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(a) German Editions:
1935 Die Feinheit Einer Fehlhandlung Almanach 1936, 15-17.
1950 Die Feinheit Einer Fehlhandlung G.W., 16, 37-9.
(b) English Translations:
‘The Fineness of Parapraxia’ 1939 Psychoanal. Rev., 26 (2), 153-4. (Tr. A. N. Foxe.)
‘The Subtleties of a Parapraxis’ 1950 C.P., 5, 313-15. (Tr. James Strachey.)
The present translation, with an altered title, is a corrected version of the one published in 1950.
This was a late, but not the last, contribution by Freud to his favourite topic of the psychopathology of everyday life. (Freud, 1901b.) He returned to it once again in his unfinished ‘Elementary Lessons’ (1940b [1938]).
I was preparing a birthday present for a woman friend1—a small engraved gem for insertion into a ring. It was fixed in the centre of a piece of stout cardboard and on this I wrote the following words: ‘Voucher for the supply by Messrs. L., jewellers, of a gold ring … for the attached stone bearing an engraved ship with sail and oars.’ But at the point at which I have here left a gap, between ‘ring’ and ‘for’ there stood a word which I was obliged to cross out since it was entirely irrelevant. It was the little word ‘bis’ [the German for ‘till’]. Why should I have written it at all?
When I read the short inscription through, I was struck by the fact that it contained the word ‘für’ [‘for’] twice in rapid succession: ‘for the supply’—‘for the attached stone’. That sounded ugly and should be avoided. It then occurred to me that ‘bis’ had been substituted for ‘für’ in an attempt to escape this stylistic awkwardness. No doubt that was so; but it was an attempt that made use of remarkably inadequate means. The preposition ‘bis’ was quite out of place in this context and could not possibly be substituted for the necessary ‘für’. So why precisely ‘bis’?