Mystic Writing Pad Research Articles

Picture of the Human in Psychoanalysis

If Freud engendered the Copernican turn in the Cartesian picture of the person, Lacan offered the Keplerian turn. The paper works through the works of Freud-Lacan and Deleuze/Guattari to arrive at three meanings of the unconscious: (i) repressive, (ii) non-repressive and (iii) productive of surplus. It displaces the Cartesian ›I think, therefore I am‹ with the ›It thinks‹ – i.e. the unconscious thinks; therefore ›I think, where I am not‹ and ›I am, where I think not.‹ It shows how the person in psychoanalysis moves from self-reflection to self-transformation, i.e. from a close look at the ›mirror of being‹ to a ›canvas of a new becoming‹; where the mirror becomes a canvas for redrawing the ›graph of affect‹ and rewriting the palaeolithic script on the person’s Mystic Writing Pad. Building on insights gleaned from a medieval spiritual ›cultivation of self‹: Sahajiya, the paper sees psychoanalysis as also a larger praxis of living-loving, and not a mere means to medicalized individual cure.

Surface Writing

In uncovering the hidden history of Sigmund Freud’s Mystic Writing-Pad, this essay seeks to illuminate not only why so many have assumed that it was “merely a child’s toy” (and how we might read it differently knowing that it was not) but also why Jacques Derrida devoted so much energy to deconstructing Freud’s fascination with it as an analogy for consciousness. We may even discover something—in ways that are perhaps more than mere analogy—about how our more contemporary devices generate modes of extended cognition as well.

Designing a Mystic Writing Pad after Auschwitz: Daniel Libeskind and Peter Eisenman

In an attempt to revisit two architectural pieces of commemoration designed by two influential architects, the Garden of Exile by Daniel Libeskind and the Memorial for the Murdered Jews of Europe by Peter Eisenman, it is worthwhile to recall Sigmund Freud’s 1925 essay “A Note Upon the ‘Mystic Writing-Pad”. This paper elaborates on the association between writing and memory and introduces how these architects use topography while placing gigantic rectangular blocks as a peculiar analogy to Freud’s technique per se, that is, ‘writing on a surface.’ This argument opens up the discussion on the longitudinal cross sections and the experiential qualities of these projects concentrating on their particular internalization of memory and time. Then comes Walter Benjamin and his notion of allegory into the picture to claim that Libeskind’s concept of ‘reading the note’ may differ from Eisenman’s in a reasonably crucial way. The latter’s architecture expands the idea of memory and it’s further functioning and places it in the realm of allegorical experience.

Mistranslations of Subjectivity: The Textual Unconscious in Conrad’s Work

The article engages with Freud’s “Mystic Writing Pad” (1925) as an interpretative point of departure for reading the unconscious labour of the text in three of Conrad’s novels. The distinctive commonality of these texts is the occurrence of a form of mistranslation, known in translation theory as “false cognates”, or more colloquially, “false friends” or “faux amis”. The readings offered in this context highlight aporetic moments in these novels, moments of undecidability, where the use of false cognates seems to cross the boundary-lines of narrative levels, and cannot be exclusively assigned to either the character, or the narrator, or the author. These aporetic moments are, I suggest, textual equivalents of the physical points of contact in Freud’s model of the “mystic writing pad”. The convergence of metalepsis with linguistic distortion in the narration indicates, in all three cases, a reverberation of unconscious anxiety about paternity and filiation and desire for a grounding of subjectivity, which boil over and across the different layers of the text, challenging the ontological distinction between the textual and the psychic, and generating a process of transference which implicates the reader as well.

