CHAPTER
15
Paul Fleming
The starting point of psychoanalysis, particularly the studies that form three of its cornerstones – The Interpretation of Dreams, The Joke and its Relation to the Unconscious, and especially The Psychopathology of Everyday Life – consists to a large degree in narration and its analysis: a dream is recalled, a joke told, an anecdote related and then each is parsed, dissected, constructed, and elucidated to reveal gradually its latent structures, intentions, and motivations. Published shortly after The Interpretation of Dreams (1900), Freud’s The Psychopathology of Everyday Life (1901) is remarkable since it consists almost exclusively in a collection of examples. The book brings together literally hundreds of narrative examples — anecdotes of forgetting, failing, slipping up, misreading, mispronouncing, and generally making mistakes. And since Freud re-worked and republished the study multiple times in his life, there are even examples from later editions that act as testimonials to the validity of the evidence from earlier editions, such as when the analyst and Freud translator A. A. Brill (the first English translator of Psychopathology) reports an anecdote of someone’s slip of the tongue, interprets it, and concludes (which Freud is sure to include in the book): “Dr R. is now firmly convinced that the theory behind Freudian mechanisms is correct” (Freud 2002: 86).1 Thus Freud cites Brill confirming Freud’s theory in the very book of examples that supplies the theory.
Such a meta-example of the methodological validity of using examples captures both the spirit and procedure of the text. The theoretical apparatus in Psychopathology of Everyday Life is rather minimal. Were one to sort out the methodological moments, they would produce a remarkably slender volume. The first two chapters, each of which deals with one anecdote, and its analysis (in the second case, the analysis is integral to the anecdote) are central insofar as they offer two sustained exegeses that elaborate the guiding principles and procedures for the study. Together, however, they amount to a mere fifteen of the book’s 300 plus pages in the German Standard Edition, after which the book quickly assumes the quality of a collection of examples, usually with little or no exegesis and the examples often simply being numbered and counted off: Chapter Three on “Forgetting Names and Sequences of Words” lists 19; Chapter Five on “Slips of the Tongue” consists of 39 numbered examples plus some 20 additional, unnumbered ones; Chapter Six on “Slips in Reading and Slips of the Pen” has 13 numbered examples of slips in reading, 21 on slips in writing; Chapter Ten “Making Mistakes” contains 17 numbered examples – and so on. And I want to emphasize the “and so on” here, since one of the points of Freud’s collecting examples of parapraxes is their hypothetical infinity.
The examples in Psychopathology do not serve, however, as illustratio, ornatus, or amplifactio to elucidate, adorn, or augment a theoretical claim; nor are they exempla as models for emulation or imitation. Rather, the examples present the theory itself. In this world of particulars, the examples reveal the mechanisms of parapraxes that belong to the normal functioning of psychic life. In other words, the examples in Psychopathology are a form of “embodied theory.” As Freud himself states at the beginning of the study, he utilizes (in Chapter 1) “a telling example [ein prägnantes Beispiel — a pregnant example],” which is important not so much in itself – it is “merely” a forgotten proper name – but rather due to its ability to “provide a clarification [eine Aufklärung zuläßt] that leads far beyond the usual evaluation of the phenomenon” (Freud 2002: 5). The phenomenon itself – e.g., forgetting a name, misspeaking, misspelling – may not be exceptional, but its analyzable and ultimately motivated mechanism is notable to the degree that it reveals the normal functioning of psychic life as often opposed to itself. The example (here: forgetting a name) is at once a singular phenomenon and offers a model for grasping other, similar cases. Freud’s “pregnant example” is what Giorgio Agamben calls a paradigm in the strict sense: “[I]t is a singular object that, standing equally for all others of the same class, defines the intelligibility of the group of which it is a part and which, at the same time, it constitutes” (Agamben 2009: 17). The fact, then, that Psychopathology collects examples – as opposed to telling one grand narrative – is not insignificant. As a collection of isolated instances, it is not a question of one story unfolding, of pieces slowly falling into place; rather, the examples carry their force paratactically. The countless examples that constitute Psychopathology adhere to the logic of the Greek word for example, paradigm (paradeigma), which derives from “to show side-by-side, to show along side” (para-deiknynai). The paradigm is a paratactical, analogical mode of knowing that departs from the traditional part-whole model often determining discussions of example, exemplum, and case; instead, the example qua paradigm solely relates part to part in a non-subsuming model of particularity.2
