From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.
Overdetermination, the idea that a single observed effect is determined by multiple causes at once (any one of which alone might be enough to account for the effect), was originally a key concept of Sigmund Freud's psychoanalysis.
Freud wrote in The Interpretation of Dreams that many features of dreams were usually "overdetermined," in that they were caused by multiple factors in the life of the dreamer, from the "residue of the day" (superficial memories of recent life) to deeply repressed traumas and unconscious wishes. Freud favored interpretations which accounted for such features not only once, but many times, in the context of various levels and complexes of the dreamer's psyche.
The concept was later borrowed for a variety of other realms of thought.
The New Critic I.A. Richards used the idea of overdetermination in order to explain the importance of ambiguity in rhetoric, the philosophy of language, and literary criticism.
The Marxist philosopher Louis Althusser imported the concept into Marxist politics in an influential essay, "Contradiction and Overdetermination." Althusser used the idea of overdetermination as a way of thinking about the multiple, often opposed, forces active at once in any political situation, without falling into an over-simple idea of these forces being simply "contradictory."
