Understand the term the corrections and you'll understand The Corrections—it's as simple as that.
The phrase—like many in the novel—is rooted in financial terminology. It's a play off the concept of a market correction, which—according to CNBC—is a "decline or downward movement of a stock […] that stops an upward trend." Our modern free-market economy is founded on the idea that the market will naturally correct itself if prices get too out-of-whack from actual values.
So what does this esoteric money-talk have to do with the Lamberts?
Franzen takes the idea of a market correction and applies it to our inner lives. So instead of referring to a sudden decline in the market, a correction comes to be defined as a sudden personal revelation that upends a long-held belief about one's identity.
So we see Enid waiting—in vain—for Alfred to correct himself and become the type of man she wanted to marry. We see Chip experience the corrections himself, shedding the east-coast-intellectual disguise he'd been wearing to reveal a nice Midwestern boy on the inside. And Alfred—a lifelong control freak—is corrected when he loses the power to distinguish the real from the imaginary.
See, when push comes to shove, the corrections in this book are all about self-denial. Enid doesn't want to admit that she and Alfred were never compatible, Chip doesn't want to admit that he's not a creative genius, and Alfred doesn't want to admit that he can't control everything.
That last part is important—if there's one thing we learn, it's that you can't control the corrections. Sometimes the corrections come unannounced and sometimes they don't show up at all, but you're never going to go wrong by investing a little bit of self-honesty into your personal economy. That stock never drops.