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An Essay Marking Its Centenary: Some Observationson the Sources of Freuds The Psychopathology ofEveryday LifeProfessor Riccardo Steineraa 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 Sourcesof Freuds The Psychopathology of Everyday Life, Neuropsychoanalysis: An Interdisciplinary Journal for Psychoanalysis andthe Neurosciences, 3:2, 221-241, DOI: 10.1080/15294145.2001.10773357

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An Essay Marking Its Centenary: SomeObservations on the Sources of Freud's ThePsychopathology of Everyday Life

Riccardo Steiner (London)

I was one day relating a visit to the Epileptic Hospital, andintending 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" waspronounced. I I was under no confusion whatever as to the per-son, but having if!lperfectly adjusted the group of muscles nec-essary for the articulation of the one name, the one elementwhich 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 scholarLewes's Problems of Life and Mind (1879), is citedby none other than Ribot, the eminent psychologistand theoriest of French psychophysiology, in Les Mal-adies de la Memoire (1881, p. 19). This book, along-side 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 hom-age to Ribot's book was paid by Forel (1885), Binet(1889), James (1890), and Wundt (1893, 1896), justto mention a few authors belonging to the scientificcontext in which some of Freud's interests originated.

I was originally asked to write this essay as an Introduction to Freud'sThe Psychopathology of Everyday L(fe by Ilse Grubrich-Simitis, GeneralEditor of Fischer Verlag, who republished the book (in the original Ger-man, together with my Introduction) in December 2000. Another versionof it was published (in English) in the Bulletin of the British Psycho-Analytical Society, 36(5): 19-41 (July 2000).

Acknowledgments. I take this opportunity to thank Professors G. La-naro and E. Ronchetti of Milan University, M. Solms of London Univer-sity, and 1. Scholz-Schlosser of the Freud Museum in Vienna, for theirinvaluable assistance.

Riccardo Steiner is a member of the British Psycho-Analytical Soci-ety, and Professor of Psychoanalysis and the History of Ideas, Universityof Westminister, London.

I The associationist aphasiological theories of the British neurologistHenry Charlton Bastian (1837-1915) were cited more than once, withapproval, by Freud in his (1891 a,b) monograph on aphasia.

Even Charcot, in his Le~ons sur les Maladies du Sys-teme Nerveux Faitts a la Salpetriere, returned fre-quently to Ribot and to his theories regarding"memoires partielles" (Ribot, 1881, pp. 108-111)(material-specific memory) developed on the basis ofGall's (1825) and Gratiolet's (1839) research, andGalton's (1883) "mental vision for objects" (visualmental imagery). In particular, Charcot referred to Ri-bot in his discussion of forms of aphasia and parapha-sia and of those mental disorders which Kussmaul(another writer well known to Freud) had termed dieWortblindheit (word blindness), (1877, p. 168).

But what is the point, the reader may wonder, ofbeginning an introduction to The Psychopathology ofEveryday Life (1901a,b; PEL) with a kind of "Who'sWho" of late 19th-century scientific neurology, psy-chology, and psychiatry? One reason is that Freud waswell acquainted with Charcot's writings, as attestedby his references to Charcot in his study on aphasia(1891a, p. 82, 1891b, pp. 142-145) and by the factthat he had already translated into German in 1886the text I have mentioned, "several months before itsFrench edition" (Freud, 1886, p. 19). The allusion toRibot is not, therefore, far-fetched and these matterswill soon become clearer. Above all, references toLewes and Ribot in the early stages of this discussionwill help the reader to understand a dramatic shift ofperspective which took place in the course of only afew years. This becomes evident if we compare asser-tions of Lewes and Ribot with the positions put for-ward by Freud in the PEL, where a radically differentuniverse of hypotheses and observations unfolds be-fore our eyes. Indeed, hardly more than 15 years sepa-rate the text in which Ribot relays Lewes's opinionsfrom Freud's early self-analyses, through which heattempted to grasp the significance of certain failures

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of memory in his everyday life. These analyses canbe found in two letters to Fliess. The first was pennedon August 26th, 1898, and the second, of greater im-portance, on September 22nd of the same year (Mas-son, 1985, pp. 324, 327):2 Here, Freud hints for thefirst time at his tendency to forget the name of theItalian painter, Signorelli. In this same letter, hestresses that his forgetfulness is induced "only" by"genuine repression and not genuine forgetting" (p.327). He also alludes, albeit rather synthetically andelliptically, to that extraordinary chain of mechanismswhich led-or rather compelled-him to be unable toremember Signorelli's name and to recall insteadthose of Boltraffio and Botticelli. Such mechanismsinclude concealments, distortions, displacements, andphonemic condensations based on phonological anal-ogy or identity and on "the possibility of establishingan external association between the name in questionand the element previously suppressed," as Freudwould later state in the PEL (Freud, 1901a, p. 6). Inthe same letter of September 22nd, 1898, Freud alsoanticipates later developments in his thought by specu-lating about the hidden roots of his repression andsubstitution of Signorelli's name, and suggesting thathis inner conflicts and his forgetfulness are tied tocertain unconscious phantasies related to the themesof sexuality and death. These ideas, further elaboratedand transformed in complex ways, would later consti-tute the nucleus of the famous story about the forget-ting of proper names which opens the first chapter ofthe PEL (1901a, pp. 1-7). Like many other chaptersof the PEL, this section contains, not by chance, legionautobiographical elements derived from Freud's ownpersonal life.

Now, if we go back to the quotation with whichI introduced this essay, one could claim that the pres-ence of the letter B, in both the autobiographical inci-dent cited by Ribot and the anecdote related by Freud,would seem to suggest a felicitous coincidence. At thesame time, however, the disparate vicissitudes in-curred by that letter become, in Freud's case, a verita-ble catalyst for the encounter with unconsciousmeanings. They also give us a sense of that universeof profoundly different (at least at first sight) hypothe-ses and observations to which I have already referredand which separate Lewes and Ribot from Freud. Intheir attempts to explain a particular kind of para-praxis, both the English scholar and the French onefocus on poorly coordinated muscular movements,

2 Quotations from the Freud-Fliess letters are taken from the Masson(1985) edition.

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through which vowels and consonants come to life,disappear, and reappear in a sort of magical trick.There is something rather mechanical about this pro-cess, as letters slip in and out and "beneath the thresh-old of consciousness" (PEL, 1901a, p. 57), to use theexpression drawn by Freud from a study by Meringerand Mayer (1895) based on principles of associationclosely linked to the supposed neurophysiology ofmental processes, as understood by Lewes and Ribot(see also Binet 1899, p. 124).3

A more detailed examination of Ribot's textcould help us gain a clearer understanding of some ofthe issues under discussion. Beside the anecdote I havealready referred to (Ribot, 1881, pp. 20-21), theFrench theorist mentions his own slips of the pen andadduces the following reasons for word substitution:The initial letters of certain words which are in theprocess of being written, and which are already pres-ent in the writer's mind and the focus of his attention,affect and attract subsequent words to be written. Dueto the speed of the writing process, words are oftendistorted, especially if they happen to begin with thesame letters as the words that have already been writ-ten. 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 hesays or describes we could watch something whichcould remind us of the reemergence of the sort ofmysterious animated alphabet which characterizes thetradition of the Kabbalah, energized, metaphoricallyspeaking, and uncannily dislocated by an unconsciousactivity, which, in maintaining partial contact withconsciousness, seems almost to play hide-and-seekwith phonemes, the "wandering speech images"(PEL 1901a, p. 58) to use the beautiful expressionderived by Freud from Meringer and Mayer (1895).This unconscious activity disjoins and alters vowelsand consonants and causes them to interact with otherfragments of words. As Freud demonstrates in thecourse of his study, this same unconscious activity andthe conflicts tied up with it constitute the foundationof a whole series of faulty actions; not only the forget-ting of names, slips of the pen, and misreadings, butblunders of all kinds which may affect how we act,

.1 In the interests of accuracy, reference should also be made toWundfs writings, the (1893) Grundzuge der physiologische Psycho!ogiewith which Meringer and Mayer (1895) were acquainted. In Freud's case,certain expressions should be traced back not only to Wundt but also to hisyouthful studies and to a tradition which, in German-speaking countries, isconnected to the names of Herbert and Fechner-as pointed out by Joneswith Bernfeld and Dorer's support (Jones, 1956, pp. 405-416); see alsoDecker (1977), E. Funari (] 981), Nitzschke (] 989), and Ritvo (1990).

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what we wear, and all the most disparate manifesta-tions of our everyday life.

