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Hysteron Proteron, or ‘Woman First’

1986; Edinburgh University Press; Volume: 8; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês

10.3366/olr.1986.007

1757-1634

Richard Rand,

Psychotherapy Techniques and Applications

The term 'Hysteron Proteron' comes to us from classical rhetoric. It refers to a figure of speech, a trope, in which two terms are reversed according to the sequence, the order, temporal, spatial, causal, in which you ordinarily find them. It is a term of language that deliberately places the cart before the horse. Typical examples include precisely the cart before the horse. Another example often cited in dictionaries is the phrase, thunder and lightning. Everyone knows that lightning comes first in the natural sequence. But no-one ever says lightning and thunder. More broadly the religious teaching that the last should be first and the first should be last is itself a hysteron proteron. and finally, or if you prefer, first and foremost, there is Wordsworth's and Freud's dictum that the child is father of the man, from which springs all that is truly modern, to my thinking, in literature and in psychoanalysis. The least then to be said of hysteron proteron is that it is a very rich trope indeed. Let me add that a hysteron proteron is more than a metalepsis. Metalepsis simply means reversal, though the two are effectively the same in their logic. It is more than a metalepsis because it not only mentions the reversal, leaping across or back, but enacts it rather like an oxymoron. It puts last, i.e. hysteron, first and it puts the first, i.e. proteron, last. Were these remarks to abide by that rigorous logic, the title of the paper would serve as the text and the text of the paper would serve as the title. Now I should like to continue with some preliminary remarks as well on the first of our two terms, the hysteron. In the matter of Freud, as we all know, our word hysteria comes from the Greek word for womb. Granted that this is so, I am struck by the fact that we never hear about the etymology within Greek of the Greek word for womb. We do