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On Freudian Slip: Psychoanalysis and Textual Criticism
Book by Timpanaro, Sebastiano
236 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1974
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157 people want to read
About the author
Sebastiano Timpanaro
34 books2 followersSebastiano Timpanaro was an Italian classical philologist, essayist, and literary critic. He was also a long-time Marxist who made important contributions to left-wing political causes. He was an atheist.
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Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews
May 23, 2012
I am of two minds concerning Timpanaro's polemic against the Freudian theory of parapraxes. In his arguments based on the technical offerings of textual criticism there is much to appreciate. Being written, and translated to English, in the mid 1970s the arguments posed seem to come from an experience of the psychoanalytic culture that utilizes the concepts behind parapraxes in a rather rigid fashion. Certainly, in this regard a criticism is welcomed. Slips, dreams, and jokes that may have been utilized by some as unassailable evidence for some sort of inferred trauma is a disingenuous use Freudian theory. Today, not many would argue against the alternate possibilities that Timpanaro explicates. I would imagine that most contemporary analysts would take Timpanaro's awareness of possibility much further.
The other Timpanaro I observe in this text is one who utilizes hypothetical musings and inferences with little basis to expand entire arguments. The conclusions that are arrived at in this way seem to have an agenda to undermine the Freudian observation as a whole, rather than offering a coexisting alternative and exploring the meaning in context.
Sometimes a cigar is just a cigarette. This has meaning, but it doesn't necessarily mean its important.
The other Timpanaro I observe in this text is one who utilizes hypothetical musings and inferences with little basis to expand entire arguments. The conclusions that are arrived at in this way seem to have an agenda to undermine the Freudian observation as a whole, rather than offering a coexisting alternative and exploring the meaning in context.
Sometimes a cigar is just a cigarette. This has meaning, but it doesn't necessarily mean its important.
March 15, 2023
This is an odd, unexpected but amazing book—there is no introduction, no translator is named, and the technical topic of "textual criticism" is a clear outlier in Verso's "radical thinkers" series. But I am very glad that this translation was produced and I hope that more of Timpanaro's works will be made available in English. When I was a PhD student in classical philology, I remember several people expressing their desire for a biography of Timpanaro, and this book demonstrates the need for further study of his ideas and legacy.
Timpanaro was a fervent Marxist and an astute textual critic, and these two ideological and professional commitments form the pillars of his critique of Freudian psychoanalysis. As a Marxist, he saw Freudian psychotherapy as an insidious form of bourgeois propaganda. Instead of addressing the social and political conditions of individual suffering, the Freudian analyst diverts attention to infant trauma and sexual neurosis. Instead of critiquing the institutions that cause repression (the state, the church, the family), the analyst focuses on the maladaptions of the subconscious. And in so doing, the analyst also legitimates the structures of society: Freud's idea of the Oedipal Complex ironically makes the family unit an anthropological datum; it posits that all sons must rebel against their fathers and desire their mothers, despite the fact that not all human societies have mother-father families and not everyone grows up with a father or mother. Freud analyzes middle-class professional men and treats their hangups as psychological universals. As Timpanaro writes,
In Timpanaro's critique, there is nothing outré or radical about Freud at all. His analysis and treatment of the individual psyche only vindicates and universalizes the capitalist and patriarchal conditions of the middle-class family. As another example, Freud observes that soldiers who forget their duty are punished harshly, whether or not they forgot deliberately, and Freud justifies this because on some level the "forgetting" signals some contempt for military authority (what a bizarre apology for an inhumane system!) Even in disclaiming the capricious brutalism of civilization, Freud defends and exonerates the status quo. The job of the psychoanalyst is simply to reconcile the patient to their social order. In one of his more caustic quips, Timpanaro notes that despite all the political upheavals of the 20th century, not once did Freud record an instance of the word "revolution". Freud can only see sexual repression, never proletariat angst.
As a textual critic, Timpanaro has more specific objections to Freud's theory of the "parapraxis" or "slip of the tongue". According to Freud's theory, in moments of distraction or mental weariness, the subconscious might disturb a sentence, withholding the intended word or inserting a different word, in a way that betrays deeper psychic anxieties. There is a ring of plausibility to Freud's theory (Timpanaro discusses the case of a Jewish father in Nazi Germany who accidentally refers to his children as "Juden" instead of "Jungen") but it's not satisfactory as an explanation of all slips. As Timpanaro discusses in deeper detail, slips of the tongue are not so different from the kinds of textual errors that medieval scribes often made (banalization, substituting a more common or more easily understood word; haplography, omitting a repeated word or syllable). Most slips of the tongue can be understood as the result of phonemic similarities.
