In The Interpretation of Dreams, Freud recalls “the defensive argument of a man who was accused by his neighbour of having returned a kettle to him in a damaged condition”:

In the first place, he said, he had returned the kettle undamaged; in the second, it already had holes in it when he borrowed it; and thirdly, he had never borrowed the kettle from his neighbour at all.

“But so much the better,” Freud notes. “If even one of these three methods of defence is recognised as valid, the man must be acquitted.”