Signorelli parapraxis

The Signorelli parapraxis represents the first and best known example of a parapraxis and its analysis in Freud's The Psychopathology of Everyday Life. The parapraxis centers on a word finding problem and the production of substitutes. Freud couldn't recall the name (Signorelli) of the painter of the Orvieto frescos and produced as substitutes the names of two painters Botticelli and Boltraffio. Freud's analysis shows what associative processes had linked Signorelli to Botticelli and Boltraffio. The analysis has been criticised by linguists and others.

One important ingredient in Freud's analysis was the North-Italian village Trafoi where he received the message of the suicide of one of his patients, struggling with sexual problems. Without Trafoi the substitute Boltraffio rhyming to it would be incomprehensible. Freud links Trafoi to the theme 'death and sexuality', a theme preceding the word finding problem in a conversation Freud had during a trip by train through Bosnia-Herzegowina.

The second important ingredient in Freud's analysis is the extraction of an Italian word signor from the forgotten name Signorelli. Herr, the German counterpart of Signor, is then linked to Herzegowina and the word Herr occurring, as Freud tells us, in the conversation.

Freud denies the relevance of the content of the frescos. Nevertheless, psychoanalysts have pursued their investigations particularly into this direction, finding however no new explanation of the parapraxis. Jacques Lacan suggested that the parapraxis may be an act of self-forgetting.

The first critique to Freud came from Emil Kraepelin, who in a postscript to his 1906 monograph on language disturbances in dreams, relates a dream involving Trafoi. The dream centers around a neologism Trafei, which Kraepelin links to Trafoi. The dream may be seen as an implicit critique on Freud's analysis. Italian trofei is associated to Trafei in the same way as Trafoi (cf. van Ooijen, 1996) and clarifies Kraepelin's dream. The meaning of trofei reads in German Siegeszeichen (victory-signs) and this German word together with Latin signum clearly links to Freud's first name (Engels, 2006, p. 22-24).

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