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Dear Sirs,
I agree with the author on his first point: the almost complete silence of the psychoanalytic historians on Peter Swales's 1982 paper (‘Freud, Minna Bernays and the conquest of Rome’) and particularly on his hypothesis that the perpetrator of the aliquis slip was Freud himself ‘is particularly disappointing’. Besides that, what disappoints me is the fact that the body of Skues's paper is a relentless indictment against the one exception to that silence: Philip Kuhn's article ( ‘A professor through the looking glass’, Int. J. Psycho-Anal., 1999, pp. 943-959). Skues, so to speak, represents Swales versus Kuhn in the court of the IJP; his paper is devoted to a systematic confrontation between Kuhn's allegations (vs. Swales) and the original documents: namely Freud's letters of September 1900 to his former friend Fliess and to his wife Martha, the Viennese newspapers of that period, plus Skues's conjectures about Martha's and Minna's menstrual periods. (In Skues's view, of course, the ‘allegations’ are always false while the ‘original documents’ always tell the truth.) No wonder then, if one can find among the many ‘original documents’ presented by Skues in his twenty-page harangue for Swales vs. Kuhn just two or three details of Freud's text on the aliquis slip (, 1901b, pp. 8-14; Psychopathology of Everyday Life, chapter II).
Skues points out that in Virgil's line (Aeneid, IV, 625) the son-avenger (‘aliquis … ultor’) conjured up by the Punic queen Dido against the ‘Roman’ Aeneas was none other than the Punic hero Hannibal, and this is something that Freud could not ignore, even if he omitted it, but Skues does not notice this likely omission of Freud's (cf. , 2001, p. 1200).
The phrase the anonymous ‘young man’ (alleged perpetrator of the slip) uses in his anxious expectation of a possible pregnancy, namely that ‘he might easily hear [“bekommen”] a piece of news [… from an] Italian lady’ (Freud, 1901b, p. 11) ‘has clear connotations of a physical sepa