Conrad's Mystic Writing Pad: Translation and the Unconscious Labor of the Text

Conrad's Mystic Writing Pad:Translation and the Unconscious Labor of the Text Daphna Erdinast-Vulcan (bio) Translation has long been a generative concept for psychoanalytic theories, beginning with Freud's polysemic deployment of the German "Übersetzung" to denote diverse, albeit related terms like "translation," "transposition," "metaphor," and "transference," whose complex affinities of these terms were highlighted by Patrick J. Mahony in an inaugural essay on translation and psychoanalysis (1980/1987). Mahony intriguingly relates to translation as "a unified field concept which illustrates the interaction of intrasystemic, intersystemic and interpsychic phenomena" (p. 3), but he stops short of articulating the dynamics of this interaction, nor does he explore the relations between the textual and the psychic as they come to the fore in translation. The following discussion would offer one possible conceptualization of these relations through a literary prism, engaging with Freud's essay on the "mystic writing pad" (1925) as an interpretative model for a reading of three novels by Joseph Conrad. The distinctive commonality of these novels is, I suggest, a form of self-translation or mistranslation, which may yield some productive insights into the unconscious labor of the text.1 The most recent and extended post-Freudian engagement with the nexus of translation and the unconscious has been offered by Jean Laplanche, whose early work, written in collaboration with Serge Leclaire (1972/1999), inaugurated a life-long project of recovering the "Copernican" thrust of the Freudian revolution by reformulating Freud's initial conception of the unconscious as the "drive for translation" [a traduire] [End Page 691] (Benjamin, 1992, p. 139). That-which-is-to-be-translated becomes, for Laplanche, the very definition of the unconscious, as originally presented by Freud in a letter to Fliess on December 6, 1896, where he equates repression with "a failure of translation" (Laplanche, 1992/1999c, p. 157). Laplanche's essays of the late 1980s and early 1990s discard much of the tradition of classical psychoanalysis, which he views as overly deterministic inasmuch as it conceives of the past as "containing the truth of" the present text, and of analytic work as a project of recovery (Laplanche, 1990/1992, p. 170). Psychoanalysis, he writes, "is not a translation but a de-translation, a dismantling and a reversion of the translation […] so as to permit a 'better' translation; that is to say one that is more complete, more comprehensive and less repressive" or "less symptomatic" (pp. 170–171). Undoing existing self-translations presented by the patient in his/her life, dreams, and symptoms, the analytic cure consists of a movement of "detranslation-retranslation" (p. 173; see also Laplanche, 1989; Laplanche, 1992/1999c; and, for a broader theoretical context, Laplanche, 1992/1999). Notably, Laplanche's reformulation of the unconscious as a traduire is still profoundly Freudian in its focus on the "double inscription" which characterizes the unconscious, and the "radical opacity" of the cogito to itself (Laplanche & Leclaire, 1972/1999, p. 227). This opacity is precisely what calls for the analytic work that "aims at bringing into relief the nodal points ('Knotenpunkte') in the patient's speech; points of intensity, of absence of intensity, lacunae, hollows" (p. 230), through which the "radical heterogeneity" of the unconscious finds expression (p. 232). Translation theories have, for their part, taken up the concept of the unconscious mostly as a force to be reckoned with in the dynamics of the translator's work or the analysis of the translated text. Translational choices, which sometimes produce ambiguities or errors are, it is argued, neither accidental nor technical, but are often generated by the translator's unconscious relations with the source texts or with their authors (Frota, 2004; Basile, 2005; Quinney, 2004). Most comprehensively, Laurence Venuti (2002), a prominent theoretician of translation, takes up Lecercle's concept of "remainders" (1990) and relates it to the process and the product of translation. The "remainder," according to Lecercle, might be considered "the [End Page 692] linguistic equivalent of the Freudian unconscious, excluded or repressed by the rules of grammar, but trying to return in jokes, slips of the tongue, solecisms, and poetry" (Lecercle, 1990, p. 23). Venuti suggests that such linguistic effects that direct the reader's attention to the "utter heterogeneity...

