While I am willing to admit that some forgetfulness, slips of speech, and other actions have unconscious motives, (ex. I actually misplaced this book, apparently so I wouldn't have to read it), I don't see how all such acts can be classified as neurotic efforts at repression. Is Freud saying that a fully conscious person would never make a mistake?

Freud shatters all scientific crediblity by admitting near the end of the book that, of couse, we can't recognize or assertain the meaining behind every dream, mistake, or superstition, (like psychoanalysis). Freud writes,

"To substantiate the general validity of the theory, it is enough if one can penetrate only a certain distance into the hidden associations." pg. 161

This is kind of like substantiating the theory of relativity by saying it's enough to know that two plus two equals four.

Freud was an egotistical person, who spewed venom towards critics, and apostates to his theory, (look at what he has to say about Adler in a letter to Jung). Much of that ego plays forth here, when he speaks of psychoanalysis as a proven fact, rather than something to be seriously questioned and studied.

My misplacing of this book was less an unconscious act than a conscious one, I really found the reading dry at times and some of the examples pulled out of thin air, (if you keep free associating long enough, you can make anything in the universe connect to anything else, don't believe me? Play the Kevin Bacon game.)

I eventually did find my lost copy, and it was in the last place I would look for it....my reading table.

Once upon a time I read Freud seriously, in search of some understanding of human behavior. Now I only dip into a few of his books periodically because his thought process is so fascinating. His book The Psychopathology of Everyday Life is more interesting and accessable than many of his writings, though his style does not make for an easy read. It is in this book that Freud takes up the issue of all the little things that go wrong which we have tended to think of as accidents and mistakes. To Freud, most, if not all incidents of things forgotten, lost, dropped etc are examples of hidden dynamics of the psyche playing out in the real world. His arguments can be very strained and he extrapolates very broadly from a few anecdotes and case histories. This isn't scientific thought, but it is very interesting nonetheless. If you took him at face value, you would have to conclude that we all need an analyst - which is exactly what he thought.

This book may be read as a necessary sequel to Freud's major opus The Interpretation of Dreams, cause the object of the two are the same, that is, to demonstrate trough a lot of very detailed personal and third person's examples, how the unconscious work, or even better, how it betrays itself trough its concealed (condensed and displaced) actions shown in our parapraxis of everyday. Parapraxis is a term which could be translated into faulty acts, which are, for instance, "slips of the tongue", "slips of the pen", misreadings, mislayings of objects, undeliberate forgetness of sentences, names and places, etc ...
The book is written in a very casual style and one is again admired how could such a genius as Freud convey his ideas in such an easy style.
Why no 4 stars? Because I think this book is not so fascinating as The Interpretation of Dreams, an opus which deserves 5 stars.