In a chapter from his forthcoming book, published in nlr 91, Sebastiano Timpanaro attacks the methods and conclusions of Freud’s chapter on ‘The Forgetting of Foreign Words’ from The Psychopathology of Everyday Life. His attack depends on a number of serious misconceptions.
1. Freud’s example of forgetting is not simply an example of inadvertent ‘textual corruption’ in the broad sense used by Timpanaro. It involved ‘tip of the tongue’ forgetting—the subject knew he had forgotten a word, and was worried by this. He was unable to remember it, though he knew it well and recognized it immediately with relief when it was supplied by Freud.