Timpanaro's fundamental critique is that Freud's theories are not scientific. In his first chapter, Timpanaro discusses one of Freud's examples of a young Jewish friend who tried to recall a line of Virgil (exoriare aliquis nostris ex ossibus ultor) but forgot the exact wording and said instead exoriare ex nostris ossibus ultor. Freud saw the omission of "aliquis" (someone) as significant and asked the young man to think what words came to mind when he reflected on that word. The young man replied "Reliquien" (relics), "Liquidaten" and "Flüssigkeit" (liquid) and then by free association he remembered the relics he recently saw of a young boy who was reputedly killed by Jews, and then free-wheeling more, he recalled the miracle of San Gennaro in which the clotted blood of the saint liquefies at the same time each year. After more prompting, the young man confessed that he had been concerned that he had recently gotten his girlfriend pregnant—and so the omission of "aliquis" actually discloses a subconscious desire for his girlfriend to procure an abortion. But as Timpanaro notes, the alterations here are perfectly explicable as natural banalizations (he removes the "aliquis" which is hard to construe with the second-person "exoriare" and he transposes the adjective "nostris" so that it goes next to the noun "ossibus", even though these changes disrupt the ictus of the sentence). As Timpanaro notes, Freud could have arrived at the same conclusion by any number of alterations to the line. Freud's analysis is an unfalsifiable theory that runs contrary to obvious grammatical explanations.
Far from being a pedantic work of abstruse philology, this book is a call for new kind of Marxism, of scientific socialism, scientific materialism and a proper investigation of human cognition and the causes of neurosis and unhappiness. And in an odd way, textual criticism is part of that science. While Timpanaro's explanation of slips also resorts to subconscious causes, it is a mode of analysis devoid of any kind of pseudoscientific mysticism—there's no Romantic idea of Nature or Kantian Idealism; there's no spiritualist doctrine of vitalism or Lamarckian theory of teleology, nor any simplistic reductivism of the mind to ontogenetic mechanics; nor is there any preconceived idea of Platonic hedonism. Textual criticism may be an old discipline "exempt from innovative impulses" but its method of close reading is impervious to fanciful theorizing. Every case of textual corruption must be considered on its own. In the end, Timpanaro's book is written not for Freudian psychoanalysts but for other leftwing Marxists, calling for a return to scientific experiment and an eschewal of idealism and dogma.
Timpanaro's style is at once learned and grandiloquent, a scholarly investigation and a cri de coeur. In one of its most sublime moments of rhetoric that feels relevant and timely today, Timpanaro writes
This is an important book, and I hope Verso prints more of Timpanaro.
Timpanaro was a fervent Marxist and an astute textual critic, and these two ideological and professional commitments form the pillars of his critique of Freudian psychoanalysis. As a Marxist, he saw Freudian psychotherapy as an insidious form of bourgeois propaganda. Instead of addressing the social and political conditions of individual suffering, the Freudian analyst diverts attention to infant trauma and sexual neurosis. Instead of critiquing the institutions that cause repression (the state, the church, the family), the analyst focuses on the maladaptions of the subconscious. And in so doing, the analyst also legitimates the structures of society: Freud's idea of the Oedipal Complex ironically makes the family unit an anthropological datum; it posits that all sons must rebel against their fathers and desire their mothers, despite the fact that not all human societies have mother-father families and not everyone grows up with a father or mother. Freud analyzes middle-class professional men and treats their hangups as psychological universals. As Timpanaro writes,
The neo-bourgeois of this sort has understood that just as Christ did not come into the world to abolish the ancient Laws but to accomplish them, so psychoanalysis does not demistify bourgeois values in order to destroy them but to reinstate and consolidate them.
In Timpanaro's critique, there is nothing outré or radical about Freud at all. His analysis and treatment of the individual psyche only vindicates and universalizes the capitalist and patriarchal conditions of the middle-class family. As another example, Freud observes that soldiers who forget their duty are punished harshly, whether or not they forgot deliberately, and Freud justifies this because on some level the "forgetting" signals some contempt for military authority (what a bizarre apology for an inhumane system!) Even in disclaiming the capricious brutalism of civilization, Freud defends and exonerates the status quo. The job of the psychoanalyst is simply to reconcile the patient to their social order. In one of his more caustic quips, Timpanaro notes that despite all the political upheavals of the 20th century, not once did Freud record an instance of the word "revolution". Freud can only see sexual repression, never proletariat angst.