Expressed perhaps in the simplest terms, the insight contained in Psychopathology is that one can find “a sense and intention [Sinn und Absicht] behind the small functional disturbances in the daily life of healthy people” (Freud 2002: 155). A parapraxis, lapsus, or Fehlleistung [“faulty achievement”] occurs when one intention interferes with and disturbs another intention, resulting in a forgotten name, a misspoken or misspelled word, an inadvertent action, etc. At stake in each example of a lapsus is the ability to discover sense from seeming coincidence, the recuperation of motivation from an apparent accident, and when taken collectively, the constitution of a field of knowledge about everyday life. If Freud’s case histories investigate the relation of neurosis to the norm, then the anecdotes analyzed in Psychopathology reveal the normality of pathology. In fact, that is part of the scandal of Psychopathology – everything it describes is quotidian, the everyday as defined by gaps, breaks, and ruptures in sense. And this normality of lapsed significance matters less for the “a-ha” moment about the so-called “healthy people” and far more for how it structures the truth of everyday life. As Jacques Derrida notes: “A lapsus is revealing in the sense that it gives another truth its chance” (Derrida 1984: 21). In so far as the model for this truth is the example qua paradigm, one can say that the truth of the everyday is para-dig-matic, is literally shown “beside itself.”
The literary form for expressing this paradigmatic other truth of the everyday is the anecdote, which, in addition to its putative quotidian provenance, is the predominate form for Freud’s examples of acting or speaking beside oneself. This isn’t surprising, since there are multiple affinities between the anecdote and the lapsus. The anecdote, following the Historisches Wörterbuch der Rhetorik, “is a short, often anonymous narration of a historical event of small effect but of great significance [von geringer Wirkung, aber großer Signifikanz].” The crucial structural feature of the anecdote is the inverse relation between effect and significance, which maps almost one-to-one onto Freud’s argument: psychic lapses that seem small or insignificant – forgetting a name, misreading a line, mispronouncing a word – bear upon closer analysis a great significance, not so much for the individual parapraxis itself but for Derrida’s “other truth”: the normal (mal)functioning of psychic life. More importantly, the parapraxis and anecdote share a strict narrative economy of sense. If Freud’s project in Psychopathology consists in tracing “lawful and calculable paths” from moments that seem to be mere “psychic capri-ciousness [Willkür]” (Freud 2002: 6), this same relation between caprice and sense determines the narrative economy of the anecdote: “In anecdotes there is nothing contingent [nichts Zufälliges]; everything is in the service of their meaning [alles dient der Signifikanz]” (Blumenberg 1997: 220). As a literary form, the anecdote, like the parapraxis, knows “no accidents.” Finally, the anecdote embodies the genre of lapsus, of something missing [Fehl], since “an-ek-dota” etymologically means “not given out,” “not published.” Originally the anecdote was something that wasn’t or shouldn’t be “given out” upon fear of retribution. In Procopius’ sixth-century BCE Anekdota (usually translated as Secret History) – the first famous use of the term – the book’s merely being recorded much less published bore the risk of punishment. In the “Proemium,” Procopius writes: “… it was not possible, as long as the actors were still alive, for these things to be written down [anagraphesthai] in the way they should have been. For it was neither possible to elude the vigilance of multitudes of spies, nor, if detected, to escape a most cruel death” (Procopius 2004: 3). Hence, the paradoxical title Anekdota: Before it comes to light, something is missing from the record; the moment it is published, it contradicts itself as something that isn’t published; like a parapraxis, every published anecdote is at loggerheads with itself.
These contradictions, however, are productive: their own forms of success. In the parapraxis’s opposition between two intentions, something comes to light in the very mistake. The disturbed intention announces itself in the traces of the misspoken, misspelled, even the forgotten. Therefore, just as a para-digma etymologically exhibits its belonging by “showing along side” or “beside itself,” the para-praxis, or Fehl-leistung marks a “faulty or failed achievement” – it is a success alongside, outside, or beside its own lapsus. In failing (misspeaking, mispronouncing, misreading) something succeeds, and in succeeding something fails; and this inverted relation between success and failure mirrors that between narration and significance in Freud’s exemplary anecdotes. The story of everyday life, in so far as its sense repeatedly lapses, requires a second, a para-story, over and over again, since the truth of everyday life is always paradigmatic – shown beside itself.
