A Parapraxis (n.) is a slip of the tongue, a mishearing, a temporary forgetting, or the loss of some object which reveals unconscious conflicts. They also reveal that thought derives from 'a source outside of speech'.
A Parapraxis (n.) can side with good sense: forgetting the clever remark spared Ferenczi from saying it before the one woman it would offend.
A Parapraxis (n.) may come in pairs, the second guarding the first: she forgot her friend Selma's appointment, then forgot the singer Selma Kurz's first name, lest it remind her.
A Parapraxis (n.) uses phonetic law only as ready-made machinery a remoter motive borrows for its convenience — the invisible helper behind the scenes.
Parapraxis (n.) made a convulsive attempt to shift bad news from husband to wife — my eye simply deleted the “Dr.” that stood in the way.
Parapraxis (n.) showed Bleuler his own name two lines down where it said “blood corpuscles” — he had just read a comment on bad scientific style he did not feel free of.
Parapraxis (n.) has its whole theory in one line — “He had read Homer so much that he always read ‘Agamemnon’ instead of ‘angenommen’”: the reader's preparedness alters the text.
Parapraxis (n.) gave the man whose bowels were timed by his doctor “Closet-House” on a sign, and he was briefly delighted — until it became “Corset-House”.
Parapraxis (n.) presupposes a reading: the distressing text must first be correctly understood and judged before it can be corrected into a denial — consciousness learns nothing of the first reading.
A Parapraxis (n.) that is serious — a deadly prescription — is produced in exactly the same way as an innocent one.
Parapraxis (n.) is forgetting where something has been put — Freud lost the catalogue of an author he admired because a friend said the man wrote just like him, and an old snub was reopened.
Parapraxis (n.) hid the cold wife's gift-book for months; the night he came home grateful for how she nursed his mother, he opened a drawer with somnambulistic certainty and there it lay.
Parapraxis (n.) shows an unconscious dexterity: the patient angry at the holiday break and the fee hid his keys so cleverly between two books that he could never hide them as well on purpose.
Parapraxis (n.) served the husband who didn't want to go to the party: he locked the key inside the trunk with his dress-suit.
Parapraxis (n.) seen across many cases makes it hard to believe anything is ever mislaid except by an unconscious intention.
A Parapraxis (n.) is especially apt for self-reproach: the present mistake represents a mistake committed elsewhere — the tuning fork for the hammer meant 'You ass, don't diagnose hysteria again where there's an incurable illness!'
A Parapraxis (n.) lies in the sidewalk dance of dodging that ends face to face with a stranger: 'getting in someone's way' is an old provocative behaviour pursuing sexual aims behind a mask of clumsiness.
A Parapraxis (n.) made me, full of a patient's Oedipus dream, put morphine in my ninety-year-old patient's eye — I had 'done violence to the old woman' (sich an der Alten vergreifen).
A Parapraxis (n.) scorns even the pretext of clumsiness — done 'without thinking', permitted because unsuspected, and so it must stay unobtrusive and slight.
A Parapraxis (n.) expresses something the agent does not suspect in it and means to keep to himself — it plays the part of a symptom.