From a descriptive point of view, even Freudwould find corroboration for these ideas in the old, yetvalid, laws of association psychology, for which hissources (Wundt, Meringer, Mayer) and his own youth-ful training were indebted to English empiricism ofthe 18th and especially 19th centuries. However, inorder to explain both verbal and nonverbal lapses,Freud adds to the relationships of resemblance andcontiguity of traditional associationism, the principlesof condensation, displacement, overdetermination,and symbolism, foregrounded with respect to the dy-namics of the dream work in The Interpretation ofDreams (1900). Even the laws of old association psy-chology, then, become animated, pervaded, distorted,and revitalized by the unconscious activity of the' 'un-conscious wish," of the "unconscious phantasy,"which Freud's letter to Fliess of September 22nd,1898, already linked to sexuality and death. Throughconflicts, defenses, and repressions, which block theresurfacing of desires and fantasies (though not as se-rious and enduring as those which distinguish disor-ders such as hysteria and obsessive neurosis), evenparapraxes bear witness, therefore, to the existenceof unconscious mental activity, a subject of intensefascination for psychologists, neurologists, physiolo-gists, philosophers, and scholars from the second halfof the 19th century, both within and outside Europe(Ellenberger, 1970; Gauchet, 1992).

Yet, in drawing attention to ways in which theunconscious, so far as he understood it, manifests itselfeven in minor mistakes made by normal people (hencethe title The Psychopathology ofEveryday Life) Freudaddresses the fundamental questions of who we are,what and why we remember, how and why we forgetwhat speaks or acts inside us. In order to grasp fullythe import of Freud's letters to Fliess and the imagina-tive conjectures through which he seeks to create abridge between aspects of normal life, art, jokes, andmythology, and the psychopathology of hysteria, ob-sessive neurosis, and even paranoia (through both hispatients' symptoms and dream interpretation), itwould be necessary to reconstruct in detail the trulyepic moments in the history of psychoanalysis that aretied to the years of Freud's first discoveries. Oneshould therefore study in detail the years which fol-lowed Freud's return to Vienna from Paris in 1885,deeply influenced by the clinical research of theFrench neurologists and particularly by Charcot. Thelatter had already creatively questioned the most in-flexible and mechanical aspects of psychophysiologi-

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cal reductionism in the field of mental illnesses, bypsychologizing the latter while never losing sight ofthe relationship between the mind and the body.Aware of these ideas, and working on a handful ofso-called hysterical patients and on his own psychethrough self-analysis, Freud was beginning to discover(and to report to Fliess) the importance of an uncon-scious life related not so much to his clinicoanatomicalcorrelations as to repressed infantile fantasies of a sex-ual nature, where fantasies were distinguished fromactual traumas suffered in infancy by either himselfor his patients. It is also helpful to remember the vitalrole played amongst those various fantasies by spe-cifically oedipal fantasies gleaned from the study ofdreams, which Freud had considered an integral partof normal psychology and not simply a pathologicalphenomenon. Forgotten or repressed due either to theirextreme intensity or their penchant for generating anx-ieties, fears, or terrible anger, such fantasies were seenby Freud as emerging through symptoms, compromiseformations, and conflicts, not only in clinical casesbut also in those fleeting short-circuits of our memory,attention, or will, of which faulty actions consist. Al-though reconstructing in detail the complex history ofthe beginnings of psychoanalysis in the present contextwould be inappropriate, a few essential points of refer-ence must be mentioned because it would be equallypreposterous to ignore that history altogether, givenits relevance to both internal aspects of Freud'sthought and the external context in which the PELoriginated.

The examination of this context is rendered nec-essary by the particular ways in which Freud presentssome of his book's themes and endeavors to establisha dialogue with his sources and, indirectly, with whatsuch sources, in turn, refer to and presuppose. There-fore, the allusion to Lewes and Ribot in the openingsection of this essay is not, as I will try to demonstrate,merely an erudite curiosity intended to show the dis-tance that separates Freud from those who had dealtwith analogous issues before him. But, first of all, itis important that we situate the PEL chronologicallywithin the developmental trajectory of Freud'sthought, even though this is inevitably an arbitrary,reductive, and framing operation. Indeed, we shouldconceive of the PEL itself as a multilayered palimpsetof themes, intuitions, revivals of older theses, memo-ries, authors, and works previously researched byFreud, moving incessantly between texts and betweenvarious letters to Fliess written in the same years.Those years could be recalled as something of an ex-traordinary galaxy of creativity, in which already con-

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solidated these and hypotheses in their embryonicstages circulated and merged, thus giving rise to freshspeculations and vistas. Some of these were onlyhinted at in the text of the PEL, others were forgotten,still others were later returned to in myriad guises. IfFreud's corpus in its entirety should not be read in apurely diachronic fashion, this is particularly the casewith the PEL. Here the reader is confronted with manystaggering examples of the cornucopian richness ofFreud's intellect, and of his stature as a veritable con-quistador of the inner world-as he was fond of dub-bing himself in the early years of his psychoanalyticcareer-who sometimes seemed uninterested in fullypursuing the clues proffered by his genius or in in-stantly reaping the products of what he had been sow-ing. An emblematic example is provided by thecomplex pages dedicated to paranoia, superstition, andtelepathy 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 relationto Studies on Hysteria (Breuer and Freud, 1893-1895)including the famous' 'Project for a Scientific Psychol-ogy" (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 (Letterto Fliess of January 10th, 1901; p. 432). It is alsonoteworthy that Freud would later emphasize the di-vulging thrust of his studies of parapraxes undertakenin the PEL (1901a, p. 272), which presupposed thetheoretical aspects of the nature of the unconsciousdiscussed in his already published major works.4

The PEL was published in 1901 by Karger inBerlin after a long and difficult labor, as attested byseveral letters to Fliess written in the course of thebook's composition. Freud discontinued writing thePEL halfway through (Letter to Fliess of January 30th,1901; p. 434), partly because he was totally absorbedin Dora's case and partly because he was dissatisfiedwith the' 'Dumfheit" (idiocy) of his own style (Letterto Fliess of February 15th, 1901; p. 436), to the pointthat, in the process of correcting the first draft of themanuscript, Freud declared to Fliess, "I dislike it tre-

4 Freud's observations on this aspect of the PEL can only be foundin 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 muchmore serious disorders, are experienced by anyone and for this reasonthey support psychoanalysis in demonstrating the existence of unconsciousprocesses even in normal people.

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mendously and hope others will do so even more. Theessay is entirely without structure and contains allsorts of+ + +forbidden things" (Letter to Fliess ofMay 18th, 1901; p. 441).5 Freud was here referring tothe manuscript of the first version of the PEL, pub-lished in two successive installments in Die Monat-schrifts fur Psychiatrie und Neurologie in July andAugust 1901, with slight yet interesting differencesfrom the final form which the book would later take.In order to demonstrate how unsmooth and how deeplyinterwoven with autobiographical factors the creationof the PEL really was, it should also be rememberedthat the famous anecdote regarding the forgetting ofSignorelli's name first appeared in an intriguing essayentitled "Zum psychischen Mechanismus der Verge-sslichkeit" (' 'On the Psychical Mechanism of Forget-fulness"), published in Die Monatschrifts fur Psy-chiatrie und Neurologie in December 1898 (Freud,1899, pp. 436-443). This rendition of the anecdotediffers in interesting ways both from the version pre-sented in 1901 and the version which features in thetext of 1904. Molnar provides some acute observationson the modifications undergone by the anecdote in itsseveral versions (1995, pp. 77-80). Moreover, part ofchapter 4 of the PEL, both in the 1901 version and inthe text of 1904, consists of materials already deline-ated in an essay published in Die Monatschrifts furPsychiatrie und Neurologie (Freud, 1899, pp.215-230) in September 1899. The essay bears the title"Uber Deckerinnerung" ("Screen Memories") andcontains many crucial observations on the progressiveand regressive nature of screen memories. This phe-nomenon bears affinities with that of name substitu-tion, as it consists of covering certain original nameswhich we wish to forget in order to avoid the conflictsassociated with them. 6

Incidentally, when in this essay Freud is describ-ing the role played by screen memories, he is alludingnot so much to the conflicts connected with sexualityand death as to the unconscious fantasies associatedwith the drives as the cause of memory and attentiondisorders. At one point, he refers to "hunger and

5 According to Masson, "Freud mocks here, making the sign of thecross three times to protect himself from evil as he did in another letterto Fliess of the 5th of November, 1899" (Masson, 1985, p. 441). However,according to Mark Solms (personal communication) it is more likely thatFreud was simply using the conventional medical shorthand for' 'severe."

6 These observations are connected with one of Freud's fundamentalconvictions of those years: his belief in the "nachtraglich" character ofinfantile memories, which features already in "A Project for a ScientificPsychology" (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 originalexperience through the process of memorization itself.

