Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CHAPTER III THE PSYCHOLOGY OF FORGETTING The main basis of Freud's psychology is that there is nothing accidental or arbitrary in the psychic life, that everything has reason and meaning. It matters not how complex or simple the condition may be, it has significance, and this significance may be discovered through analysis. There is thus a tremendous number of mistakes in speech and thought manifestations which we commonly make, that reveal, in a surprising way, the individual's real thoughts and motives. They are, as we say, symbolic expressions or psychopathological actions, incorrect psychic activities which the individual daily performs and of which he is not aware at the time. They have not been hitherto investigated, I mean psychologically, because they were regarded as essentially organic disturbances. I am referring to such faulty actions as lapses of memory, lapses of talking, mistakes in writing, dreams in the normal individual, and convulsions, deliria, visions, and obsessive acts in neurotics and psychotics. The psychologist has paid little attention to these phenomena because they presumably belonged to pathology, and the physician, to whom they were baffling and recondite to the last degree, passed them by, as if they did not at all exist. Freud in working with his patients began to pay attention to them because he found, as I have already said, that they all had a certain import and genetic basis. He thus developed in time what we may call a symbolic language. If you understand this language, youwill then realize how it manifests itself practically all the time in our daily lives. Understand this symbolism and how full of meaning will be your friend's forgetting to do or say something! Sometimes a patient will be startled by what seems to him nothing short of ps...