peripeteia

• peripetia, peripety

From Late Latin peripetia, and its source Ancient Greek περιπέτεια (peripéteia), from περιπίπτω (peripíptō, “to change suddenly”), from περί (perí, “round, around, about”) + the stem of πίπτω (píptō, “to fall”).

• (Received Pronunciation) IPA^(key): /pɛɹɪpɪˈtɪə/, /pɛɹɪpɪˈtaɪə/
• (General American) IPA^(key): /pɛɹɪpɪˈtiə/, /pɛɹɪpɪˈteɪə/

peripeteia (countable and uncountable, plural peripeteias)

1. (drama) A sudden reversal of fortune as a plot point in Classical tragedy.
2. (by extension) Any sudden change in circumstances; a crisis. [from 16th c.]
   • 1965, John Fowles, The Magus:

     Once more I was a man in a myth, incapable of understanding it, but somehow aware that understanding it meant it must continue, however sinister its peripeteia.

   • 1977, Alistair Horne, A Savage War of Peace, New York Review books, published 2006, page 167:

     They were to bestride the Algerian scene like demigods until the tragic peripeteia of 1961 […]

3. (psychoanalysis) A turning point in psychosocial development. [from 1960s]
   • 1989, Elizabeth Abel, Virginia Woolf and the Fictions of Psychoanalysis, →ISBN, page 6:

     The visual moment whose consequences Freud began to ponder in the essay on the phallic stage has evolved into a peripeteia: "Some day or other it happens that the child whose own penis is such a proud possession obtains a sight of the genital parts of a little girl; he must then become convinced of the absence of a penis in a creature so like himeself. With this, however, the loss of his own penis becomes imaginable, and the threat of castration achieves its delayed effect."

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