The intimate relation between paradigm, anecdote, and lapsus in their strict, but significant structure is clearly the case in the second chapter, “On the Forgetting of Foreign Words,” and its “aliquis”-anecdote. This chapter is central to the architectonics of Psychopathology for several reasons: (1) it is one of the few instances of developed exegesis, including a scene of miniature analysis with analyst (Freud) and analysand (his young friend); (2) the analysis of the anecdote belongs to the anecdote itself, creating a reflection on the status and significance of the anecdote within the anecdote; and (3) the aliquis-example thus acts as a meta-example in so far as it explicitly thematizes and reflects upon Freud’s theory of the motivation behind such lapses in general.
The anecdote runs as follows: on vacation, Freud renews an acquaintance with a young man, who is also versed in his writings. The topic of conversation quickly turns to the deplorable social standing of Jews in Austria, which compels the young man to complain that his generation “is condemned to waste away, unable to develop its talents or satisfy its needs” (Freud 2002: 12). The final crescendo to this impassioned lament is the famous line from Virgil, where Dido calls upon posterity to avenge her on Aeneas. The only problem – and this is the crux of the example – is that the young friend cannot remember the exact wording. The crescendo falters, falls flat. He stumbles through the Latin and produces the rather nonsensical “Exoriar(e) ex nostris ossibus ultor.” Knowing he got it wrong, the young man appeals to Freud for help, who gladly obliges: “Exoriar(e) aliquis nostris ex ossibus ultor! [May someone rise, an avenger, from my bones!]” In addition to the wrong syntax, “aliquis” – literally: “someone” – was missing. The friend, aware of Freud’s theories, challenges him: “But you are always saying that people do not forget things for no reason at all” – a challenge Freud eagerly takes up, being the avid collector he is: “I readily accepted the challenge,” says Freud, “hoping for a contribution to my collection [einen Beitrag zu meiner Sammlung]” (Freud 2002: 13). The spirit of the collector expressed, however, is not the desire for a new, undiscovered species, but rather to demonstrate that here, too, the parapraxis reveals the structure of two intentions at loggerheads, with the destructive tendency (the forgetting of the word) occurring due to a hidden motivation.
What next occurs is a miniature analysis, in which the analyst Freud asks the analysand to free associate, “to communicate honestly and without any critical judgment, what occurs to you [einfällt] when you turn your attention without any determinate intention to the forgotten word” (Freud 2002: 13). In dropping all self-censorship, the friend is to open himself up to what hits him, and precisely here – when all intention has been dropped – the intention can become clear. What hits him is the “ridiculous idea” [lächerlicher Einfall] of severing the semantic unit “aliquis” into a-liquis, followed by the series of associations (in German): Reliquien – Liquidation – Flüßigkeit – Fluid [relics – liquidation – liquidity – fluid]. From these four words a series of thoughts flows: first, the relics he recently saw in Italy, which evoke the names of numerous saints (Simon, Augustine, Benedict) including, finally, Saint Januarius and the miracle of the blood, whose hardened state in a vial miraculously liquefies [flüssigwird] on a certain date each year – and causes outrage among believers if it fails to happen or happens late.
Freud is soon satisfied. He explains that the word “aliquis” is forgotten in the Latin quote, not because his friend wasn’t fit in his Classics or simply blanked, but because he is anxious about his girlfriend being late with her period. Despite the friend’s approving astonishment, Freud quickly lists off the chain of associations – calendar saints, liquefying blood, agitation when it doesn’t happen, etc. – that led him to the motivation behind the lapsus: the missing “fluid,” which is also potentially “aliquis,” the desired “someone” in the quotation to avenge his situation. The friend, however, admits that this wish for an avenging offspring runs counter to what he actually wants at this point in his life. Out of this ambivalence springs the forgetting.
