Ever do something that seemed spontaneous only to have people say you were "impulsive"?  Or do something that seemed "decisive" only to have people say you were "dogmatic"?  In these cases your actions were "transvaluated".  What seemed positive to you when you did it was put in negative words.

A "transvaluation" is a reframing that shifts the evaluative connotation from negative to positive or from positive to negative (for a negative transvaluation).  Transvaluations are made possible by the fact that our natural language seems to have two vocabularies for describing things, one positive and one negative.  Look
 
 

It is as though our ordinary language contains both a positive vocabulary and a negative one and that either one can be used to refer to much the same thing.  I call this the "transvaluative structure of language."  The transvaluative structure of language is what makes it  possible for anything you do that you think is positive to be described negatively by someone else.  Ouch!

For the most part, transvaluation is talked about in passing and without giving it a name (such as "transvaluation").  For example, in Bk I or Rhetoric, Aristotle says
 
 

Aristotle, however, did not explore the implications of his observation.  In fact, he seems to minimize them.  Plato tries to draw distinctions between the different transvaluative alternatives.

In more modern times, see Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil (1973, pp. 2, 34, 47, 200-201).  Jeremy Bentham talks about transvaluation (although he does not call it this) .   Dean Peabody did research on the concept in psychology (although he did not call it this).

The word transvalue and transvaluation are in larger dictionaries.  Webster's New International (1934) lists these terms as:
 

The term also appears every now and then in the journal literature. For example, see:

Justad, Mark J. A transvaluation of phallic masculinity: writing with and through the male body.    Journal of Men's Studies v4, n4 (May, 1996):355-75.

Schaefer, D. L. (1979). Good, the Beautiful, and the Useful - Montaigne transvaluation of values.  American political Science Review, 73(1), 139-154.

I have a several  papers discussing transvaluation and its relevance to psychological research and therapy.
See:

Shawver, Lois.  (1977a). Research variables in psychology and the logic of their creation.  Psychiatry,  40, 1-16.

    In this paper I discuss transvaluation in the context of psychological research and research  philosophy.   Suppose a researcher wanted to study what caused people to be "decisive."  A little reflection shows that afterwards someone could transvaluate the findings and see that the researcher has shown what causes people to be "dogmatic" or "authoritarian."

    I believe that all of our research is riddled with this problem.

   In this paper I also introduced the research solution of using a "metalanguage" to research these issues.  I have since abandoned hope that this solution would be very effective to study transvaluation.  See Shawver (1978) and (1977b) below for research in which I tried to do explore transvaluation.

 Shawver, Lois.  (1983). Harnessing the power of interpretive language."  Psychotherapy: Theory,   Research and Practice),  20(1), 3-11.

    Transvaluation, I claim, is an important an overlooked dimension of therapy language.  In this  paper I relate the concept to passages in Freud and to more recent theorizing in the literature.

Shawver, Lois and Lubach, John.  (1977). "Value attribution in group psychotherapy." Journal of Consulting and Clinical Psychology,  45(2), 228-236.

   I was unable to discover moments that were transvaluative in the group therapy sessions that I sampled, but I did discover a profile of value attribution in these sessions.  Therapists generally were negative or pejorative in their descriptions of their clients, as were the other group members.  People being discussed were generally self-excusing.

  I later found in unpublished studies that people were much more self-critical when they were  described positively by others than when they were described negatively.

Shawver, Lois and Pines, Ayala. (1978).  "Value-attribution in encounter groups."  Small Group  Behavior,  9(1), 14-22.

   Pines and I found that encounter group leaders were generally negative of the group participants  just as were group therapy leaders.  And, like group therapy participants, encounter group participants generally put down the others in the group.  People who were talked about were generally self-excusing.

Also, look for:

Shawver, L. (1998.). Postmodernizing the Unconscious.  The American Journal of  Psychoanalysis. 58(4), 361-390.,