John Forrester – What are the Consequences of Drawing an Analogy Between Speech and Money
 
THE LETTER 01 (Summer 1994) pages 68-81
 
Excerpt:
 
The very first patient described at some length in Freud’s writings, Frau Cacilie M. or Baroness Anna von Lieben, suffered from an “‘hysterical psychosis for the payment of old debts”‘1. All these old debts had been accumulated, he indicated, by her making false connections in the past: her neurotic symptoms were masks, excessive stories, covering over the true and hidden connections, which her cathartic cure would reveal. Getting the true words out, expressing them adequately, in the proper place, to the proper person: this is another way of describing her paying off or perhaps writing off these old debts. The speech emitted can almost be counted off, on one side of the balance sheet, against the debt, the past obligations, represented, as if they were old IOUs, by...