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The assertion that the River Mincio does not flow into the Vltava seems to belong incontrovertibly to the category of «true propositions». After all, the Vltava - in German, the Moldau - is a major central European river whose course is wholly contained within the Czech Republic. Everyone remembers it because it is the river that magnificently traverses Prague. The Mincio has nothing to do with the Vltava, since it rises in Lake Garda and is a tributary of the Po. It runs not through Prague but, as we know, through the city of Mantua, where it widens out into three small lakes. That being the case, how on earth could the Mincio possibly flow into the Vltava?
I realize that such considerations may seem absurd. However, much depends on how they are developed.
The proposition that «the River Mincio does not flow into the Vltava» is deliberately constructed along the same lines as another bizarre, «obviously true» proposition thought up by Wittgenstein and featuring in his Philosophical Investigations (223): «“A rose has no teeth”. […] For where should a rose's teeth have been?» Yet, Wittgenstein continues, this proposition is only seemingly absurd. After all, «the cow chews its food and then dungs the rose with it, so the rose has teeth in the mouth of an animal. This would not be absurd, because one has no notion in advance where to look for teeth in a rose».
Wittgenstein's ingenious linguistic and anthropological «game» is of interest to the psychoanalyst, who declares himself to be always in pursuit of truth, while at the same time being faced with oddly misplaced statements and the apparently farfetched or absurd analogies of dreams, the arts and delusions. Upon analytic contemplation, what may at first sight convey the impression of a bizarre anomaly of experience in fact reveals perfectly plausible and consistent connections.
On the basis of the foregoing, I shall now present an instructive tale that allows us to assert, contrary to all the geographical evidence, tha