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.

Do You Have a Comfort Pose?

My Comfort Pose. It's called chin-tucked-in-a-turtleneck pose.

I guess most people have their "comfort" pose. It's that posture one comports to when feeling the need to be comforted, protected. For me, it's pulling my shirt neatly over my chin - and just under my lips, so I can nibble the fabric. It makes me feel safe - especially if I want to feel protected.

I have several comfort poses, actually. Some I've abandoned. Others I’ve kept on. In high school, for example, I carried books close to my chest. All the time. No matter where I was I had a hunky book attached to me. I don't traverse the traffic of my adult life in exactly the same way. Now, I go to my books. I keep them around. I put them in satchels or in the bathroom. I'm a teacher so I've taken to creating a space in my classroom where I showcase books. It’s a professional showcase. But it’s also for comfort.

Most of us want to be comforted so we tend to comfort ourselves in the absence of other's care. And with others, we play with the scripts that comforted us and we play around with what works - and abandon what doesn't.

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Hey! What's your comfort pose? I'd love to know in the comments.

The Stages of Life According to Erikson

Erik Erikson, the accessible psychologist, child of Freud, conceived of an eight-layered schematic to illustrate the entirety of human development —  first marked out in his groundbreaking book, Childhood and Society. In this book, he maps out a continuum from birth to death of the struggles of human development. Even though they are not meant to be like a grocery list, I list them out here:

1. Trust and Mistrust  

The first stage begins at the moment the infant meets the outside social world for the first time. Our first experiences with the world forms the basic trust/mistrust dyad. It’s kind of like the father who tosses his daughter up in the air and catches her. Trust: he catches her safely. Drops her? Basic mistrust forms.

2. Autonomy and Guilt

The struggle between autonomy and guilt – that nasty fight between independence and the debilitating fear of the all-seeing eye that threatens to swallow you alive with its judgment, catapulting a person into shame and doubt.

3. Initiative and Guilt

Then, of course, there is the whole question, “what do I do with myself once I’ve achieved autonomy?” that either gets us going to self-actualization or we become mired in the things we should have done or said – in a word: guilt. 

4.Industry and Initiative

Every child has to learn what to create with their bodies after they’ve decided they can actually get off their haunches and express themselves – and added with that, the internal feeling of being loved and the inner worth that goes along with creating work worthy of pride.

5. Identity

You can have an identity, it seems, without struggling through those forgotten visceral experiences of infancy; adolescence merely pokes its ugly head in to confuse us all over again – and we thought the womb was tough.

6. Intimacy and Isolation

But once we get a firm grounding on who we are as individuals we can really enter into genuine intimacy with another, although rocking precariously with the threat of isolation; this is where boundaries are set and committed relationships begin.

7. Generativity versus Stagnation

  And once we accomplish these mile markers we feel we have to give something back; we feel mortality nipping at our heels and generativity rushes in as a contraposition to idle stagnation.

8. Coming to terms. Or not.

The final hurrah is accessing whether the whole thing was worth it from the womb to the final tomb. We struggle at this point in the journey between feeling satisfied that we have gained much from life and whether or not we have nurtured the seeds for our children’s children. If we feel we've failed, death is a painful process, and we sink into the depressing cavity of despair, hopelessly casting off any hopes for immortality.

image credit: The Library Company of Philadelphia

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Notes on "On Some Motifs in Baudelaire"

Walter Benjamin on Marcel Proust on the Madeleine
I remember Walter Benjamin's writings on Marcel Proust's madeleine, the moment, in Proust's novel In Search of Lost Time, when an avatar of Proust bites into the pastry, memories of his childhood flood into his brain, what Proust calls a memoire involuntaire; but, I never noticed before this statement Benjamin (writing about Proust) makes about the search for an object related to a lost memory:

"As for that object, it depends entirely on chance whether we come upon it before we die or whether we never encounter it" (Benjamin Illuminations 158).

Lacan's Objet Petit A
This comment reminds me of Lacan's objet petit a.

It's Lacan's psychological concept for the lost object. The object of desire responsible for obsession and deranged fantasy. It is that object of desire that drives the desirer mad in search of it.

The object of desire, in the symbol of the madeleine, is a marker for that object that we may chance upon, involuntarily, or may never have at all. I think about myself, here, and my desires. If there is a "madeleine" for me, I may taste it, or I may not; the memoire involuntaire is totally necessitated by chance; I happen upon the object, the memory comes flooding in like an impressionistic painting. But, I may never come upon this memory, locked forever in some lost object of desire.

Is the Job of the Poet to Hearken Back to Lost Memories?
If it is the poet's job to unlock these memories, then I applaud the poet. If it is a poet who can open up a madeleine of lost memories, let's laud him with a crown of laurel.

I am sure there is a poem hidden in a taste yet to be eaten.

Am I hedonistic to wish for such a bite?

Proust entrances his reader with the opportunity to invoke memories through the senses. It is the poet who puts these sense impressions into language. Cognitive science confirms Proust's intimation that the senses (e.g., smell and taste) trigger a memory. Proust is right.

Proust Via Benjamin Via Lacan Are Onto Something
The memory Proust, and I think Benjamin is onto something, is alluding to is not a factual memory stuck at a particular moment in time. The memory is much broader than a recollection. Baudelaire (via Benjamin) uses the term shock - an expression meant to suggest a memory linked to trauma. The shock is a sense impression outside of some romantic notion of memory, and instead of a memory of the crowd.

I put away silly notions of private memory. The artist does not pull from something deep inside of him to produce art. It is not a private string of emotions the artist must articulate so others can understand. The memory the artist exposes is already there, involuntary.

Works Cited: 

Benjamin, Walter. Eiland, Howard, et al. Gesammelte Schriften. United Kingdom, Belknap Press, 1996.

Benjamin, Walter. Illuminations: Essays and Reflections. United States, Mariner Books, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2019.

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