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love," drawing these terms from Schiller's Die Welt-weisen (1795; Freud, 1934, p. 316). The essay alsocontains autobiographical elements related to Freud'schildhood and to his sexual fantasies about his littleniece Pauline, his stepbrother's daughter. Freud men-tions Pauline and his stepbrother more than once inThe Interpretation of Dreams (Freud, 1900, pp. 25,483, 486) but he does not explicitly reveal his sexualfantasies either in this text or in the PEL. In the latter,they are replaced by an episode coupled with anotherfrom Uber Deckerinnerung (Freud, 1899), which fea-tures Freud as a child, standing in front of a cupboard,demanding something and screaming at the absence ofhis mother, whom he thought to be inside the cupboard(PEL, 1901a, pp. 51-52). This occurrence was firstmentioned by Freud in a letter to Fliess of October15th, 1897 (pp. 271-272). In speaking about his sexualfantasies in the paper Uber Deckerinnerung, and inspeaking about the episode of the cupboard in the PEL,Freud makes an interesting mistake: He is incorrectabout 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" of1899 was published only in 1925, and a fuller explana-tion of the cupboard episode was only given by Freudin a note to the 1924 edition of the PEL, where itwas linked to his mother's pregnancy and to his ownfantasies on the subject (1901a, p. 51).

In spite of Freud's initial reservations about thePEL and the complications surrounding its composi-tion, he would return with growing pride to the themeof parapraxes in order to underline his ability to applypsychoanalytic methodologies to this phenomenon.This is attested, for instance, by the Introductory Lec-tures on Psycho-Analysis (1916-1917), in which threeintroductory lectures are devoted to that theme (seealso Freud, 1913, p. 166, 1916-1917, p. 40, 47). In1923, Freud was to triumphantly declare that "they[parapraxes] were shorn of their psychological expla-nation, if any such had been attempted" (1923, p.240).

Furthermore, convinced of its novelty and origi-nality, Freud grew increasingly fond of his book, keptreturning to it, drawing examples from it, and addingnew illustrations to it. In his London library, there iseven a copy of the 1904 edition with additions inFreud's own hand, for the most part incorporated inlater editions and adopted in the Standard Edition. Abrief but fascinating article written by the aging Freudin 1935, "The Subtleties of a Faulty Action," shouldalso be mentioned (1935, pp. 233-235). In this piece,it is still possible to hear the old Freud, intent on self-

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analysis and self-observation. He draws attention toone of his innumerable parapraxes (which would havemultiplied exponentially over the years) and helps thereader understand its import by recourse to his daugh-ter Anna. This short essay antedates by barely oneyear an undoubtedly more famous essay, "A Distur-bance of Memory on the Acropolis," which alsomakes reference, in away, to a faulty action (1936,pp. 239-248).

"The Subtleties of a Faulty Action" could easilyhave been one of the many examples added to thecopious revised editions of the PEL that were pub-lished when Freud was still alive: According to Stra-chey, 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 Intro-ductory Lectures on Psycho-Analysis, the most popularbook in Freud's entire corpus. A letter written byFreud to Jung on May 26th, 1907, bears witness toFreud's belief in the value of his book: "But just letfive or ten years pass and the analysis of 'aliquis',which today is not regarded as cogent, will have be-come cogent though nothing in it will have changed"(McGuire, 1974, p. 54). Here Freud is referring to thePEL (1901a, p. 9). It is also worth considering Freud'sresponse to certain objections to his theory of para-praxes raised by Roback (who, however, includesFreud amongst the most prominent Jewish thinkers)in a letter of February 20th, 1930: "My impression isthat if your objections to the conception of lapses arejustified, I have very little claim to be named besideBergson and Einstein among the intellectual sover-eigns" (cited in Jones, 1957, p. 480).7

To understand its vast popularity, one has to con-sider that the PEL contains a huge and entertainingrepertoire of case studies assembled by Freud himself,in the first place, and further extended, in the courseof various revised editions, by the contributions ofFreud's students, friends, and admirers including Brill,Ferenczi, Jones, Reich, Rank, Sachs, Tausk, and, fora certain period of time, even Jung, and many others.However, the PEL is not supposed to be of interestmerely to experts in the field of psychoanalysis, foreven a public utterly unfamiliar with psychoanalytictechnicalities may find in it something curiously rele-vant. The book was intended from its inception toreach a very broad audience, and Freud ultimately be-lieved he had succeeded in addressing a series of prob-

7 Freud will revisit the theme of parapraxes in one of his very lastworks, "Some Elementary Lessons on Psycho-Analysis" (1940, pp.284-285).

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lems which, however tangentially, in the case ofparapraxes, had constituted one of the central concernsanimating the intellectual debates of the last decadesof 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 so-called scientific psychology, in its involvement withancient philosophical preoccupations such as thoseconcerning memory, attention, will, and their mal-functioning. Concurrently, the neurophysiology of thattime had generated great enthusiasm and stimulatedthe interests of disparate researchers, thus uniting themin spite of their diverse geographical locations anddifferent cultural and social milieux (Boring, 1950;Woodward and Ash, 1982; Harrington, 1987; Dan-ziger, 1990).

The reader may now begin to see more clearlywhy I have cited some of the protagonists of thosedebates in the opening part of my essay. Yet, in orderto better understand the external cultural context ofthe PEL and the way Freud interacted with it, to thescholars I have mentioned others should be added.Practically all researchers concerned with the mindand with psychology in the ambit of the English schoolof the second half of the 19th century engaged withthese issues by utilizing discoveries based on the the-ory of nervous reflexes in neurophysiology, and byrelating them to association psychology. And in oneway or another the same happened in France and Ger-many and other countries too. If we focus specificallyon the question of memory, its disorders and its exten-sion into the remote regions which many of thesethinkers regarded as the unconscious, it is temptingto think-particularly in light of publication dates ofcertain seminal works-that what manifests itself inthe continual return to problems of memory and re-membrance is one of the most significant syndromesof the last fin de siecle. Consider, for example, theaudacious assertions made by a certain Myers of theSociety for Psychic Research (1887) or Hering's out-standing paper of 1870, an influential text in all Ger-man-speaking cultures and familiar to Breuer andFreud. These researchers were seeking to extend theboundaries of memory into both the organic and theinorganic facets of the unconscious. Consider also, bycontrast, the momentous experiments on memory un-dertaken by Ebbinghaus (1885). The suggestive pageson memory by Taine (1870), von Hartmann (1870),Butler (1880), and Dessoir (1899) also deserve men-tion. On the topic of the comingling of normal andpathological aspects of memory, Ribot (1881) and

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other thinkers I have already cited, and will return to,should be considered.

Freud's PEL, despite his warnings about thebook's modest theoretical assumptions, is actually em-bedded in this context and could be read as an attemptto respond to the syndrome I hinted at earlier: an ob-sessive interest in the problem of memory which doesnot concern exclusively academic psychology. Afterall, Bergson devoted to the theme of memory a wholebook entitled Matiere et Memoire (1896) and shortlyafter, Proust published A la Recherche du TempsPerdu (1913), a work that is inconceivable outside thecultural context I have outlined. No less intimatelyrelated to the theme of memory are Joyce's Ulysses(1922) and certain aspects of Woolf's fiction (1927),and, outside Europe, some influential chapters ofJames's Principles of Psychology (1890), just to citea few famous writers of those years.

What is striking, and the reader should bear thisin mind in order to grasp Freud's occasionally polemi-cal attitude, is the conviction harbored by these au-thors that they were caught in a genuine scientificrevolution, their historical circumstances affectingprofoundly their approaches to issues of memory andforgetfulness. In a sense, it may not even be necessaryto refer to writings produced over the past 50 years tocomprehend these ideas, although it is undeniable thatthe studies of Canguilhelm (1955), Liddell (1960),Young (1970), Clarke and Jacyna (1987), Gauchet(1992), and Hacking (1995) have delivered many in-teresting pages on the subject. By simply consulting afew of Freud's contemporaries or near-contempora-ries, we would readily see how great a significancethey tended to attribute to their historical and scientificsituation. Wundt, in particular, dedicated a verylengthy chapter of the third edition of Grundziige derphysiologischen Psychologie (1893, pp. 259-282) tothe problems of memory and attention, spanning theperiod from the ancient Greeks to his contemporaries.Spencer's introduction to the third edition of The Prin-ciples of Psychology (1855) and statements made inthe third edition of Bain's work The Senses and theIntellect (1855, pp. 3-7) corroborate my thesis. An-other case in point is Taine's De l'Intelligence (1870),a text with which Freud was acquainted (Letter toFliess of February 13th, 1896; p. 172) and which hadbeen deeply influenced by the English school of neuro-physiology and association psychology. Last but notleast, we should remember some competent observa-tions made by Ribot who, not accidentally, had alreadyfelt the need to write a history of experimental Englishpsychology as early as 1870.

