Abstract

In an iconoclastic work of great verve -- republished now with a new introductory essay by Perry Anderson -- Sebastiano Timpanaro submits the whole field of psychoanalysis to one of its most sustained and serious Marxist critiques. Using textual criticism, Timpanaro reconsiders the most famous cases of the 'slips' analysed by Freud in The Psychopathology of Everyday Life, and argues that in virtually every case Freud's explanations of them are arbitrary or unnecessary. His book ends with a remarkable interpretation of the cultural and historical destiny of Freud's work within early twentieth-century thought.