Psychoanalysis and Psychiatry

When I was twelve or thirteen I became interested in Freud when a friend came across the Penguin paperback edition of The Psychopathology of Everyday Life. The discovery that the omissions, lapses and slips that are part of everyday life are actually evidence of an everyday psychopathology was astonishing to me. The fact that my friend and I were quite ignorant of life did not get in the way of our enjoyment of the story of the various slips of the tongue and bungled actions which betrayed the obscure motives of their subjects.…