peripeteia

Noun

peripeteia (countable and uncountable, plural peripeteias)

1. A sudden reversal of fortune as a plot point in Classical tragedy.
   • If we recoil with the consternation of surprise at such a conclusion, it is no defense to invoke as parallel the peripeteia by which Euripides in his Ion leads us to expect one ending yet effects another.1924, Herbert Weir Smyth, “IV. Prometheus”, in Aeschylean Tragedy, page 112
2. (broadly) Any sudden change in circumstances; a crisis.
   • 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.1965, John Fowles, The Magus
   • They were to bestride the Algerian scene like demigods until the tragic peripeteia of 1961 […]1977, Alistair Horne, A Savage War of Peace, New York Review books, published 2006, page 167
3. A turning point in psychosocial development.
   • 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...1989, Elizabeth Abel, Virginia Woolf and the Fictions of Psychoanalysis, →ISBN, page 6