Freud's psychoanalytic theories
Freud suggests that our everyday psychopathology is a minor disturbance of mental life which may quickly pass away. Freud believed all of these acts to have an important significance; the most trivial slips of the tongue or pen may reveal people's secret feelings and fantasies. Pathology is brought into the everyday life which Freud points out through dreams, forgetfulness, and parapraxes. He uses these things to make his case for the existence of an unconscious that refuses to be explained or contained by consciousness. Freud explains how the forgetting of multiple events in our everyday life can be consequences of repression, suppression, denial, displacement, and identification. Defense mechanisms occur to protects one’s ego so in The Psychopathology of Everyday Life, Freud states, “painful memories merge into motivated forgetting which special ease” (p. 154)