By Stuart Mitchner

(…what interrupts our concentration as readers may be as telling as the book we are reading: Freud is always making the case for interruption). We make a Freudian slip when we thought we knew what we were saying. We dream beyond the bounds of intelligibility….

—From Becoming Freud

Why Freud and why now?” That is the question. After a lifetime of relative indifference to most things Freudian, it’s taken the attempted assassination of a former president plus the massive media freak-out inspired by the current president’s shabby debate performance and slip-of-the-tongue doubleheader to send me to Adam Phillips’s Becoming Freud: The Making Of a Psychoanalyst (Yale University Press) and the Gutenberg text of The Psychopathology of Everyday Life translated by A.A. Brill.

Meanwhile we have this week’s “telling” interruption in the form of the All-Star game and the Republican National Convention, held in the aftermath of Saturday’s game-changing event while I’m still gamely trying to find a place in the psychopathology of everyday baseball life for Biden’s Freudian slips. Talking heads on CNN and MSNBC have already begun portraying the president as a veteran pitcher whose late-inning moment has come as the manager walks out to the mound to take the ball and bring in the closer. Except by now everybody knows Biden intends to finish the game and there’s no manager and no closer.

Freud and Baseball

Google “Freud and baseball” and you’ll come up with Randy Newman’s 1977 song “Sigmund Freud’s Impersonation of Albert Einstein in America,” although Freud doesn’t enter until the last verse, which begins with Americans dreaming of Gypsies and “African appendages” and ends with “little boys playing baseball in the rain.” Decades later Newman brings baseball and personal history together in the song “Potholes” from his 2008 LP Harps and Angels wherein he recalls his humiliating collapse during a sandlot ball game: “I used to pitch, I could get the ball over the plate, but anyway this one time … I walked about fourteen kids in a row, cried, walked off the mound, handed the ball to the third baseman and just left the field.” Years later the woman who was to become Newman’s second wife meets his father for the first time, Randy leaves the room for a moment, “and when I came back he’s telling her the story about how I walked fourteen kids, cried and left the mound.”
While I’m not suggesting that a boyhood “pothole” is equal to what happened to Biden during the debate, the father’s callous retelling of the anecdote reminds me of the media’s obsessive “retelling” of Biden’s catastrophic inning. If nothing else, all the post-debate flak has given him a narrative: the embattled president soldiering on, head high, in spite of the nagging chorus of “quit, step down, give up for the good of the country” trumpeted incessantly by many of his former supporters and the so-called “newspaper of record.” Although there was a chance that such a narrative might eventually gain traction with the voting public, what happened late Saturday afternoon in Butler, Pa., has provided Trump with a more compelling story of his own.

The T-word

While I carefully avoided using the T-word in reference to Trump’s narrative trumping Biden’s, there’s no getting away from the intrusion of “trumpeted” in the previous paragraph, which is yet another reminder of the July 11 news conference when the president casually referred to Trump as his vice president after saying “Putin” when he meant “Zelensky” earlier the same day.

Trump knows all about such “speech-blunders,” as he calls them. I meant to say Freud knows, of course, but I’ll leave my authentic half-slip in place for posterity. And what does Freud himself know? In The Psychopathology of Everyday Life, he recalls a 1907 International Congress in Amsterdam, where his theories of hysteria were the subject of a “lively discussion.” During a diatribe against him, one of his most violent opponents repeatedly put himself in Freud’s place, saying “Breuer and I” when he meant to say “Breuer and Freud.”

Commenting on his opponent’s awkward slip of the tongue, Freud makes it clear that his rival’s name has not “the slightest sound similarity” to his own: “From this example, as well as from other cases of interchanging names in speech-blunders, we are reminded of the fact that the speech-blunder can fully forego the facility afforded to it through similar sounds, and can achieve its purpose if only supported in content by concealed relations” — as happened to this writer when “Trump” became “Freud” and to Biden when “Trump” displaced “Harris.”

Freud vs. Music

In the context of the “case for interruption” and going “beyond the bounds of intelligibility,” reading that sample of Freud’s labored prose is like riding a bicycle up a very steep, bumpy hill, and even given the fact that it’s a translation from the German, it accords with biographical evidence that Freud not only had no ear for music but apparently detested it and would actually hold his hands over his ears at the mere sound of it — in Vienna, the city that gave the world Mozart, Schubert, Beethoven, and Brahms. Explaining in “The Moses of Michelangelo” (1914) that “with music I am almost incapable of obtaining any pleasure,” Freud says, “Some rationalistic, or perhaps analytic, turn of mind in me rebels against being moved by a thing without knowing why I am thus affected and what it is that affects me.”

Freud in “Babylon Berlin”

Imagine Freud being subjected to the storm of stimuli unleashed in a series like Babylon Berlin, which just began its fourth season on MHz via Amazon Prime. Even as I write I’m hearing “Zu Asche, zu Staub,” the show’s rousing theme as half-sung, half-chanted in drag by the Russian spy Svetlana Sorokina at the Moka Efti cabaret. Imagine the psychic damage inflicted on Freud by all that sensual period imagery, by a cross-dressing vamp like Sorokina or by a female as girlish, bright, charming and sexually alluring as Charlotte Ritter, who came to mind when I was reading Freud’s response to Sarah Bernhardt as detailed by Adam Phillips in Becoming Freud; in an 1885 letter from Paris to his fiancée Martha Bernays, Freud refers to Bernhardt’s “intimate endearing voice” and how “every inch of this little figure was alive and bewitching . . . her caressing and pleading and embracing the postures she assumes, the way she wraps herself around a man.” Bernhardt’s music, of voice and gesture and posture, left the 29-year-old Freud admitting, “I had to pay for this pleasure with an attack of migraine.”

Signing a Martian

Put Freud in the mix, and anything can happen, whether you’re talking about the chaos of a political convention or an All-Star game or the signing of a young Martian slugger by the St. Louis Cardinals. “Wait,” says Freud, did you say “Martian?” No, it’s not a slip of the tongue, it’s only that the Cardinals’ top draft pick, J.J. Wetherholt, hails from Mars, Pa., which plays the outer space theme for all its worth, with a flying saucer monument at the heart of town, and little green men in every other shop window. More important in the context of recent events, Mars is located in Butler County only 17 miles from the site of Saturday’s assassination attempt.

The Name Game

I’m grateful to Adam Phillips and Yale University Press for giving back-of-the-book attention to the passage about Freud “always making the case for interruption.” And dreaming “beyond the bounds of intelligibility” could be my epigraph for these weekly articles. Today’s piece might be reimagined as a cosmic quiz show, The Name Game, hosted by Dr. Freud. Will Trump continue trumping, will Biden continued abiding? In respect to the host, there will be no theme music today. As Dr. Freud declared in his introductory lecture on the psychoanalysis of dreams (1915–16): “Tunes that come into one’s head without warning turn out to be determined by and to belong to a train of thought which has a right to occupy one’s mind though without one’s being aware of its activity. It is easy to show then that the relation to the tune is based on its text or its origin. But I must be careful not to extend this assertion to really musical people, of whom, as it happens, I have had no experience.”