Please be kind enough and inform me what wxactly means parapraxia?

-- Tolina VASSILAKAKI (Tolina.Vassilakaki@ddb.gr), May 21, 2003

Answers

According to Sue Walrond-Skynner's Dictionary of Psychotherapy (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul), parapraxis is a "slip of the tongue or of the pen, momentary amnesia regarding names, and other errors which, according to Freud (1901), demonstrate the intrusion of -unconscious- mental processes into the -conscious- world of the normal individual. Freud suggested that -ceonsorship- operates in some of these situations to repress material which is unacceptable to the ego and thus brings about the 'mistake.'" (p, 247)

You might also check the answers to the question about Freudian slips at http://hv.greenspun.com/bboard/q-and-a-fetch-msg.tcl? msg_id=009voc

-- Hendrika Vande Kemp (hendrika@earthlink.net), May 21, 2003.

"Parapraxia" is made up of two morphemes: "para-" and "praxis." "Para" means "substitute" and "praxis" means "action/movement/behavior". The pre-fix "para-" is Greek for "a substitute", such as "paramilitary" (substitute for military), "paralegal" (substitute for a lawyer), "paramedic" (substitute for a physician). The term "paraphasia" in general means some sort of substitution in aphasic language: phoneme substitution, word substitution, etc.

"Parapraxis" is the very general term for some switch in an action, behavior, movement, or a substitutive "slip-of-the-tongue." Freud was one of the first to make use of "parapraxis" in his analysis of errors, both in non-pathologically involved subjects and brain- damaged subjects, and as a result Freud was one of the first to consider the relations between slips-of-the-tongue and paraphasias in aphasic language. The notion of "parapraxia" is likely to be deeply embedded in evolutionary theory of human cognitive processing, and is likely to be found in the work of Herbert Spencer in his development of comparative descriptions of pathology and normality - of disease and health. The evolution of the mind (as well as the body) involves the growing appreciation of the similarities of substitive errors in non-pathological states as well as in pathological states.

Again, the modern terminology for "paraprasixas" are terms such as: slips-of-the-tongue; action slips; paraphasias (sound substitutions and word substitutions) in brain-damaged language output (aphasia).

Hugh Buckingham Professor of linguistic aphasiology Louisiana State University Baton Rouge, LA 70803

-- Hugh Buckingham (hbuck@lsu.edu), September 23, 2004.

'Parapraxia' is the general term used to describe what is also known as a 'freudian slip'. This can refer to a slip of the tongue or pen, or selective amnesia (the forgetting of specfic events/memories). Freud believed parapraxia to be the unconscious mind simply tying to manifest one's true feelings.

-- Dr. David Molyneux (dmolyneux87@hotmail.com), March 16, 2005.