Correspondence

Dear Sir

Readers may be interested to know that Michelle Moreau Ricaud's conjecture enclosed in brackets as to the authorship of Freud's quotation of ‘the logic of soup, with dumplings for arguments’ is indeed correct.1 The poem quoted is Heinrich Heine's ‘Die Wanderratten’. The edition I have access to places the poem amongst the posthumous material but gives no indication of the date of its composition.

The poem is a depiction of two sorts of rat: the hungry and the satisfied. The thirteenth stanza reads:

‘Only the logic of soup with dumplings for reasons and only arguments of roast beef garnished with Gottingen sausage quotations gain access to a hungry stomach.’ (My translation)

According to the editor of the edition2 Gottingen produced both sausages and pedantic academics. He also sees the poem as a critique of Marxism, but it can be read more widely as a scathing indictment of human beings as a whole. Freud's affinity with Heine reflects marked parallels in their lives and deaths: both typified the ‘outsider’ on the edge of their century's intellectual life and both died as Jewish exiles, after suffering painful and protracted illness. But this is only the beginning of a much longer story about the literary and intellectual influences on Freud and other figures of psychoanalysis.

Yours faithfully