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"Es denkt in mir ... es fiihlt in mir." FurtherNotes on the Cultural and ScientificBackground of The Psychopathology ofEveryday LifeFreud may seem to passionately oppose those authorsin particular who relied on a purely neurophysiologi-cal explanation of parapraxes, but, on closer inspec-tion, things prove far more nebulous, complex, andeven ambiguous, for many important allusions andreferences demonstrate that Freud is more profoundlyindebted to his sources than at first appears to be thecase. Hence, it is necessary to take into account theconstant, however indirect, dialogue between the au-thor of the PEL and the context of its creation. Nodoubt, Freud's controversial attitude to those he willterm "the authorities" in the Introductory Lectureson Psycho-Analysis (1916-1917, p. 45) is confirmedby even the very first page of the PEL. It is eventempting to name the hypothetical psychologist ofwhom Freud asks certain questions merely to receiveanswers which, in his opinion, do not solve anything,the central question being why it is that the names onemost frequently forgets are those of people one actu-ally knows. That psychologist would simply answer"that proper names succumb more easily to the pro-cess of being forgotten than other kinds of memorycontents" (Freud, 1901a, p. 1). He would, Freud po-lemically maintains, "bring forward the plausible rea-sons why proper names should thus be singled out forspecial treatment, but would not suspect that any otherconditions played their part in such occurrences"(PEL (1901a, p. 1). These ideas were fairly current atthe time: no less an authority than Kussmaul hadvoiced them (1877, p. 132), and the chapter on "Lesamnesies partielles" in Ribot's Les Maladies de LaMemoire (1881) legislates on the principles of mne-monic malfunctioning, starting with the loss of propernames and referring to a sort of natural law of theloss of memory redolent of Darwin's and Spencer'sevolutionism, which I will have to recall later on. Ac-cording to Ribot, the names'that are most easily forgot-ten and erased are precisely people's names (1881, pp.91-111, p. 164).

Freud's polemical vein is evident in those sec-tions of the PEL in which he raises abstract objectionsagainst the theories of the "mind's function," the"psychological theory of remembering and forget-ting" and the scientific psychology of his day, whichtell us precious little about our' 'mental life" (PEL,1901a, p. 134). This disputatious mood becomes stillmore obvious if we examine the passages in which

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Freud interrogates Wundt's positions, albeit respect-fully and constructively (PEL, 1901a, p. 61). Wundtat the time could be deemed the most authoritativerepresentative of scientific psychology in German-speaking cultures, and his writings a reelaboration ofthe entire experience yielded by psychophysiologicalresearch in both the English and the French camps. Inhis Introductory Lectures on Psycho-Analysis (1916-1917), 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 acceptingtheir existence, he takes issue with those who soughtto explain parapraxes by recourse to physiological fac-tors associated with "tiredness, circulatory distur-bances and intoxication" (PEL, 1901a, p. 21) or tomechanical factors in their own right, such as the fail-ure of attention and memory. One has to say neverthe-less that, at the time, these ideas were widespread andFreud had already referred to them in his neuropsy-chological monograph on aphasia (1891a, p. 52). Yeteven in the Introductory Lectures on Psycho-Analysis,Freud's particular bone of contention is with Wundtand Wundt's physiological explanations-the' 'physi-cal creation" (Freud, 1916-1917, p. 33)-of thecauses of many slips of the pen. More importantly,the PEL radically questions Wundt's attempts to ac-count for verbal lapses-"speech distur-bances' '-merely on the basis of the "contact effectof sounds" (PEL, 1901a, p. 61) and takes issue withWundt's convictions about the role played by the"cessation or diminution of the attention" in the sec-tion entitled "Mistakes in Speaking, Reading andWriting" (PEL, 1901a, p. 132).

As I have said, at one stage Freud is quite ab-sorbed in the task of dismantling certain physiologicaland mechanical/associative explanations in favor ofthe "unknown psychic power" (PEL, 1901a, p. 37)and of those repressed thoughts and fantasies which,stemming from the unconscious, disturb the order ofour psychic apparatus and of language and our psy-chophysical balance. Indeed, one should not forgetthat behind the theses embraced by Wundt lie someof the most important positions advocated by the greatschool of English associative and neurophysiologicalpsychology, and Freud is well aware of this fact in hisradical critique of those theses. It should be noted,however, that English thinkers, like French and Ger-man ones for that matter, had only paid marginal at-tention to parapraxes as such, the only exception beingMeringer (1900) and Meringer and Mayer's (1895)research into slips of the pen. Freud's decision to de-vote an entire book to these "small details," as he

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terms them repeatedly in the Introductory Lectureson Psycho-Analysis may help us better understand thereasons underlying his particular reactions to his" Au-thorities.' ,

Indeed, the importance of physiological factorssuch as the circulation of the blood, fatigue, and theaging process as causes of faulty actions and memorylapses had been brought to Freud's attention by sev-eral authors. It had been emphasized by Spencer inthe first edition.of his Principles ofPsychology (1855)and again in subsequent editions (1870, 1881), in tan-dem with Maudsley (1867, p. 189) and then Bain(1855, pp. 467-482), not to mention Lewes (1879) andmany others. At the same time, both Bain and Spencerhad stressed the vital role played by emotions in eitherfacilitating or hindering the act of recollection (Spen-cer, 1855, pp. 234-236). Spencer's theses, dressed withall the ingredients of Darwinian evolutionism, firmlyestablished themselves both in England and on theContinent, and profoundly influenced Ribot's Le Mal-adies de la Memoire (1881, pp. 157-176). Amongstthe German authors of interest to Freud, besides thosehe had already discovered in his youthful apprentice-ship with Brticke, especially influential was Kussmaul,whose Die Storungen der Sprache had made somesubstantial observations on the physiological dimen-sion of memory (1877, pp. 36-42). Even James, inAmerica, had opened his Principles of Psychology(1890, pp. 6-7) by acknowledging his debt to Spencer,and asserted the importance of the body's physiologi-cal rhythms in the operations of memory. No less inter-esting is the case of the Scottish philosopher Hamilton,who could by no means be described as a whole-hearted supporter of physiological psychology. How-ever, in his Lectures on Metaphysics and Logic (1877,pp. 487-494), even Hamilton, while dealing in ahighly sophisticated manner with the issues of memoryand forgetfulness, had emphasized the importance ofthe body's physiological conditions. But the catalogueof names to which these traces could lead, were oneto pursue them all, would not be easily exhausted.

Freud, then, was justifiably proud of his findingsand of his alternative explanations of the functioningand meaning of memory in normal people. Yet, as Ihinted earlier, a careful reading of the PEL shows thatFreud is concurrently very cautious. A plausible rea-son for this wariness is that he must have been awareof the reactions which some of his theses might pro-voke. It is in this light, perhaps, that one should inter-pret his claim that he does not wish to destroy hiscolleagues' opinions, but rather add a further "mo-tive" to their explanations (PEL, 1901a, p. 4). And it

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is in this same light that one could read his assertionthat not all parapraxes, and particularly slips of thepen, may be immediately explained by recourse to hismethod. Only in the Introductory Lectures on Psycho-analysis will he come to the opposite conclusion (Cut-ler and Fay, 1978, p. xxviii).

However, as I said earlier, on closer inspectionmatters prove much more complex than they at firstmay seem to be. What should one make, for example,of Freud's willingness to take seriously certain obser-vations and theoretical suggestions put forward by hispredecessors? A case in point is the essay by Henriand Henri (1897) to which Freud explicitly refers inthe second edition of the PEL (1907), having alreadyused it in his study" Uber Deckerinnerung" publishedin 1899. Freud derives from Henri and Henri the ob-servation that, with some people, it is possible to re-trieve recollections that can be traced back to the sixthmonth of the first year of their lives (PEL, 1901 a, pp.45-46), although Freud argues that further investiga-tion of these issues is required. A close reading ofHenri and Henri's study exhibits a peculiar feature(pp. 184-198). Freud finds the essay inspiring in itsexamination of the distortions incurred by infantilememories, which can be based on an apparently trivialevent or recollection, or generally on the role playedby emotions and affects in the ability or inability toremember. In this text, however, Freud also encoun-ters two authors to whom Henri and Henri owe manyof their theoretical pointers: Taine and Ribot. Taine' sDe I'Intelligence (1870), which contains passages oc-casionally reminiscent of Proust (note again this coin-cidence), had studied the role played by certainmemories and hidden impulses in enabling the act ofrecollection. What is most interesting is that Taine, asI have already recalled, had been deeply influenced bythe associative and neurophysiological psychology ofthe English school, and particularly by Spencer andBain who, on the premise of the importance attributedby Darwin to the emotions, had established an incon-trovertible connection between the affects, memory,attention, and forgetfulness. Ribot, mentioned by He-nri and Henri alongside Taine, had likewise stressedthe part played by emotional factors in fixing or eras-ing certain childhood memories in his La Psychologiedes Sentiments (Henri and Henri, ] 897, pp. 192-193).As to the part played by affects and reminiscencesassociated with repressed childhood memories in para-praxes, well, this is precisely what Freud's PEL wasintended to shed light upon, by linking them to certainunconscious fantasies going back to childhood.

