Overdetermination [Überdeterminierung]

Literary/ Cultural Context Note

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  • The Literary Encyclopedia. WORLD HISTORY AND IDEAS: A CROSS-CULTURAL VOLUME.

Domains

  • Concept (psychoanalysis)

Dates

  • Date of occurrence 1895

Places

The idea of over-determination was one of Freud’s earliest and most seminal recognitions, first appearing in his earliest work Studies in Hysteria (1895) where he showed that the hysterical symptom is the consequence of many different levels of causation. Freud borrowed the term for geometry in which discipline two lines are said to determine a point and three lines to over-determine it. In his discussion of the “dream-work” in Book VI of The Interpretation of Dreams (1900), Freud maintained that “Not only are the elements of a dream determined by the dream-thoughts many times over, but the individual dream thoughts are represented in the dream by several elements. Associative paths lead from one element of the …

484 words

Citation: Clark, Robert. "Overdetermination [Überdeterminierung]". The Literary Encyclopedia. First published 22 October 2005 [https://staging.litencyc.com/php/stopics.php?rec=true&UID=802, accessed 23 November 2024.]

802 Overdetermination [Überdeterminierung] 2 Historical context notes are intended to give basic and preliminary information on a topic. In some cases they will be expanded into longer entries as the Literary Encyclopedia evolves.

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