Analysis: Freud, Derrida and the Magic Slate

Do you remember playing with a magic slate as a child? Learn how Sigmund Freud uses this device to talk about the unconscious mind.

A Finnish Version of Freud's Wunderblock.

Do you remember this toy from your childhood? It’s charmingly called a “Magic Slate” or an “Etch-a-Sketch”. In German, the Wunderblock. I had a version of this toy as a kid. The novelty of the apparatus consists in the ability of the pad to retain impressions, such as drawings, and like a normal slate, the impressions can be erased, not by an eraser but by simply lifting the page. Presto. Freud and Derrida loved this thing. Freud liked it because the Magic Slate is a model for the human mind. Psychoanalysis! Derrida liked it because Freud's reading of it seems to suggest the unconscious is inhabited by writing and is prior to speech acts. Deconstruction!

Deconstruction!
The stylus is used to write, scribble, or draw on the transparent plastic sheaf which creates an impression on the middle thin layer. The magic slate I had as a kid was a simple plastic, red stylus. The slate itself was a flimsy plastic backing with the “magic sheaf” part lightly affixed to the backing.

When the sheaf is lifted, the thin papery layer which exists beneath it is erased of its impression. At the bottom, a resinous wax layer exists which retains etched into the resin the residuals, or traces of all the previous impressions.

Freud on the “Magic Slate”
Freud wrote a short seven-page essay called "A Note Upon The Mystic Writing Pad." He wrote the essay to explain his theory of memory via the working apparatus of the Wunderblock. The outer coating represents the protective layer of the mind. The layer protects the mind from too much excitation. Notice if the thin paper layer is torn or contaminated the Wunderblock ceases to work in the same way that trauma can irreparably damage the psyche. The stylus represents a stimulus from the outside world. The papery layer is the conscious mind and the wax resin is representative of the unconscious.

The memory of the present can be erased, but like the mind, retains the impressions in the unconscious. The Wunderblock can both destroy and create.

Freud thought the Magic Slate was the closest machine-toy resembling the human mind. The only difference between the Wunderblock and the human mind is the mind's waxy resin layer can come back and disrupt the psychic life. Notably in dreams and trauma.

Derrida On Freud
Derrida, in an essay called "Freud and the Scene of Writing" was astounded that Freud, as a metaphysical thinker, could have inadvertently stumbled upon a machine that is a metaphor for the techné (production) of memory.

Derrida wonders how Freud could have imagined the Wunderblock to represent the psychic life while not realizing that the fundamental essence of the toy, like the mind, is its reserve of graphical traces, not phonetic signifiers.

Repost from the Brooklyn Institute for Social Research - "Dreams and Hysteria: An Introduction to Freud"

Musing: The Red Wine Freud Da Game

image credit: arpla

Tuesday night I cut my foot. Usually, when I drink with my roommates I keep the glassware downstairs and the conversation confined to the kitchen. Not this time. After the "party" had dispersed I took a tumbler of red wine to my room and no sooner had I sat down to talk to my friend Patrick on the phone had I knocked over the damn tumbler and kablam! — shards of glass everywhere. Not one to do manual labor after the sun goes down, I merely plopped myself on the bed and told Patrick good night.

What Happens When I Read Novels (Inspired by Reading and Proust and Freud)

When I read novels I do not see images when I read. 
I may see an image emerge in my mind’s eye after the reading has been done, but during the reading itself, I read in black and white without images. I've been reading selections from Proust's Swann's Way. What I conjure in my mind's eye of Marcel dipping a madeleine cake into a cup of tea anticipate images. Novels do not generate images. They anticipate.

Reading Novels is a Similar Cognitive Experience to What We do When Dream
What we do when we read novels is similar to what happens to us when we dream. Freud calls the dream image a rebus (p. 276); in this way, I think he is correct. If there is an image in the novel it is more akin to a rebus, a hallucination of loosely strung together spectral thoughts. 

Free Association of the Imagination When Reading Novels
We free associate when we read a novel; what comes before our mind’s eye are parts and pieces that do not form an entirely thought together whole. In the novel's image, like the dream, parts stand for wholes. Novels are constituted by their love for particularities. Epics and grand eloquent drama are the stuff of another art form; they form archetypical images. Novels are a unique art form in that they work similarly to the way our minds work. 

In the Novel-form the Individual is Privileged 
Novels arose as the predominant art form because they privilege individual experience over grand narrative; the mundane and the banal are championed in the novel over the hero trope and archetype. It is not the photographic image that is desired in the novel, but rather, what we see in the novel is the recognition that the mirror is broken; we see in the novel a skewed mirror and we call it real.

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The Function of the Other in Lacan

In this post, learn about Lacan's analysis of Edgar Allen Poe's short story "The Purloined Letter".