Decisive in this example is the continuing dialogue between the young man and Freud. Despite finding Freud’s interpretation compelling, the young man asks: “Couldn’t this all be coincidence [Zufall]?” To which Freud responds:
I must leave it to your own judgment to decide whether you can explain all these connections by assuming coincidence [Zufall]. But I can tell you that any similar case [jeder ähnliche Fall], if you care to offer it for analysis, will lead to equally remarkable “coincidences” [merkwürdige Zufälle]. (Freud 2002: 15)
Two things ought to be highlighted at this juncture: first, the open question – even from the convinced interlocutor – of whether the entire set of Einfälle that form the case [Fall] might be more Zufall than method.3 Therefore, Freud’s response and decisive reversal of the locus of coincidence: from Freud’s perspective, chance no longer lies with the forgetting of the word “aliquis.” Rather, after the analysis and discovery of the hidden motivation, it would be remarkable to claim that all the connections explaining the lapsus end up being mere coincidence. In other words, for Freud, when all the “coincidences” lead to and can be explained by a hidden intention, the one truly unbelievable coincidence would be that it is all just coincidence.
In his “compulsion to interpret” [Zwang … zu deuten] (Freud 2002: 244), Freud readily admits that he differs in no way from the superstitious person: both see chance or coincidence (Zufall) and are compelled to interpret it, that is, to show its motivated relation and thus strip it of its coincidental nature. But the difference between them is also enormous: the superstitious person looks at external events, things deprived of all relations to a will or wish, however unconscious, and wants to ascribe meaning to them, some force or providence in the cosmos ordering the contingent; Freud, on the contrary, is only concerned with cases of an inner motivation at the heart of the apparent accidental occurrence: “I believe, indeed, in outer (real) chance [Zufall], but not in fortuitous inner (psychic) actions [Zufälligkeit]” (Freud 2002: 244). The superstitious person, Freud continues, “projects a motivation onto something outside him, while I look for it within myself, […] he interprets chance as some incident that has happened, while I drive it form an idea” (Freud 2002: 244). The psyche, unlike the external world, is a contingency free zone; so too the anecdote as the literary form that gives expression to the mental economy in wakened everyday life. In Blumenberg’s words cited at the beginning: “In anecdotes there is nothing contingent [nichts Zufälliges]; everything is in the service of their meaning.” One can say that the Fehlleistung is structured like an anecdote: both are strictly ordered in what they include and what they do not. The “aliquis”-anecdote is a particularly good example not only because it comes from a non-neurotic friend in everyday life, but also because it adheres to the strict economy of the lapsus. Freud himself summarizes the “aliquis” example:
One must reconstruct the process thus: the speaker was lamenting the fact that the rights of the present generation of his people are restricted; a new generation, he foretells, like Dido, will be avenged on its oppressors. So he has expressed the wish for offspring. At the same moment a contradictory idea enters his mind. “Do you really want children so much? Surely not. [.] No, you do not want offspring – however useful they might be in the matter of revenge.” (Freud 2002: 16)
It is the strict relation between these two incompatible wishes that account for the lapsus; the one forces the other underground, and with it the word “aliquis,” the very someone who could avenge – just not now.
For Freud, one example of parapraxis, properly analyzed, stands on its own and provides all the proof he needs for the motivated relation between “mistake” and meaning. But the peculiarity of the analysis-in-miniature in Psychopathology is that even success, as the young friend suggests, can still bear the semblance of coincidence. This is the dilemma of an analytic procedure that always and again only addresses the particular: the dream, the joke, the lapsus, the symptom. One can only move from particular case to particular case, and thus each seems to call for another example.4
Zufall, therefore, is the specter hanging over every example in Psychopathology of Everyday Life, perhaps more than in Freud’s other writings. And why? Precisely because he is elaborating normal, everyday psychic mechanisms of the non-neurotic person. In the case histories, Freud works on and through neuroses that are often literally inscribed into the body and whose repressions and resistances, once recognized and incorporated into consciousness, can lead to a “cure” – an abatement of the repression and its symptoms. One can, and Freud often does, point to the alleviation of the neurosis as evidence.5 In the Psychopathology of Everyday Life, however, the anecdotes concern non-neurotic persons. There is no alleviation of a symptom to strive for, only cognitive insight into the normal psychic life, including the parts it elides, distorts, or misrepresents. Therefore, the claim that Freud makes to his interlocutor in the aliquis-example – “But I can tell you that any similar case […] will lead to equally remarkable ‘coincidences’ [Zufälle]” – is actually a challenge he poses to himself, for it is at this juncture that Psychopathology of Everyday Life morphs ever more into a collection of examples.