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Yet, the PEL is often much more closely relatedthan may be at first apparent to the intellectual processthrough which a certain tradition had established itselfthroughout Europe in the previous decades. At times,Freud even appears to revitalize certain physiologicalpositions. Although he never embraces them toutcourt, he nevertheless emphasizes the necessity of re-membering their existence and validity. He even con-tends that lapses may occur as a result of nervousdeviations independent of the lapses themselves, andthat structural relations between the physiological andthe psychophysical dimensions should not be ignored(PEL, 1901a, pp. 270-271). These points must beborne in mind because from a certain angle the PEL,replete as it is with examples and even with analysesof Freud's own personal lapses, is somehow an at-tempt to reintroduce a kind of Selbstbeobachtung, achain of discoveries based on introspection, which hadbeen one of the main characteristics of the old spiritu-alistic and metaphysical psychology based on the"faculties" of consciousness. This is also true of TheInterpretation of Dreams, a text that would be incon-ceivable without Freud's personal dreams. Such "in-trospection" 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 ofmemory, attention, and volition fashionable at thetime, he does not propose a return to the psychologyof the "faculties," which had dominated Europeanculture for centuries, or even millennia. While con-testing his colleagues' assertions, Freud never losessight of the natural material and substratum that makesthe body a fundamental receptacle, our starting point,and our destination, in the study of parapraxes; to thepoint that one could say that for Freud, in the PEL,the physiological and the neurological constitute, soto speak, "a dependent concomitant," of the psycho-logical, to use, in inverted form, a famous expressionattributed by Freud to Hughlings Jackson in his bookon aphasia (1891a). There he stated that "the psychicis a dependent concomitant" of the physiological. Sig-nificantly, the famous term metapsychology, whichfirst appears in print in the PEL (1901a, p. 259), andthrough which Freud seeks, with psychoanalysis, totake metaphysics and certain aspects of religion ontothe level of natural and psychological explanation, ac-tually features for the first time in a letter to Fliess ofFebruary 13th, 1896; p. 172). Here Freud states thathe is absorbed in the reading of Taine's De l'Intelli-gence and finding it extremely stimulating. And Taine,of course, was no supporter of the old spiritualistic

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or metaphysical psychology, because he had actuallyfought for the introduction on the French scene of anew scientific and materialist psychology.

Having acknowledged the PEL's distinctive char-acter and originality and clarified Freud's vis polemicatoward colleagues and mentors, it is also necessary tohighlight what Freud owes, both directly and indi-rectly, to a certain cultural context. This context en-compasses the central axes of Freud's major workssince, as we know even from a reading of the PEL,one of its main concerns is the attempt to establishwhat should be meant by terms such as the I, con-sciousness, attention, volition. It is within this contextthat, only a few years prior to the composition of thePEL, Exner, one of Freud's closest friends and men-tors, pointing to a purely neurological unconscious(Gauchet, 1992), even maintained that one should talk,in the case of Denkfehler (false reasoning), not of anIch denke (I think), Ich fuhle (I feel), but rather of esdenkt in mir (it thinks in me), es fuhlt in mir (it feelsin me), and adds: "Wir sind eben nicht uberschrankteHerren unsereres Associations, wenig wir uberhauptHerren unserer Gefuhle sind" (we also do not com-pletely own our associations or have control of ourfeelings) (Exner, 1889, p. 109). Of course, Freud en-dows this es denkt, es fiihlt in mir with a distinctivecontent defined by his own understanding of the un-conscious and of parapraxes, and he later will desig-nate the unconscious with the term das Es, drawingon Groddeck's definition. Yet it is also impossible toignore, despite their occasional ingenuousness, certaintexts by French authors with whom Freud had directlyor indirectly interacted. In these texts, notions of con-sciousness, memory, attention, and volition were pre-sented as tenuous, fragmentary, unstable, weak, anddevoid of any genuine autonomy, mere "epipheno-mena added to the psychophysiological process."

Yet, just think again of Binet's and Ribot's work.Although there are important differences between thetwo, insofar as Binet exhibits subtler psychologizingtraits than Ribot, their works share one important fac-tor. Indeed, both had drawn on, and elaborated in theirown fashions, theses formulated by Huxley andMaudsley: Ribot in Les Maladies de la Memoire(1881, pp. 21-25,45-51) and Binet in Les Alterationsde la Personnalite (1892, pp. 38-40). And both hadtransformed the old certainties into circus performerswalking the tightrope without a protective net, facingthe impenetrable abyss of the organic and neurophysi-ological unconscious by which all aspects of normallife were, in their view, affected and motivated. Atten-tion (Lampl, 1988) has even been drawn to close af-

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finities between Ribot and Nietzsche (who knew Ribotand had been influenced by his understanding of theego and consciousness generally). I assume the readerwill be aware, moreover, of the complex relationshipbetween Nietzsche and the most problematic and pro-found aspects of Freud's thought. Therefore, Freud,as author of the PEL, should be situated, however cau-tiously, within this broad cultural context. Matterswould become even clearer and, in a sense, "unheim-lich, " if other clues offered by the PEL were pursuedof which the reader should be aware in order to graspthe text's complexity.

One of the pillars of Freud's research is his con-viction that in order to construct a psychology of thenormal, 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 intoconsideration the resonance of the French school, andof the famous theses put forward in Bernard's tract onexperimental medicine (1865) which had influencedCharcot, Ribot, and Janet (1894, p. 298) and were incirculation at the time of Freud's stay in Paris. Wemust also pay heed to Freud's crucial observations onvarious "types" of memory and on his own type ofmemory in particular, which he describes as "visual"(PEL, 1901a, p. 39). Here the influence of Ribot(amongst other sources) can be felt, even though Freudattributes his classification of different kinds of mem-ory to Charcot, in one of his many memory lapses! Imentioned the relationship between Ribot and Charcotat the beginning of this essay and hope that the readeris now in a better position to see my reasons for do-Ing so.

In a very interesting section of the PEL, Freudhints at "the architectonic principle of the mental ap-paratus," and at the fact that superior "agencies" canbe inhibited by inferior ones (PEL, 1901a, p. 147).Here we witness another example of Freud's far fromnegligible debt to the scientific and cultural scenarioof his times. Understanding this debt can help us betterunderstand Freud's work in its entirety. It is worthrecalling, in this regard, Freud's discovery and reinter-pretation in his own fashion of Hughlings Jackson'sneurological theories. Freud's allegiance to HughlingsJackson is already evident in his Zur Auffassung derAphasien (1891a, p. 132), where he cites the greatEnglish neurologist and what he terms his theory ofthe "disinvolution" of the "nervous apparatus,"which Hughlings Jackson had, in fact, defined as dis-solution. 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

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sought to provide a neurophysiological explanation forthe phenomenon whereby certain higher arrangementsof the nervous apparatus control lower ones, yet dis-solve and disappear in the case of some mental ill-nesses, thus allowing more primitive arrangements toresurface. What must also be remembered, in this con-text, is Hughlings Jackson's debt to the evolutionismtheorized by Spencer, from whom the term dissolutionis directly derived. Ribot, in France, had based onthis same notion of dissolution his own law of thedissolution of memory advocated in Les Maladies dela 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 appara-tus" through which he tries to explain the causes ofcertain types of forgetfulness.

But just think now of Freud's explicit referencesto posthypnotic tasks, through which he explains theanalogies between the ability to remember certain in-tentions at the right moment and what is experimen-tally achieved with patients subject to hypnosis (PEL,1901a, p. 250). Equally interesting is Freud's recurringemphasis on his own "security of the sleepwalker"(PEL, 1901a, p. 250), through which he seeks to eluci-date his modus operandi in the retrieval of forgottennumbers, or in certain parapraxes connected withfaulty actions which, in their eeriness and sometimesviolence, appear to be purely physiological or muscu-lar, yet bear close affinities to the unconscious inten-tionality that manifests itself in the motor syndromesof hysteria. Freud returns one last time to the subjectof hysteria and to the "formes frustes" of neurosis inthe closing page of the PEL (1901a, p. 278) as thoughto bid them farewell. Through this French expression,which he would have come across at the time he wrotehis Preface and footnotes to the translation of Char-cot's clinical neurological lectures, "Le~ons du Mardide La Salpetriere" (Freud, 1892-1894, p. 34), Freudpays homage to the school from which he learnedmost. Echoing, as I have already mentioned, Bernard'swell-known theses (1865), he examines what linksparapraxes to mental illness and its more serioussymptoms, and what distinguishes them from the lat-ter-their intensity, their duration, the functions andsocial aspects of individual life which they tend todisrupt-stressing that the dividing line between san-ity and insanity is extremely tenuous and that we areall a bit neurotic.

applies to the concept of dependent concomitant~ for Hughlings Jackson,mind and brain were independent concomitants. Even in these cases, weare confronted with Freud's own parapraxes!