Jacques Lacan, French Psychoanalyst, and Theorist

According to Jacques Lacan (2006), “the subject’s unconscious is the Other’s discourse” (p. 16). Lacan’s correlative thesis is “the unconscious is structured like a language” (1998, p.2).
Lacan sees in Edgar Poe’s short story “The Purloined Letter” (1844) a privileged illustration of the Other’s discourse in relation to the unconscious and the structure of a letter to always contain the possibility of return. In the Poe detective story the interrelationship between the primary characters: the Queen, the King, the Minister D., and Dupin (a French version of Sherlock Holmes) are each in turn inhabited by a letter and its undisclosed contents, seen first as a compromising piece of evidence against the Queen, and then, as becomes evident in Lacan’s reading, a metaphor for the function of the Other modulated by the presence and absence of the letter and the way in which the Other, which does not “exist,” inhabits and is inhabited by the subject. The plot of the Poe story is thus: the compromising letter is displayed in full sight when the King enters the royal boudoir, “the primal scene.” Hoping to avert the King’s eye from the incriminating letter, the Queen places the letter face down so as not to attract undue notice. The Minister D., at that moment, walks in and is able to discern the Queen’s deception because of his “lynx eye.” Producing an identical looking letter from his breast pocket, the Minister concocts a discourse with the King while at the same time nonchalantly placing the facsimile letter on the bureau. The Queen can do nothing. When the conversation between Minister D. and the King is terminated, the Minister picks up the Queen’s letter and leaves the room. The Queen is dispossessed of the letter by the crafty Minister. By possessing the letter, the Minister is in hold of power over the Queen. The Queen promises a sum of money to the person who can retrieve the letter and return it to her. The detective Dupin orchestrates a plot to retrieve the letter from Minister D. Once he determines the location of the letter -- between the jambs of the fireplace -- he craftily replaces it with a facsimile and is able to restore the letter to its proper place and reap a reward.

The Other functions in what Lacan terms the symbolic order. Lacan’s “Seminar on the Purloined Letter” is part of his larger reading of Freud's Beyond the Pleasure Principle. In this book Freud speculates on the existence of an inextricably charged compulsion in each human being to repeat past, original trauma (Widerholungszwang). Lacan claims repetition compulsion is to be understood as a structure of repetition based on the insistence of something like a letter in a long signifying chain. The letter is a material signifier in the Poe story. According to Lacan’s developmental model of human subjectivity articulated in his “Mirror Stage” essay (1942), the self, upon leaving dyadic union with the Mother is captured into a “symbolic dimension” which hitherto “binds and orients” it (Lacan 28). Schooled in the thought of Alexander Kojève’s reading of Hegel, Lacan’s theory of intersubjectivity is based upon a theory of alterity that is spelled out by the equation “the I is the Other.” Rimbaud, the boy poet, put it nicely, "Je est autre." In other words, there is no subjectivity without intersubjectivity. I cannot name myself as an “I” in the symbolic order without an embedded relationship to something outside myself which defines me. The birth of the subject arises out of an imaginary misrecognition which in turn is sublimated under the domain of the symbolic order, so that it is “the symbolic order which is constitutive for the subject” (Lacan 29).

The subject is divided between a mirror image of its self, what Lacan calls the imaginary, the topos of images, dreams, and libidinal desires, and the symbolic order, the purview of language, the law, thought, and desire for an Other. The subject is thus barred from access to a signified, written out in the formula S/s, and is circumscribed under the auspices of the signifier. The realm of the imaginary is related to the symbolic but there is a bar wedged between the gestalt of the spectral image and the name of the father, the law, of the symbolic order. What constitutes the self is an intractable search to locate the lost wholeness of the Other. In this way, Lacan rewrites Freud’s observation that the little child realizes his mother (the m/Other) does not have the phallus. Upon realizing that the mother does not, in fact, have the phallus, the child cognizes that the phallus must be lost and goes in search of it in order to restore it to its proper place. We have here the Lacanian explanation of symbolic desire built upon Freud’s idea of the Oedipal Complex as well as the repetition compulsion. The search for the mother’s phallus is forbidden by the Father/Law. The law intrudes in the form of the symbolic father who cuts a decisive “no” into the child’s forbidden desire.

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References

Lacan, J., & Fink, B. (2006). Ecrits: The first complete edition  
in English. New York: W.W. Norton & Co.

----, & Sheridan, A. (1998). The four fundamental concepts of
psychoanalysis: the seminar of Jacques Lacan Book XI. New  
York: W.W. Norton & Co.

Muller, J. P., & Richardson, W. J. (1988). The Purloined Poe: Lacan, 
Derrida & psychoanalytic reading. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press.

Derrida's Definition of Western Philosophy

Derrida writes in "La Différance," in Margins of Philosophy, "For the middle voice, a certain nontransitivity, may be what philosophy, at its outset, distributed into an active and a passive voice, thereby constituting itself by means of this repression" (9).

Hedwig and the Angry Inch and Plato's Theory of Bisexuality

Read about how the song "Origin of Love" from the musical movie Hedwig and the Angry Inch is a primer on Plato's theory of bisexuality.

image credit: Hedwig and the Angry Inch

Freud uses the myth of the three human figures (taken from Plato’s Symposium) to illustrate the human instinct to return to a former state, which he calls the death drive, which, as seen by the myth, is fueled by the libido of desire.

“‘The original human nature was not like the present, but different. In the first place, the sexes were originally three in number, not two as they are now; there was man, woman, and the union of the two.’ Everything about these primaeval men was double: they had four hands and four feet, two faces, two privy parts, and so on. Eventually Zeus decided to cut these men in two .... After the division had been made, ‘the two parts of man, each desiring his other half, came together, and threw their arms about one another eager to grow into one.’” (Freud Beyond the Pleasure Principle, 69-70).

In the film Hedwig and the Angry Inch, Hedwig uses the same myth to inspire a song she calls “The Origin of Love.” 

Feel inspired? Use the lesson plan I added to the TpT catalog.

Lyrics from “Origins of Love”