As a textual critic, Timpanaro has more specific objections to Freud's theory of the "parapraxis" or "slip of the tongue". According to Freud's theory, in moments of distraction or mental weariness, the subconscious might disturb a sentence, withholding the intended word or inserting a different word, in a way that betrays deeper psychic anxieties. There is a ring of plausibility to Freud's theory (Timpanaro discusses the case of a Jewish father in Nazi Germany who accidentally refers to his children as "Juden" instead of "Jungen") but it's not satisfactory as an explanation of all slips. As Timpanaro discusses in deeper detail, slips of the tongue are not so different from the kinds of textual errors that medieval scribes often made (banalization, substituting a more common or more easily understood word; haplography, omitting a repeated word or syllable). Most slips of the tongue can be understood as the result of phonemic similarities.
Timpanaro's fundamental critique is that Freud's theories are not scientific. In his first chapter, Timpanaro discusses one of Freud's examples of a young Jewish friend who tried to recall a line of Virgil (exoriare aliquis nostris ex ossibus ultor) but forgot the exact wording and said instead exoriare ex nostris ossibus ultor. Freud saw the omission of "aliquis" (someone) as significant and asked the young man to think what words came to mind when he reflected on that word. The young man replied "Reliquien" (relics), "Liquidaten" and "Flüssigkeit" (liquid) and then by free association he remembered the relics he recently saw of a young boy who was reputedly killed by Jews, and then free-wheeling more, he recalled the miracle of San Gennaro in which the clotted blood of the saint liquefies at the same time each year. After more prompting, the young man confessed that he had been concerned that he had recently gotten his girlfriend pregnant—and so the omission of "aliquis" actually discloses a subconscious desire for his girlfriend to procure an abortion. But as Timpanaro notes, the alterations here are perfectly explicable as natural banalizations (he removes the "aliquis" which is hard to construe with the second-person "exoriare" and he transposes the adjective "nostris" so that it goes next to the noun "ossibus", even though these changes disrupt the ictus of the sentence). As Timpanaro notes, Freud could have arrived at the same conclusion by any number of alterations to the line. Freud's analysis is an unfalsifiable theory that runs contrary to obvious grammatical explanations.
Far from being a pedantic work of abstruse philology, this book is a call for new kind of Marxism, of scientific socialism, scientific materialism and a proper investigation of human cognition and the causes of neurosis and unhappiness. And in an odd way, textual criticism is part of that science. While Timpanaro's explanation of slips also resorts to subconscious causes, it is a mode of analysis devoid of any kind of pseudoscientific mysticism—there's no Romantic idea of Nature or Kantian Idealism; there's no spiritualist doctrine of vitalism or Lamarckian theory of teleology, nor any simplistic reductivism of the mind to ontogenetic mechanics; nor is there any preconceived idea of Platonic hedonism. Textual criticism may be an old discipline "exempt from innovative impulses" but its method of close reading is impervious to fanciful theorizing. Every case of textual corruption must be considered on its own. In the end, Timpanaro's book is written not for Freudian psychoanalysts but for other leftwing Marxists, calling for a return to scientific experiment and an eschewal of idealism and dogma.
Timpanaro's style is at once learned and grandiloquent, a scholarly investigation and a cri de coeur. In one of its most sublime moments of rhetoric that feels relevant and timely today, Timpanaro writes
Since the turn of the century, the bourgeoisie has known and felt that it deserved to die. At times it reacts to this knowledge with intoxicated violence and brutal activism, with a parade of jingoistic and anti-decadent mythologies, with rabid invective not only against the proletariat but also any fraction of its own class which yields to 'defeatism', even resorting to demagogic propaganda that what is 'bourgeois' is not capitalism and its repressive apparatus, but particular forms of intellectual refinement. At other times, on contrary, it has made dolorous or ironic confession of its own infirmity and iniquity. Thus on the one hand there have been fascist in trends in bourgeois society, vaunting a crude health and bestial myths of blood and race, and on the other hand, there have been bourgoeis trends of refined decadence.
This is an important book, and I hope Verso prints more of Timpanaro.
May 14, 2018
A competent and sensible critique of the excesses of Freud's theory of parapraxes. I knocked one star off my rating because of the penultimate chapter of the book, which unfortunately reveals Timpanaro's rather obscene ideological combination of radical Marxist materialism and hedonistic primitivism. Otherwise, this work is a fair and careful look at an important area of Freud's thought.
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