With the advent of the collection of anecdotes after the second section – a collection that grows with each new edition of the book – the force of exem-plarity as paradigm, or “showing alongside,” assumes clearer contours. In the Rhetoric, Aristotle describes the paradeigma (example) as “a kind of induction” (Aristotle 1991: 25 [1357a]), a horizontal movement from particular to particular that includes a reference to a rule or principle that cannot be given. It is the relation between individual paradigms qua examples that is particularly relevant for understanding the collection of examples that form Psychopathology of Everyday Life: a paradigm (paradeigma), writes Aristotle, “is neither a relation of part to whole, nor of whole to part, nor of one whole to another, but of part to part, of like to like [homoin pros homoin] when both come under the same genus [hupo to auto genos], but one of them is better known than the other …” (Aristotle 1991: 29 [1357b]). The fact that Aristotle excludes a relation to the whole, whether by subsuming part under the whole or by inducing the whole from the parts, is crucial. Each paradigm is necessarily only a particular. The relation between them is explicitly a relation of similitude, of resemblance (“like to like”) that first emerges belatedly and without recourse to a prior whole or principle. For this reason, the paradigm is “a kind of induction.” A principle is never fully gained via paradigmatic induction; it is at best hinted at or claimed. Aristotle’s model of exemplarity operates, then, on a plane of immanence, in which parts show literally side-by-side: they show themselves and each other by showing beside themselves (via similitude). Each paradigm therefore both rests in itself and follows a recursive movement of resemblance. This paratactic model of knowing is structured by an analogical relation between parts that are neither subsumed under a whole nor, when taken together, add up to a whole.
Aristotle, however, does clearly refer to the parts falling “under the same genus.” How does a part solely relate to a part without any notion of the whole, and yet both parts are still claimed to be “under the same genus?” This genus does not precede the examples qua paradigms, but is a product or effect of the relation of similitude between them. The genus is belated; it arrives from the analogous force shared between the paradigmatic instances.6 Therefore, it is not the collection that first forms the paradigm; each example is (literally) a paradigm; that is, there is an element of singularity to each example. The collective force forged by the set of analogous relations – a structure and its repetition via similitude – circumscribes the genus or model of knowledge. In the case of Freud’s Psychopathology, the genus is the parapraxis as an ultimately motivated and thus meaningful “mistake.” As Agamben writes in “What is a Paradigm?” the role of the paradigm is “to constitute and make intelligible a broader historical problematic context” (Agamben 2009: 9). The paradigm achieves this by offering a model of thought in which one cannot separate singularity from exemplarity: “The paradigmatic group is never presupposed by the paradigms; rather it is immanent to them” (Agamben 2009: 31). A paradigm is a singular case that can and will repeat itself (via its resemblance with other analogous cases), and thus can serve as a “model” (paradigm) for structures of thought. This similitude is one way to understand the “showing alongside” of the parapraxis as paradigm; it shows itself (is singular in its significance) but also shows (illuminates) other parapraxes, how they are structured and function, thus showing more than itself. It is at once singular and “constitutes and makes intelligible” how hidden motivations can be traced back to latent intention (i.e. that group of psychic mechanisms known as Fehlleistungen). Or, to use Freud’s own language already cited: each example is singular and, as a “pregnant example,” “provides a clarification [Aufklärung] that leads afar beyond the usual evaluation of the phenomenon” (Freud 2002: 5).
How exactly the parapraxis structures the quotidian – in and as the story we tell ourselves about everyday life – requires a further additional step in examining the relationship between narration and meaning in the Fehlleistung. I note that the anecdote is a particular type of example – it is not an allegory, fable, or fiction, but a narration that claims to be real, to having “really” happened. This relation to history is present from the genre’s famous first popular appearance, Procopius’s Anekdota, which plays on the etymology of an-ek-dota as “not given out, not published,” since his “Secret History” provides the previously unpublished compendium to his eight volume Wars of Justinian. In so far as Freud’s Psychopathology of Everyday Life consists to a remarkable degree in anecdotes, it is not a stretch to describe it as a “Secret History of Everyday Life,” for at stake is the secret intention that underlies everyday mental mishaps. In so far as the heart of the psychopathology of everyday life is a lapsus, a gap, its secret is also to a certain degree “not given out” – it is withheld, misspelled, misspoken, or misplaced – and when it does come out as motivated, as not really accidental, it is often met with opposition and resistance.
