ABSTRACT
When explaining to Freud why she failed to confess that she loved her employer, Lucy R. said ‘I didn’t know or, rather, didn’t want to know’ (Breuer & Freud, 1892: 117). Freud believed these words describe the ‘curious state in which one knows something and at the same time doesn’t know it’, and evoke a memory in which he himself saw something that ‘didn’t meet his expectations’ and made him ‘prey to that blindness that so surprises us in the attitude of mothers towards their daughters, in husbands towards their wives, of rulers towards their favorites’ (ibid.).
