Response to Marco Rivalta

Dear Sirs,

Readers of my paper who value the customary conventions of scholarly rigour will no doubt sympathise with me in my task of responding to Dr Rivalta's letter in respect of the degree to which he misrepresents its argument and selectively avoids confronting the evidence it presents. But, curiously enough, his letter is not alone in the latter respect as there has recently appeared in print an article that cites my paper and proffers a competitive thesis as to the identity of the ‘young man’ of Freud's aliquis slip, but only does so with any semblance of plausibility in so far as it evades the facts established by my article. Hirschmüller's (2002) favoured candidate is Freud's brother, Alexander, and he lists a number of characteristics the ‘young man’ of the slip shares with Alexander, which are sufficient to persuade him that he has good grounds for claiming to have found the subject of Freud's analysis. The strategic and tactical similarities between Rivalta's letter and Hirschmüller's article are striking when it comes to disregarding uncomfortable evidence, albeit that each of them does so in the service of different conclusions.

Dr Rivalta maintains that if the ‘immediate context’ of the aliquis slip was not the news of Freud's failure to gain his professorship, but rather a newspaper article referring to St Januarius and a fear about a possible pregnancy of Freud's sister-in-law, Minna Bernays, then I ignore the consequence that Freud must have disguised the ‘psychological circumstances’ that preceded the slip's occurrence. It is not clear whether Rivalta means by ‘immediate context’ the specific circumstance that triggered the slip or that which led up to the conversation immediately preceding it, but in either case, this is a topic on which I am careful not to speculate in my article. For his part, all Freud maintains is that the slip occurred in the middle of a conversation about the social status of the race to which he and the ‘young man’ both belo