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Earlier in this discussion, I underlined that it isimportant to contextualize the PEL in relation to thoseneuroscientific theorists of the unconscious who hadsucceeded in anchoring the notions of memory, atten-tion, and consciousness to their organic roots, in orderto avoid dangerous misunderstandings which mayseem to point to a revival of spiritualistic and meta-physical positions. However, to comprehend the pagesof the PEL to which I have just referred, and Freud'sobservations on the relationship between hysteria,somnambulism, and parapraxes, it is necessary to in-spect more closely certain texts in which the neurolog-ical conception of the unconscious and the physiologyof consciousness, memory, and attention had alreadybeen dealt with in highly sophisticated ways. Thesetexts endeavored to describe, without ever denyingtheir relation to organic bodily processes, the psycho-logical phenomena of double consciousness and splitpersonality peculiar to hysterical patients. They intro-duced the hypothesis of a thinking subconscious, ofa more primitive and active hidden personality thattriggers faulty actions, causes forgetfulness, inhibitsvolition, and so on. Those were the theories promotedby the great French school of research into hysteriaof the fin de siecle and they have to be considered,too, because they transpire in these, as in many otherpages of the PEL, as having influenced Freud in theearly stages of his explorations. The reader may re-member Breuer and Freud's celebrated dictum "DieHysterische leidet grossentheils an Reminiscenzen"(hysterics suffer mainly from reminiscences), bor-rowed enthusiastically by Janet as confirmation of hisown long held convictions (Janet, 1894, pp. 269-270).The "reminiscences" that afflicted hysterical subjectswere somewhat comparable to strange memory lapses,because the traumatic origins of those reminiscencesare unconscious. Some of the key texts that ought tobe surveyed, however superficially, to notice certainsignificant reverberations, are Bernheim's writings,translated by Freud and cited by him on the subjectof posthypnotic tasks; and alongside the works of theoften quoted Charcot, Janet's Etat Mental des Hyster-iques (1894) and Binet's Les Alterations de la Per-sonnalite (1892) are of particular interest in thiscontext. In Janet's case studies of Lucie, Isabelle, andBerthe, these patients showed a propensity to describean "other" that acted and spoke inside them. Some-times, curiously, they used the same neutral expres-sions to be found in Exner (1889) but with the higherdegree of personification: "On me vole ma pensee, onecrit ce que je pense . .. " (Janet, 1894, p. 41). Thepatients confronted by Janet, Binet, and many others

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were sleep-walking hysterical women trapped in pecu-liar amnesias and sudden recollections that could berevived through hypnosis and revealed the presenceof a type of mental activity describable as unconsciousor, at any rate, drastically severed from the subjects'conscious personalities. In the face of such cases, Ja-net, Binet, and many others had tried more than onceto establish the difference between hysterical syn-dromes characterized by prolonged and massive amne-sia, or what was defined as the total anesthesia ofconsciousness and even of certain psychomotor pro-cesses, and what they termed amnesias, forms of, 'partial" anesthesia of memory, of consciousness, orof certain gestures and actions that did not affect sub-stantially the subject's personality and were evidentin the lapses committed by even normal people (seeBinet, 1892, pp. 140-147,235-242; here Binet drawson previous studies undertaken by Charcot, Janet, Ri-chet, and others).9

The PEL repeatedly draws attention to analogiesbetween dreams and lapses, to the point of maintainingthat parapraxes bear witness to the fact that certainprocesses characteristic of dreams are active evenwhen we are awake. In other words, we dream duringthe day no less than at night and this is why we loseconcentration, forget things, or perform bizarre ac-tions. I hope that the following remarks will not bemisunderstood. It is worth wondering, however,whether it is merely a coincidence or an erudite curios-ity that Freud (possibly without knowing or remem-bering it) confirms, through his assertions and in hisown fashion, what had also been inferred in a workby the French psychiatrist Macario, quoted by Janetin the chapter on "Les accidents mentales" of his EtatMental des Hysteriques (1894, p. 29). Macario hadalready maintained in the mid-nineteenth century that"les reves ont une grand analogie avec les distrac-tions, qui sont pour ainsi dire, les reves de I'etat dela vielle" ("dreams exhibit a significant analogy withmoments ofabsent-mindedness, which are, so to speak,the dreams of our waking hours"; emphasis added).It would be inadvertent indeed to ignore all these con-nections; we, too, could end up daydreaming too muchwhile reading the PEL.

There is one further aspect of the relationshipbetween the PEL and a certain tradition which I be-lieve the reader should take into consideration. ThePEL partly owes its popularity to the amazing range

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of case studies collected by Freud and, to some extent,to others on reading and writing lapses. I have referredmore than once, in this regard, to Wundt and to Mer-inger and Mayer, from whom Freud derives a descrip-tive terminology of philological and linguisticorientation, to .the point of adopting the famous wordplay "Versprechen und Verlesen" that had constitutedthe title of the two Austrian writers' text. 10 This is notthe place to enter into a detailed discussion of thesematters. The reader will become immediately awareof how Freud used the descriptive terminology I referto by perusing certain passages of the PEL (1901a;particularly pp. 58-63). A close analysis of the waysin which Freud uses Wundt, Meringer, and Mayercould shed light on Freud's debt to the linguistic con-text that had molded him and still influenced him.

Indeed, as I said, it should not be forgotten thatthe PEL is not only connected with The Interpretation

(~fDreams (1900) and the case of "Dora" (1905a,) butis also contemporaneous with another text of appliedpsychoanalysis, Jokes and Their Relation to the Un-conscious (1905b), which testifies to Freud's debt tocertain philosophers of language, linguists, and philol-ogists (Steiner, 1982). In the particular case of thePEL, nevertheless, I wish to draw the reader's atten-tion to some very specific data. Let us consider, forexample, the term paraphasia, to which Freud oftenrefers in this work (see, for instance, PEL [1901a, p.53]). This term harks back to one of the most im-portant texts in Freud's preanalytical work and wasbound to profoundly influence subsequent develop-ments in his thought (Steiner, 1982; Solms and Saling,1990; Greenberg, 1997). I am referring to the alreadymentioned Zur Auffassung der Aphasien (1891 a)where Freud argues, on the basis of his sources, thatparaphasia constitutes a nonlocalizable characteristicof certain aphasic disorders. It was Freud's contactwith these phenomena and with researchers intent ondescribing them that drew his attention to manifesta-tions of these disorders in normal people. The study Ihave just cited reverberates with the massive inventoryof descriptive cases found by Freud in Kussmaul(1877), where a whole chapter is devoted to the clini-cal neurological phenomenon of paraphasia (pp.157-192). However, Kussmaul is only one of numer-

10 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), atext to which Freud repeatedly refers in the PEL (Wundt, 1900b, p. 371).Freud became acquainted with Meringer and Mayer's writings by readingwhat was contained ""in a short essay designed for a wider circle of read-ers" in the Neue Freie Presse, August 23rd, 1900. The essay was entitled"Wie Man Sich Versprechen Kann" (PEL, 1901a, p. 59).

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ous scholars whom one could cite in this context. Fur-thermore, and this is something of a sure importance,in his seminal study on aphasia Freud had alreadylinked paraphasia to certain disorders, to certain"Wortwechslungen" (confusion of words), "Worters-tummlung" (speechlessness), of healthy and normalpeople. In those cases the paraphasia was due to the"Ermudung" (fatigue), or to "geteilter Aufmersam-keit" (split attention), but also to the "Einfiussstorender Affekte" (influence of disturbing affects).His explanations of a purely physiological kind there-fore were already linked to the attempt to take intoaccount also these "storender Affekte" (1891a, p. 52).

In his search for explanations at that time, Freud,like many others, was simultaneously fascinated andconfused by his subject matter, moving between hyste-ria (hysterical patients, too, suffer from "parapha-sia' '), aphasia, and other disorders, trying to grasptheir differences, and beginning to call into questionthe positions put forward by his sources and col-leagues. After all, even Charcot, in Paris, had dealt indepth with the various forms of aphasia and their clini-cal and psychological features. Situated betweenFreud's work on aphasia and, before that, his Parisianexperiences with Charcot and the French school, onthe one hand, and the PEL, on the other, was the dis-covery of the unconscious. Yet, elements of earlierobservations, hypotheses, attempts to find partially al-ternative solutions, had survived; as I have tried toshow. What is more, I think it is worthwhile remem-bering, in this context, that even the famous dia-gram-which could be regarded as something of arecalling or guiding image-with which Freud opensthe PEL, referring to his attempt to reconstruct thevicissitudes of his forgetting of Signorelli's name, isthe product of a cultural heritage once again associatedwith the study of aphasia.

Of course, in that famous diagram the uncon-scious is mysteriously represented, for, as Molnar hasrightly pointed out (1995, p. 88), missing from it arethe connections that could explain the transition fromunconscious fantasies to the various name distortionsthat mask "Signorelli." Consciousness is a kind ofconcomitant receptor of something that is no longerunconsciously "physiological," but rather related tosuch processes as condensation or displacement thatcharacterize the waking dream work through whichare created the concealments and false remembrancespeculiar to everyday memory disorders. All this hap-pens, however, without us knowing it. It is intriguing,from a descriptive point of view, that this diagramshould be so similar to the diagrams that feature in

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Freud's work on aphasia (1891a, p. 75, 121) and thatthe charts sketched by Freud in that text should, inturn, hark back to analogous charts present in hissources on the subject of aphasia, albeit in a contextthat attempted to find neuroanatomical and neurophys-iological explanations for that disorder, and whichFreud had begun to question through his own research(see also Greenberg, 1997, p. 105, 156). It would seemthat at a semiotic level-after all, Freud describeshimself as a classic visual memory type in thePEL-Freud wishes to pay homage to that traditionof thought and research which had compelled him forthe first time to reflect upon and elaborate the modelof "Sprach Apparatus" that echoes throughout subse-quent developments in his thought. And one could goon pursuing similar traces.

