Concept
Parapraxis
A slip of the tongue, pen, memory or action that betrays an unconscious intention.
Development
1901
introduced by Sigmund Freud
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.
In Fragment of an Analysis of a Case of Hysteria (1905);Rationalization in Every-Day Life (1908);Introductory Lectures on Psycho-Analysis (1917);The Psychopathology of Everyday Life (1901)
1905
developed by Sigmund Freud
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.
In Fragment of an Analysis of a Case of Hysteria (1905)
1908
developed by Ernest Jones
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.
In Rationalization in Every-Day Life (1908)
1964
reworked by Jacques Lacan
In Seminar XI Lacan groups the parapraxis with the dream and the witticism as the formations in which the unconscious first shows itself, as a stumbling, a failure, a crack in what is said or written: a gap in which something else, apparently intentional, seeks to be realised. In the same session he rereads Freud's forgetting of the name Signorelli as the disappearance of the signifier 'Signor', the Herr or absolute master, which he links to death.
In The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis (1973)
Relations
- 1901 introduced by Sigmund Freud
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.
- 1905 developed by Sigmund Freud
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.
- 1908 developed by Ernest Jones
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.
- 1964 reworked by Jacques Lacan
In Seminar XI Lacan groups the parapraxis with the dream and the witticism as the formations in which the unconscious first shows itself, as a stumbling, a failure, a crack in what is said or written: a gap in which something else, apparently intentional, seeks to be realised. In the same session he rereads Freud's forgetting of the name Signorelli as the disappearance of the signifier 'Signor', the Herr or absolute master, which he links to death.
- 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.
- derives from 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.
Works
- 1901
The Psychopathology of Everyday Life
Freud's study of the small failures of everyday mental life. It examines the forgetting of proper names, foreign words and intentions, screen memories, slips of the tongue, of the pen and in reading, bungled and chance actions, superstition and errors. Freud traces each of these parapraxes to the interference of a disturbing thought or wish that has been suppressed or repressed, and takes them as evidence that mental life is determined in healthy people as well as in neurotics. The work first appeared in two parts in the Monatsschrift für Psychiatrie und Neurologie in 1901, was published as a book by Karger in 1904, and was much enlarged in later editions.
- 1905
Fragment of an Analysis of a Case of Hysteria
Freud's case history of "Dora", an eighteen-year-old Viennese woman (later identified as Ida Bauer) whom he treated for about eleven weeks at the end of 1900; written in 1901, it appeared in 1905 in the Monatsschrift für Psychiatrie und Neurologie. Dora suffered from a nervous cough, loss of voice, shortness of breath and low moods, and her father brought her to Freud after her parents found a letter in which she hinted at suicide. Behind the symptoms Freud uncovers a family entanglement: her father's affair with Frau K., and the advances of Frau K.'s husband, Herr K., whom Dora slapped after a proposal by a lake and whose earlier kiss had filled her with disgust. Freud reads her symptoms as the expression of repressed sexual wishes — love for Herr K., a revived childhood attachment to her father and, at the deepest layer, love for Frau K. — and builds the case around the interpretation of two dreams: a burning house from which her father rescues her while her mother wants to save her jewel case, and a wandering through a strange town after her father's death. Dora broke off the treatment on 31 December. In the Postscript Freud attributes the failure to his not having recognised and interpreted in time the transference of her feelings for Herr K. onto himself, and gives his first sustained account of transference as a new edition of old impulses directed at the physician.
- 1908
Rationalization in Every-Day Life
Ernest Jones read this paper at the first psychoanalytic congress, in Salzburg in April 1908, and printed it that summer in Morton Prince's Journal of Abnormal Psychology. It is where the term ‘rationalisation’ enters psychoanalysis. Jones starts from Freud's demonstration that many mental processes, in the normal as in the ill, have causes the person neither knows nor will admit. He sorts the mechanisms that hide these causes into two classes. In the first class the person holds that a thought or act needs no explanation. Slips and chance actions are put down to accident. Choices shaped by hidden motives or by custom, such as a number picked ‘freely’ or a tie worn every day, are claimed as acts of will, so that asking where they come from seems absurd. Jones reads this resistance to inquiry as a sign that the real source is unacceptable, and finds it behind many fixed religious, ethical and political beliefs. In the second class the person offers an explanation, but a false one, because everyone needs to give a connected and rational account of themselves. False explanations formed mainly for oneself he calls evasions; those formed with an eye to the opinion of one's circle he calls rationalisations. There is no sharp line between them. His examples are a young man who believes he chose his family's sect after weighing the evidence, and physicians who still prescribe valerian for hysteria. The remedy was once justified by the theory of the wandering womb and is now explained as an ‘antispasmodic’. Jones closes by arguing that the new psychology will show how opinions are formed and how true but unwelcome ideas can best be spread, since restating the evidence is not enough.
- 1917
Introductory Lectures on Psycho-Analysis
Twenty-eight lectures that Freud delivered at the University of Vienna in the winter terms of 1915–16 and 1916–17 to an audience of physicians and lay listeners, published in three parts by Hugo Heller in 1916–17. They became his most widely read general account of psychoanalysis. The first part treats parapraxes, such as slips and errors, as acts that carry meaning. The second sets out the theory of dreams: the dream censorship, symbolism, the dream-work and wish-fulfilment. The third offers a general theory of the neuroses, moving from the sense of symptoms, resistance and repression through the sexual life of human beings, the development of the libido and its organisations, regression and fixation, and the paths by which symptoms form, to anxiety, narcissism and the libido theory, and finally transference and analytic therapy.
- 1973
The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis
The seminar Lacan gave in 1964 at the École Normale Supérieure, after the International Psychoanalytical Association had made his removal from the list of training analysts the condition for admitting the Société Française de Psychanalyse. Established by Jacques-Alain Miller, it was published by Éditions du Seuil in 1973 as Book XI of Le Séminaire, and in English in Alan Sheridan's translation. Speaking to a larger and less specialised audience than before, Lacan set out to bring coherence to four concepts on which psychoanalysis rests: the unconscious, repetition, transference and the drive. He opens with his 'excommunication', and moves from asking whether psychoanalysis is a science to asking what kind of science could include it. The seminar treats the unconscious and repetition, the gaze as objet petit a, transference and the drive, and the field of the Other, where alienation, aphanisis and the subject supposed to know are taken up.
See also
Linked from
People
References
- Fragment of an Analysis of a Case of Hysteria1905Evidence for a relation
- Rationalization in Every-Day Life1908Evidence for a relation
- Introductory Lectures on Psycho-Analysis1917Evidence for a relation
- The Psychopathology of Everyday Life1901Evidence for a relation
- The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis1973Evidence for a relation