Freud on the Psychology of Ordinary Mental Life

Susan Sugarman, professor of psychology at Princeton University, where she also teaches in the Council of the Humanities, is the author of empirical and theoretical works on the cognitive development of children. Attracted by Freud's investigative tactic of using the child to understand the adult, she has written more recently on Freud, including Freud on the Acropolis: Reflections on a Paradoxical Response to the Real.

Susan Sugarman has given us a clear, concise, elegant analysis of Freud's understanding of the fundamental principles by which mind is produced and luminously explicated how Freud saw these principles working in such ordinary experiences as mistakes, jokes, enjoying a novel, and experiencing the uncanny.

• 1 Chapter 1. Introduction to the Inquiry2 Chapter 2. The Pleasure Principle3 Chapter 3. Meaning and Determinism and the Search for Anomalies4 Chapter 4. Conscious and Unconscious, Repression, and Development5 Chapter 5. Developmental Analysis as Investigatory Tool6 Chapter 6. Getting Lost in Someone Else's Story, "Creative writers and daydreaming" (1908)7 Chapter 7. Why We Laugh at Something Funny, Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious (1905)8 Chapter 8. The Experience of the "Uncanny", "The 'uncanny'" (1919)9 Chapter 9. The Paradox of Surprise in the Face of Certainty, "A disturbance of memory on the Acropolis" (1936)10 Chapter 10. What Makes Choice Difficult When It Is: A Freud-Inspired Excursion11 Chapter 11. Mourning and Mental Health, "On transience" (1916),"Mourning and melancholia" (1917)