Concept
Parapraxis
A slip of the tongue, pen, memory or action that betrays an unconscious intention.
- Introduced by
- Sigmund Freud
- Key works
- 5
- Related
introduced by
- Sigmund Freud 1901 Freud set out the theory of slips in Zur Psychopathologie des Alltagslebens, printed in the Monatsschrift für Psychiatrie und Neurologie in 1901 and as a book in 1904: the forgetting of names and intentions, slips of the tongue and pen, misreadings, bungled and chance actions are treated as meaningful acts with unconscious motives rather than accidents. In the Dora case he refers readers back to that treatise, and Jones in 1908 cites its sections on slips of the tongue and pen, bungled actions and chance actions as Freud's.
developed by
- Sigmund Freud 1905 Uses the symptomatic act clinically in the Dora case: Dora's playing with a small purse during a session, opening it and putting a finger in, is read as a pantomime of masturbation, and her quickly hiding a letter she was reading when Freud entered the waiting room as a further symptomatic act. Freud defines such acts as things done automatically and dismissed as meaningless, which on closer observation give expression to unconscious thoughts and impulses.
- Ernest Jones 1908 Jones takes the insistence that a slip or chance action had no cause, or was due to chance or inattention, as one of the ways a person keeps the source of a mental process out of consciousness; the resistance to asking where it came from signals that the source is unacceptable. Analysis, he holds, always finds a precise cause.
derives from
- Unconscious The parapraxis is defined by its source in the unconscious: an apparently accidental slip or act is the tolerated expression of thoughts and impulses that consciousness does not know of or will not know of. For Freud slips are, with dreams, the everyday evidence that the unconscious exists in the healthy; Lacan treats them as the very place where Freud went looking for it.
- Repression In the classical account a parapraxis results from interference by a thought or wish that has been pushed out of consciousness because it is unacceptable: the forgetting, slip or mislaying shows both the repressed content and the resistance against it. The Dora case speaks of acts consciousness 'will not know of', and Jones ties the concealment of a slip's source to its unacceptable nature.