Abstract

The first and best-known case of a lapsus examined by Freud concerns his failure to recall the surname Signorelli. From Lacan on, psychoanalysts have dedicated themselves to exploring the reasons for this forgetfulness, becoming caught up in a vortex of ever more complex and improbable conjectures. Yet the solution to the puzzle is simple, if one can make out the glaringly obvious anagram which would seem to have escaped investigators (it escaped them, in my view, as being too obvious). It cannot even be ruled out that the «Signorelli episode» is pure invention: a false event made up by Freud to back up his theory of lapsus as removal. Even in this case the solution to the puzzle may still serve a purpose: it can tell us something about the inventive abilities of the founder of psychoanalysis.