Freud on Everyday Life

Considered the founding father of pschoanalysis, Freud has written numerous books on analyzing and breaking down why we do what we do and think, say, and act like the way we do.  "The Psychopathology of Everyday Life" is only one of his books and while dense at times brings to mind plenty of questions to reflect upon as you look at your everyday life and why you act the way you do.  Below are a couple of quotes that will make you watch what you say and pay closer attention to  what others do.

-Now extensive observations have taught me that words with opposite meanings are, quite generally, very often inter-changed; they are already associated in our linguistic consciousness, they lie very close to each other and it is easy for the wrong one to be evoked.

-If one of the parties involved in a serious argument makes a slip of the tongue which reverses the meaning of what he intended to say, it immediately puts him at a disadvantage with his opponent, who seldom fails to make the most of his improved position.

More after the jump.

-An intention is an impulse to perform an action: an impulse which has already found approval but whose execution is postponed to a suitable occasion.

-Analysis of the examples of forgetting that seem to require a special explanation reveals that the motive for forgetting is invariably an unwillingness to remember something which can evoke distressing feelings.

-In other, far more significant, cases it is self-criticism, internal opposition to one’s own utterance that obliges one to make a slip of the tongue and even to substitute the opposite of what one had intended. One then observes in astonishment how the wording of an assertion cancels out its own intention, and how the slip has exposed an inner insincerity.  The slip of the tongue here becomes a mode of mimetic expression-often, indeed, for the expression of something one did not wish to say:  it becomes a mode of self-betrayal