Among the many aspects of Freud's work (therapeutic, cultural, meta-psychological, etc.), the one represented in this book is, without a doubt, the most accessible, the most popular, the most entertaining, and the most seemingly innocent. For the author focuses on the everyday life of all of us, both patients and so-called healthy individuals. However, after Freud, mistakes, omissions, miscalculations, misguided actions, and even stumbles will no longer be as innocent as they were once believed to be.

They are not merely results of carelessness and laxity. Our deeper motives show that the unconscious lurks even in our most ordinary and normal actions, ready to remind us of its grim omnipotence and to impose respect upon us.

“The other day I walked out of the tobacco shop where I buy my cigars daily without paying. It wasn't anything serious; I am a regular at the store, and the next day they would remind me of my debt. But the small lapse, the attempt to accumulate debts, was surely not unrelated to the financial calculations that had occupied me the previous day. Even among so-called respectable people, the issue of money and property often leaves clear traces of a split behavior. The primitive desire of the infant to grasp all objects (to bring them to its mouth) seems generally unable to be entirely overcome under the influence of culture and upbringing.

“I do not see why I could deny a place among the achievements of science in that wisdom which constitutes the essence of common experiential knowledge. The essence of scientific work does not lie in the variety of its objects but in the stricter method with which their verification is conducted and in the search for a broader framework of relationships.”

Sigmund Freud