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This paper was written in honour of Richard Sterba on the occasion of his seventy-fifth birthday and published in the Annual of Psycho-analysis, vol. III, New York: International Universities Press, 1975.
In his paper ‘The Multiple Determinants of a Minor Accident’, Richard Sterba (1972) presents an intriguing inquiry into a parapraxis which he concludes by pointing to a gap in our theoretical understanding. As he will remember, I was so fascinated by his paper that I wrote to him about it, yet I did not know then what it really was that held me so much in its grip. When invited to contribute to this Festschrift, I knew without a moment’s hesitation that I had to return to this paper, to take up the challenge of the questioning note on which it ends, and to find out what it was that so exercised my mind about it. I am thus doubly grateful for the invitation.
Like so many psychological facts, parapraxes were generally neglected until Freud turned the torch of his scientific exploration on this phenomenon and brought to light its hidden meaningfulness and psychic function. The first generation of psychoanalysts was obviously fired by The Psychopathology of Everyday Life, followed Freud’s example by analysing slips and bungled actions that came their way, and sent him instances to swell his collection. Later generations of analysts, however, have neglected the problem parapraxes pose. We seem content to look for the hidden meaning, as Freud has shown, but so far as I know, there has been no attempt at correlating parapraxes to specific aspects of psychoanalytic theory. All the more welcome is Sterba’s paper, that points to this gap, explores the part which the ego and regression play in parapraxes, and offers an answer, albeit tentatively.