Having traced, however cursorily, some aspectsof the cultural and scientific trajectory that led Freudto the composition of the PEL, it is arduous to pre-scribe any clear reading strategies. What I will try toshow should therefore be taken as a purely indicativeand personal choice. As I hope to have conveyed inthe preceding pages, we must avoid the danger ofviewing the PEL as a text of an exclusively divulgingnature. Just consider the theme of memory and itsrelationship with childhood and unconscious recollec-tions. Ultimately, despite Freud's modesty, it is pre-cisely in the PEL that we find some of the mostinteresting statements on his understanding of mne-monic operations in general, and not only in the con-text of parapraxes, particularly where-returning tohis earlier essay "Uber Deckerinnerung" (1899)-hediscusses the possibility of recalling the events of earlyinfancy. It is in these pages, for example, that we en-counter the theme of Nachtraglichkeit. Freud's com-plex and intricate grasp of the temporal dimensionof psychic existence reveals itself precisely where heproposes a paradoxical and "unheimlich" model, ac-cording to which we do not merely use recent occur-rences to explain, through distancing, earlier ones, butalso use remote events to distort and make sense ofwhat has actually taken place in the more recent past(PEL, 1901a, pp. 40-42). These observations are enor-mously relevant to the present scenario, consideringwhat is being written today about the possibility ofveridically remembering the past in general. At thesame 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 Super-stition: Some Points of View," Freud advances oneof his most daring and, in a way, optimistic assertionsregarding the possibility of remembering the repressed

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past of the unconscious. Here he maintains that froma theoretical angle, the traces of memory, containedand stratified in the unconscious, may be utterly re-trievable by circumventing defenses and repressionsand somehow eliminating even the nachtraglich dis-tortions (PEL, 1901, pp. 274-257).

It is also worth considering certain observa-tions-yet to be developed, but potentially semi-nal-on the application of psychoanalysis to historicalresearch. Here Freud endeavors to establish a link be-tween the inevitably distorted modality through whichwe remember our past and the ways in which mytho-logical and historical traditions of various peopleshave been constructed, on the basis of ineluctably andprogressively misconstrued recollections of their ori-gins and of unpleasant events consigned to forgetful-ness (PEL, 1901a, pp. 48, 147). These issues willoccupy Freud's research in later years, as attested byhis assertions in "The Unconscious" (1915a, p. 187)and the essay on Leonardo (1910, pp. 83-84), not tomention 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 en-lightening words-courageous and for some rather, 'uncanny' '-through which Freud attacks the meta-physical pretensions of religious thought, thus dis-playing the conquistador attitude that animated him inthose years, and the desire to deconstruct any availablefacet of culture and thought via psychoanalysis. It isin this same context that Freud comes across as a laicand positivistic scientist, recalling his youthful enthu-siasm for Feuerbach and his critique of religion, astestified by his letters to Silberstein of November 8th,1874, and March 3rd, 1875 (Boehlich, 1990). It is alsoin these extremely involuted and not always clearpages, where Freud attempts to unite superstition,paranoia, telepathy, and prophetic dreams, that we findsome famous statements concerning religious beliefswhich point to Freud's quest to "transform metaphys-ics into metapsychology," having maintained that "alarge part of the mythological view of the world whichextends 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 theSociopolitical and Cultural Context of the ThePsychopathology of Everyday LifeBeside these general themes, to which I shall returnshortly in relation to Freud's views on determinism

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presented in the last chapter of the PEL, what shouldbe underscored are the extraordinary, sleight-of-handtricks with which Freud the prestidigitator seeks toconvince the reader of the validity of his the-ses-namely the unconscious causes of para-praxes-by recourse to legion exempla and anecdotes.Following Freud's discourse by simply looking at thetitles of his chapters, as they move from "Vergessenvon Eigennamen" (The forgetting of proper names),to "Vergessen vom Fremdsprachigen Worten" (Theforgetting of foreign words) to "Vergessen von Namenund Wortfolgen" (The forgetting of sets of words), tothe sections entitled "Das Versprechen" (Slips of thetongue), "Das Verlesen und Verscwreiben" (Misread-ings and slips of the pen), "Das Vergessen von Ein-drucken und Vorsatzen' , (The forgetting ofimpressions and intentions), "Das Vergreifen" (Bun-gled actions), and so on; we witness something of alinguistic crescendo, expressed by the constant repeti-tion of the prefix Ver which, as Freud himself declares,seems to reflect and allude to a kind of "internal simi-larity" amongst various phenomena (PEL, 1901 a, p.239). It also, I would suggest, seems to encapsulatethe omnipresence of those ghosts to whom Freud re-fers, citing Goethe's Faust, Part II, as the "logo" ofthe 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 exaggera-tions and I would not like what I have said to implythat the "haunting shape" can be reduced to a repeti-tion of prefixes where, from a linguistic point of view,the ghosts that animate it appear to nestle in an oppres-sive and pervasive fashion. Indeed, the PEL also con-tains a series of examples and stories based on lapsesof a motor type. In these cases, too, there is evidencefor that unconscious intentionality, that counterwill(PEL, 1901a, p. 154) that governs our quotidian mal-aise and incessantly reveals the existence of a terraincognita inside us that renders us strangers to our-selves, errant at the gate of our psyche. However, thePEL's most striking pyrotechnics are undoubtedly lo-cated with verbal lapses. This is largely due to Freud'sexceptional linguistic and associative flair for de-tecting their unconscious motivations. At times, thesense of awe and surprise elicited by the text is suchas to make the reader think: "Well, only the intelli-gence and creativity of Freud's unconscious could en-gineer this ludic confusion of one's memory andperception." I believe that the presence and quantityof autobiographical anecdotes pertaining to Freudshould be emphasized. Clearly, through the passing oftime, various editions, and the help of friends, admir-

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ers, and colleagues, the book has grown to such anextent as to suggest that the yearning to collect evernew examples may mirror, in the PEL, another maniaor passion on Freud's part. Even this passion waslinked to the desire not to forget and to the desire toaccumulate, yet it was a more mundane and expensivepassion, which curiously parallels the PEL's variouseditions, that of the collector not only of stories basedon parapraxes or jokes but also of Greek, Roman,Egyptian, and eventually Eastern relics that wouldgradually fill Freud's study in Vienna over the years.

Of considerable importance to understandingFreud are the famous autobiographical dreams dis-cussed in The Interpretation of Dreams (1900), towhich practically all the most recent of Freud's biogra-phers and scholars have drawn attention (Anzieu,1975; Grinstein, 1980), not least the extremely subtleobservations of Grubrich-Simitis (1993) on the rela-tionship between autobiography and writing in Freud,and Mahony's observations (1987). However, no-where more than in the PEL is it possible to capturethe sense of Freud as a conquistador intent above allon conquering, more or less successfully, himself andthe reasons for his everyday malaise. At times we wit-ness, in his attempts to explain certain associations, areal fibrillation of his thought connections, almost lostin the labyrinth of all those "Einfallene" (suddenwords, ideas) that lead from one to another, animatedby the unconscious conflicts and desires to which theyare tied. In these pages, the reader may find someof the most revealing moments of Freud's biography.Consider, beside what I have already observed, thecolossal parapraxis, which contributed decisively tothe end of Freud's friendship with Fliess, concerningthe correct attribution of the discovery of infantile bi-sexuality (PEL, 1901a, p. 144). Consider also Freud'ssignificant errors apropos Charcot, and inaccurate ci-tations in The Interpretation of Dreams, indicative ofhis strong ambivalences toward his father and rela-tives, and later thrown into relief by some of his biog-raphers. It would suffice, as an example, to read thechapter on "Errors" (PEL, 1901a, pp. 218-229). Attimes, Freud attributes his forgetfulness of propernouns to minor disasters connected with his migraineattacks (PEL, 1901a, p. 19). We are sometimes pre-sented 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-mind-edness culminating in the grotesque and potentiallyrather dangerous mistake of squeezing morphine in-stead of eye drops in the eyes of an almost centenarian

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female patient, the error reawakening in Freud "oedi-pal fantasies"! It is impossible, in this context, toprovide a detailed account of Freud's enormous per-sonal casebook, which even informs us about the ex-traordinary retentive power of Freud's youthfulmemory, now weakened by the passing of time (PEL,1901a, p. 135).

