How far apart indeed are the method of textual analysis employed by Sebastiano Timpanaro (nlr 91) and the method of psychoanalysis evolved by Sigmund Freud! For Timpanaro, a corruption is a departure from an original which has to be discovered and restored and raised to its former level, from which it has been corrupted. The original must have been correct, so that the alteration is inferior to it. The omission of aliquis from Virgil’s line is thus a corruption.
For Freud, however, the omission of aliquis is ‘anti-corruption’. To Freud’s companion, the word had associations connecting it with a topic to do with death and sexuality. These were the ‘corrupt’ elements which the young man wanted to keep out of his own mind and which, in undergoing this ‘erasure’, dragged with them, as it were, the word with which they had become connected. Hence the omission is from the psychoanalytical point of view an ‘anti-corruption’ measure. The textual analyst restores his text to its uncorrupt original. The psychoanalyst restores his ‘text’ (the slip, the neurotic symptom, the dream) to its ‘corrupt’ original (‘corrupt’ here referring to a subjective evaluation by the person himself).