overdetermination

[oh-ver-di-tur-muh-ney-shuhn]

noun

Psychoanalysis.

1. the concept that a single emotional symptom or event, as a dream or a slip of the tongue, may be caused by more than one factor.

Word History and Origins

Origin of overdetermination¹

1915–20; over- + determination, translation of German Überdeterminierung (Freud)

Example Sentences

One might take the fact that Roe relied on multiple constitutional provisions as proof of its overdetermination.

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Maxwell spent more than a year undergoing psychoanalysis with Theodore Reik, and while his fictions are hardly Freudian case studies, they are nonetheless profoundly analytical, propelled by a spirit of inquiry more than by the mechanics of plot, and animated by a belief in overdetermination.

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Criminologists face a problem that’s common in many fields: overdetermination.

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The movie’s narrowly dramatic technique, with its curtly informational scenes, is matched by the emotional overdetermination of the images.

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“Basically, I wanted to be awkward. I could take advantage of fiction’s built-in tolerance of overdetermination, in which multiple possible causes for an outcome can be allowed to exist alongside each other without being resolved, or even given definitive weights.”

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