Sebastiano Timpanaro’s piece on The Psychopathology of Everyday Life published in nlr 91 under the title ‘The Freudian Slip’ does not live up to the editorial promise of a ‘highly original stance’ on Freud. On the contrary, the article published amounts to a populist attack on psycho-analysis reminiscent of those made by positivists.
This is unfortunate since, whatever the role of philology as a discipline, the particular scholarship deployed by Timpanaro could have been used to strengthen Freud’s argument by making it more specific; in the very area, in other words, where Timpanaro criticizes it. Timpanaro claims that the Freudian explanation cannot show why aliquis was forgotten rather than some other word. Clearly, Freud was not concerned with this but with what the slip revealed. In any case, Timpanaro supplies half the argument by showing that aliquis is, as it were, the weak link in the sentence: aliquis is unusual in this context, a certain basic sense is left in the line without it. Freud has already provided the other half of the argument earlier in the book: ‘It is probable indeed that a suppressed element always strives to assert itself elsewhere, but is successful in this only when suitable conditions meet it half way.’ (Standard Edition, Vol. VI, p. 6).