The PEL demonstrates how really quotidian thepsychopathology of everyday life is. Yet, as we followcertain themes and certain developments of the exam-ples and anecdotes supplied by Freud and his col-leagues and friends, we realize that the text is notmerely concerned with strictly personal occurrences,with the more or less tragicomic games of hide-and-seek that the unconscious of single individuals likes toplay with their consciousness. In fact, what graduallyemerges is a kind of social psychopathology of theeveryday, which obviously characterized a certainelite or, at any rate, a certain social class, typically themiddle class in Central Europe, Britain, and NorthAmerica during those years. But, as we know, Freud'sintention was more general and universal. Here theeveryday changes, according not only to personalevents and histories but also to History with a capital"H," as this more than once shows through, in formsthat would have been most distressing and traumatiz-ing for both Freud and his friends. For example, it isno coincidence that from the third edition of the PEL(1915), Freud begins to add anecdotes and examplesof parapraxes based on the events and conflicts of theFirst World War and on the anxieties and concernscreated by it in his unconscious and in that of hisfriends and colleagues (PEL, 1901a, pp. 22, 70-77,186). At some point, even the aftermath of the warmakes its fleeting appearance through references toBerlin, its tumults, and strikes.

What must be stressed is that the examples andstories constitute, even from a formal and stylisticpoint of view, the most persuasive rhetorical instru-ment needed by Freud to convince the reader of thevalidity of the psychoanalytic method by virtue oftheir very simplicity and also, at times, of their ab-sorbing, albeit fragmentary, narrativity. Undoubtedly,in these inane and uncannily amusing tales, Freud'sskills as a writer express themselves in compressedand miscrocosmic form. He experiments with a kalei-doscopic variety of techniques and narrative genresthat range from first- to third-person narration, fromreportage to extremely lively dialogue in which thecomic (it is not by chance that Freud compares manyparapraxes to condensed jokes [PEL, 1901a, p. 64])often transmutes into the deeply tragic, as attested by

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parapraxes related to fatal accidents or self-destructiveacts which can unconsciously lead to suicide (PEL,1901a, pp. 185-186). In all this, it seems possible tocapture in nuce the range of expressive registers thatcan subsequently be found in the great KrankenGeschichten. Dora's case, for instance, is unthinkablewithout taking into consideration many stories anddialogues of the PEL, especially from a formal view-point. Indeed, as I have already mentioned, the writingof that case was contemporaneous with that of thePEL. In order to better understand these ideas, it wouldbe necessary to inspect some so-called minor literaturecharacteristic of the Vienna of that period. It wouldbe useful, for example, to go back to some salaciousvignettes of Die Wiener Spaziergangers by Spitzer,which Freud himself cites in the PEL, and to the litera-ture of the fragment and the ''feuilleton'' that wasbeing read and sampled in those years both at homeand in the cafes (Magris, 1996). Not accidentally, thefirst example of "misreading" reported by Freud re-fers to the Leipziger Illustrierte, which Freud, likehundreds of his fellow citizens, liked to "durchblat-tern" in his favorite cafe, the Corb Cafe.

In a beautiful article entitled "Der Kobold imHirnkasten" (the goblin in the cranium), published inNeue Freie Presse on April 10th, 1904, an anonymousreviewer of the PEL, signing himself as "St.g," high-lights Freud's skills as a hound or detective in pursuitof the unconscious. Following this lead, it may beworth recalling some other illustrious figures, Sher-lock Holmes, for example. However, the project un-dertaken in the PEL should not be regarded as a minorvirtuoso performance in comparison with the greatprose of Die Kranken Geschichten. The fact that cer-tain tales, dialogues, and narrative sketches, so perfectat times in their brevity, should proliferate ad infinitumis in itself telling. Perhaps there is no work in Freud'sentire corpus that enables us to experience moreclosely the everyday reality of a particular portion ofEurope, especially prewar Vienna (Janik and Toulmin,1973; Pick, 1976; Schorske, 1979, 1998; Johnston,1981; Barea, 1992); to imagine the interiors of housesfull of expensive and lovely, small and tasteless trin-kets with which a certain bourgeoisie was keen onsurrounding itself; to perceive at an almost tactile levelthe weight of certain house keys and the somnolentheaviness of certain doors and desks; to visualize thefashion of the period, the styIe of dresses, suits, hats,and overcoats (Gay, 1988), the comforting solidity ofsilver-pummeled walking sticks and the amplitude ofleather cases filled with medical instruments, whichtoday would belong in a museum. Perhaps there is no

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other book by Freud that succeeds in evoking morevividly the drone of large streets to be slowly crossedon foot, where long-bearded men would gallantly takeoff their hats in the presence of any female acquain-tance, or the noise of horse-drawn carriages andcoaches, and the first motor cars, and the chit-chat ofthe coffee shops. And perhaps there is no other bookby Freud that manages more successfully than the PELto help us understand the place that trains occupied inCentral European culture: the trains on which people,on interminable journeys, avid for interminable con-versations, would cross the entire Austro-Hungarianempire and the whole of Europe, as if those trainswere somehow symbolic of that Austrian felix towhich Magris devoted some of his most beautifulpages in his acclaimed book Ii Mito Asburgico (1996).This was the Austria of the "guten alten Zeit" (thegood old days), where a common train was alwaysavailable in a common station, on which "man sichsetzen konnte' , (one could sit oneself down) and forgettime "in die Heimat zuruckfahren" (and go back toone's home town), to use Musil's ironical words inDer Mann ohne Eigenschaften (The Man WithoutQualities) (1956, p. 33). With those words Musil de-scribes "{las Keisertum Oesterreichs" (the AustrianEmpire) in the famous chapter of his book entitled"Kakanien": a world which Zweig had also definedas "die Welt von Gestern" (the world of yesterday),"die Welt von Sicherheit" (the world of certainty),"die geordnete Welt mit klaren Sichtungen und gelas-senes Ubergangen" (the ordered world with clear vi-sions and calm transitions) (Zweig, 1968, pp. 20-42),although his description of the world erased by theFirst World War was more naive and rhetorical thanthe manner used by Musil with his ironical nostalgia.

Finally, there is no work by Freud that succeedsmore than the PEL in conveying how illusory thatsense of security and order really was (Le Rider,1990). This is not only because in that country of "Ka-kanien," to return to Musil's term, due to either ab-sent-mindedness or stupidity "wurde inmer nur einGenie fur einen Lummeln gehalten"(a genius wouldalways be considered a rascal), an idea to which Freudwould perhaps also have subscribed, at least in termsof the response of a certain cultural establishment tohis work.

The fact remains that the pervasiveness of auto-biographical elements in the PEL makes Freud thebook's true protagonist, notwithstanding the fragmen-tary manner in which he speaks about himself, ormaybe because he speaks about himself in so fragmen-tary a fashion. In those anecdotes, which, if the anal-

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ogy does not sound too disrespectful, bring to mindCharlie Chaplin's "sublime" gags, we find signs ofthe same Jewish humor present in the almost contem-poraneous Jokes and their Relation to the Unconsciousas that sometimes pathetic need to display and makemockery of one's shortcomings and lapses, an indica-tor of the complex cultural identity of Freud the Jewin search of a universal integration with the culturethat surrounded him (Wistrich, 1988; Beller, 1989; R.Gay, 1992; Gilman, 1993a,b).

Yet all this becomes also the very symbol of thedisintegration of a certain way of understanding con-sciousness and identity which was, as I have men-tioned, concurrently personal, social, and historical,exactly because it was so graphically encapsulated byFreud himself, in the description of his own mnemonicflaws. It is as if we were watching the sudden reemer-gence, the coming to life again of a series of flashesfrom old photographs yellowed with time, or an oldfilm in slow motion. Just imagine Freud's suspendedand confused gestures at home, in the face of some ofhis patients; imagine him in the streets, in the cafe,on a train journey, intent on trying to remember, onrecapturing inside and outside of himself, syllables,names, numbers, memories, keys, hats, temporarilymislaid, just like thousands of his contemporaries en-gaged in similar efforts. Particularly if one considersthem all to be acting in the social, cultural, and histori-cal context of Vienna, the capital of an empire that inthose last pre-First World War years seemed at timesitself to be encapsulated in an extraordinary and pa-thetic cultural and sociopolitical lapsus.

Quo Vadis Austria? is the extremely poignant ti-tle of a novel published in 1913 by a rather obscureAustrian writer, G. Sieber (Foster, 1990). Its titleseems to condense marvelously the comments I havejust made. And in 1915 a famous satirical poem byKraus, published in Die Fackel, speaks of "Die Letz-ten Tage der Menscheit" (the last days of humanity)to refer to that world (Timms, 1989; Timms and Rob-ertson, 1990). Yet, paradoxically, it is also necessaryto remember, when thinking of Freud, that' 'Glucklichist were vergisst" ("happy is he who forgets") as hadbeen so enthusiastically sung a few years earlier inStrauss's Die Fledermaus (Magris, 1996), as thoughto symbolize an attitude based on the cult of socialoblivion so fashionable in Vienna, and in an empirewhere, in spite of its impending political and socialcollapse, time seemed to have come to a halt; wherea whole world was burying itself, seeking to forget orto forget itself, daydreaming in the cradle of that mu-sic, yet trying to maintain and project its own illusory

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