Life

Uploaded by

Document Information

Original Title

Copyright

Available Formats

Share this document

Share or Embed Document

Sharing Options

Did you find this document useful?

Is this content inappropriate?

Copyright:

Available Formats

6 An Essay Marking Its Centenary: Some Observations On The Sources of Freud's The Psychopathology of Everyday Life

Uploaded by

Copyright:

Available Formats

This article was downloaded by: [Adelphi University]

On: 19 August 2014, At: 23:39

Neuropsychoanalysis: An Interdisciplinary Journal

An Essay Marking Its Centenary: Some Observations

Professor Riccardo Steiner

12A Belsize Lane, London NW35AB, England, e-mail:

PLEASE SCROLL DOWN FOR ARTICLE

An Essay Marking Its Centenary: Some

Downloaded by [Adelphi University] at 23:39 19 August 2014

Riccardo Steiner (London)

I was one day relating a visit to the Epileptic Hospital, and

This anecdote, drawn from the English scholar

Downloaded by [Adelphi University] at 23:39 19 August 2014

Downloaded by [Adelphi University] at 23:39 19 August 2014

Downloaded by [Adelphi University] at 23:39 19 August 2014

solidated these and hypotheses in their embryonic

Downloaded by [Adelphi University] at 23:39 19 August 2014

analysis and self-observation. He draws attention to

Downloaded by [Adelphi University] at 23:39 19 August 2014

lems which, however tangentially, in the case of

Downloaded by [Adelphi University] at 23:39 19 August 2014

"Es denkt in mir ... es fiihlt in mir." Further

Downloaded by [Adelphi University] at 23:39 19 August 2014

terms them repeatedly in the Introductory Lectures

Downloaded by [Adelphi University] at 23:39 19 August 2014

or metaphysical psychology, because he had actually

Downloaded by [Adelphi University] at 23:39 19 August 2014

finities between Ribot and Nietzsche (who knew Ribot

Downloaded by [Adelphi University] at 23:39 19 August 2014

Downloaded by [Adelphi University] at 23:39 19 August 2014

of case studies collected by Freud and, to some extent,

Downloaded by [Adelphi University] at 23:39 19 August 2014

"Quo Vadis, Austria?" Some Notes on the

Downloaded by [Adelphi University] at 23:39 19 August 2014

presented in the last chapter of the PEL, what should

Downloaded by [Adelphi University] at 23:39 19 August 2014

Downloaded by [Adelphi University] at 23:39 19 August 2014

Downloaded by [Adelphi University] at 23:39 19 August 2014

Downloaded by [Adelphi University] at 23:39 19 August 2014

Downloaded by [Adelphi University] at 23:39 19 August 2014

Downloaded by [Adelphi University] at 23:39 19 August 2014

Downloaded by [Adelphi University] at 23:39 19 August 2014

You might also like