The narrative structure of lack that defines the Fehlleistung can be found in Joel Fineman’s contribution to anecdote theory. The anecdote, for Fineman, is “a his-toreme, i.e., the smallest minimal unit of the historiographic fact,” that raises the question of the “integration of event and context” (Fineman 1989: 57). With this question Fineman broaches a central, but slightly different, relationality of example than in Aristotle. It is not the relation between lapsus and lapsus (particular to particular, paradigm to paradigm), but between lapsus and the otherwise common narration of everyday life – that is, how the parapraxis (and its literary form: the anecdote) fits into the practice (and its narrative) of everyday life. One could call is the relation between particular and whole when it comes to the narrative, the story of everyday life. Speaking in terms of historiography, Fineman argues that structurally the anecdote produces a gap, a rupture in the (historical) context. The anecdote is, in Fineman’s famous description, the hole in the whole of the grand récit of history, a hole that is repeatedly filled in and re-opened:
In formal terms, my thesis is the following: that the anecdote is the literary form that uniquely lets history happen by virtue of the way it introduces an opening into the teleological, and therefore timeless, narration of beginning, middle, and end. The anecdote produces the effect of the real, the occurrence of contingency, by establishing an event as an event within and yet without the framing context of historical successivity, i.e., it does so only in so far as its narration both comprises and refracts the narration it reports. (Fineman 1989: 61)
This double relation of the anecdote – inside and outside, constituting and breaking the context – maps perfectly onto the structure of Freud’s parapraxis. Fineman could easily be talking about the anecdote as lapsus. For what is a lapsus but a hole or gap – an interruption – in the fabric of the story we tell of everyday life, the breakdown that at the same time constitutes the normality of pathology? The parapraxis opens a hole in the significance of everyday life (a forgotten name, a misread title, a mispronounced word) that then, via analysis, gets filled in, is shown to be guided by a hidden intention, and thus is brought back to a coherent whole. (This, of course, can and does produce new holes, new lacunae in turn, an ever shifting ‘ground’ of holes and attempts at wholes.) Not only does this process of puncturing and restoring repeat itself, but more importantly the restored integrity of significance comes at a price, the price that is the paradigm of everyday life in Freud.
To elucidate this last point, I return to the aliquis-anecdote. In being forgotten, the semantic unit “aliquis” marks a lapse, a breakdown in the coherence of meaning of everyday life; there is a gap in the story – a semantic unit is literally missing. Freud then not only supplies the missing word, “aliquis,” but also the reason for why it was missing, why it lapsed: the conflict between two intentions – “the wish for offspring […] ‘No, you do not want offspring’” (Freud 2002: 16). In circumscribing this opposition, Freud restores not only the manifest text (the quotation) but also its latent meaning (the two desires in conflict). In so doing, however, he also causes a second rupture or hole, now in the single narrative fabric of everyday life. Narration and signification, in other words, are out of sync. A second narrative thread – the unconscious and its wishes and motivations – is shown to double, flow beneath, and in fact flow against the conscious stories of everyday life. Either you have a narration that includes a lack, a lapse of meaning, or you fill in the hole of meaning and create a hole in the single narration of everyday life, producing a re-doubled narrative of the quotidian. Here, Freud’s (Greek) parat-actic model of the paradigm approaches the etymology of its Latin counterpart, the ex-emplum: a part, a sample that has been taken out, removed. What results for Freud is a repeated hole that negates any notion of a coherent whole: there is either a lapse in meaning or a break in the coherent narration. In the end, the paradigm of everyday life must always include and account for a para-praxis of everyday life: a life beside itself.
Endnotes
1All translations cited may be silently modified throughout.
2This notion of paradigm will be elaborated below in reference to Aristotle’s Rhetoric. See also Alexander Gelley’s Introduction to the collection Unruly Examples, in which he differentiates between Plato’s transcendental-vertical notion of exemplarity, in which the exemplar is an archetype, and Aristotle’s rhetorical-horizontal directionality of linked particulars (Gelley 1995: 1–24, esp. 1–2); see also Giorgio Agamben’s essay on Kuhn, Foucault, and others entitled “What is a Paradigm?” (Agamben 2009: 9–32). Freud himself refers to the two most prominent examples, the “Signorelli” – and the “aliquis”-examples (Chapters 1 and 2 of the study) as “paradigms” [Paradigmata] (Freud 2002: 16).
3Throughout this section, Freud plays upon the semantic affinities between coincidence [Zufall] and mental occurrence [Einfall], which together are central to the particular case [Fall]. By keeping Zufall and Einfall in such close textual and theoretical proximity, Freud hints at the seeming slippages between them (i.e., that the mental occurrence, like the mistake, may be coincidence). But in so far as the mental occurrence should take place without intention and mental critique, its seemingly capricious nature (e.g., suggesting bifurcating “aliquis” – someone – into “a” and “liquis”) should, like the Zufall itself, lead to a hidden motivation. In the psychic economy, the appearance of coincidence acts as a mask for a hidden intention.
4To be sure, Freud is confident that we can know why one forgets the word “aliquis.” His main worry as the study progresses and the examples mount is that it is all too obvious, too clear. Freud, therefore, repeatedly writes things such as “I fear that in all the examples thus far given I have been rather banal”; “I could multiply such examples of forgetting names…”; “I have since then analyzed a large number of cases of forgetting or faulty reproduction of the order of words, and the consistent result of these investigations led me to assume that the mechanisms of forgetting, as demonstrated in the example aliquis […], are almost of universal validity. […] I shall therefore add no more to the number of such examples” (Freud 2002: 148, 41, 24).
5At the beginning of the “Ratman”-case history, Freud points to “a series of successful cures” in his treatment of obsessive-compulsive neuroses (Freud 2003: 127).
6Continuing this same passage in the Rhetoric, Aristotle makes this clear by providing an example of how examples, this relation of like to like, offer evidence: “For example, to prove that Dionysius is aiming at tyranny, because he asks for a bodyguard, one might say that Pisistratus before him and Theagenes of Megra did the same, and when they obtained what they asked for [they] made themselves into tyrants. All other tyrants known may serve as an example of Dionysus, whose reason, however, for asking for a bodyguard we do not yet know. All these examples are contained under the same [genus] [hupo to auto], that one who is aiming at a tyranny asks for a bodyguard” (Aristotle 1991: 29 [1357b]). The precursors, I note, serve as an example of Dionysus (paradeigma … tou Dionusiou) not for him; Dionysus thus does not emulate those who came before him, but in their similarity they are a paradigm of what he in a sense already is, even before he becomes it. Therefore, I wouldn’t follow Agamben (who admittedly is looking at a similar but different passage in the Prior Analytics) in claiming that “Aristotle seem[s] to hold that the common type exists before the particulars” (Agamben 2009: 19).
References
Agamben, G. (2009) “What is a Paradigm?” in The Signature of All Things: On Method, trans. L. D’Isanto with K. Atell, New York: Zone Books.
Aristotle (1984) The Complete Works of Aristotle, revised Oxford translation, ed. J. Barnes, Princeton: Princeton University Press.
— (1991) Art of Rhetoric, trans. J. H. Frese, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Blumenberg, H. (1997) Die Vollzähligkeit der Sterne, Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp.
Derrida, J. (1984) “Mes Chances/ My Chances: A Rendezvous with some Epicurean Stereophonies,” trans. I. Harvey and A. Ronell, in J. H. Smith and W. Kerrigan (eds), Taking Chances: Derrida, Psychoanalysis, and Literature, Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press.
Fineman, J. (1989) “The History of the Anecdote: Fiction and Fiction,” in H. A. Veeser (ed.), The New Historicism. New York: Routledge.
Freud, S. (1941, 6th edn 1973) Gesammelte Werke IV.Zur Psychopathologie des Alltags, Frankfurt am Main: S. Fischer Verlag.
— (2002) The Psychopathology of Everyday Life, trans. A. Bell, New York: Penguin Books.
— (2003) The “Wolfman” and Other Cases, trans. L. A. Huish, New York: Penguin Books.
Gelley, A. (1995) “Introduction,” in A. Gelley (ed.), Unruly Examples : On the Rhetoric of Exemplarity, Stanford: Stanford University Press.
Procopius (2004) Secret History, trans. H. B. Dewing, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Timpanaro, S. (1985) The Freudian Slip: Psychoanalysis and Textual Criticism, New York: Verso Books.