Berlin Psychoanalytic: Psychoanalysis and Culture in Weimar Republic Germany and Beyond by Veronika Fuechtner (review)

Reviewed by: Berlin Psychoanalytic: Psychoanalysis and Culture in Weimar Republic Germany and Beyond by Veronika Fuechtner Laurie R. Johnson Berlin Psychoanalytic: Psychoanalysis and Culture in Weimar Republic Germany and Beyond. By Veronika Fuechtner. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2011. Pp. xii + 242. Cloth $49.95. ISBN 978-0520258372. At this book’s conclusion, Veronika Fuechtner states that part of her aim “has been to establish the Berlin Psychoanalytic as another point of reference in discussions on psychoanalysis and modernism” (179). This statement is modest, but the book that precedes it reveals the prismatic power of that choice of reference point. Viewing part of the history of psychoanalysis and modernism within the context of Weimar Berlin makes these movements themselves seem to shift and re-form along a spectrum quite different from the one viewed from Vienna or London. By reconstructing the history of the Berlin Psychoanalytic Institute (BPI) from its opening in March 1920 to the beginning of the Gleichschaltung in early 1933, Fuechtner presents a picture of Weimar Berlin as well as of the seminal psychoanalytic practitioners who inhabited it. By focusing on situating psychoanalysis in these years within the larger movement of cultural modernism, Berlin Psychoanalytic reveals (or reinforces previously known) connections between artists and physicians, authors and scientists. Fuechtner’s study emphasizes psychoanalysis’s multidisciplinary structure, in part by investigating the diverse and not infrequently ambivalent positions of its early Berlin adherents. While part of Fuechtner’s contribution is to illuminate the pervasiveness of psychoanalysis and the ways in which psychoanalytic concepts or a psychoanalytic mindframe can saturate a culture, an equally significant part is her investigation, through the conversation technique, of specific networks between clinicians and other cultural practitioners and artists. Berlin Psychoanalytic’s chapters are organized in terms of conversations, and they take place in various spaces: Alfred Döblin and Ernst Simmel, Georg Groddeck and Count Hermann von Keyserling (et al.) meet in Berlin, while Arnold Zweig and Max Eitingon converse in a chapter on exiled BPI members in Palestine. The continued work of BPI members in New York from the mid-1930s onward is considered in a chapter that positions Richard Huelsenbeck and Charles Hulbeck in conversation with Karen Horney. This format of situating members and associates of the BPI in conversation, in which Fuechtner reads their correspondence as well as references to one another’s work, helps highlight the confluence of science and art within psychoanalysis and within individual careers. Döblin’s psychiatric training and work as a military doctor is well known, but his work with Simmel and the BPI, says Fuechtner, shifted his “late-nineteenth-century psychiatric understanding of mental illness to a psychoanalytic conception of the soul. This development changed his medical practice and simultaneously drove his search for radical new forms of narration in his fiction” (18). The soul in Döblin’s fictional psychology is both knowable and unreliable, and operates in a way compatible with Freud’s thinking about memory as involving “the [End Page 454] flickering-up and passing-away of consciousness in the process of perception” (in “A Note upon the ‘Mystic Writing-Pad,’” 1925). And it was the BPI that, Fuechtner states, “offered Döblin an institutional framework where he could connect his two professions—those of writer and physician” (21). Berlin Psychoanalytic also offers new readings of the literature and film associated with the BPI and with psychoanalysis more generally. Döblin, as Fuechtner puts it, “described psychoanalytic therapy as a necessary relief of the clogged-up sewer system of Berlin’s collective unconscious,” and “Berlin Alexanderplatz can be read as an unsettling descent into the depths of this psychological canalization” (39). Fuechtner’s close readings of Berlin Alexanderplatz and other texts emphasize the reach of psychoanalytic thinking into other areas of life—into film, art, politics, and also into very eclectic realms. The chapter situating Groddeck in conversation with Count von Keyserling is entitled “Wild Psychoanalysis, Religion, and Race” and provides a truly new way of looking at the margins of psychoanalysis and how they were perhaps only traversable during the highpoint of cultural modernism’s avant-garde movements. Some of the work Fuechtner examines in the chapter on “Wild...

The Alterability of the Memory Trace

This essay is the result of a critical reading exercise of Freud's 1925 text Note upon the Mystic Writing-Pad. This reading led me to argue the necessity of radicalizing some consequences that emerge from the analogy established by Freud between the psychic apparatus, and a certain writing machine. The purpose of this paper is to compare critically such a model of the psychic apparatus and what Derrida describes as processes of inscriptionality. One of the most relevant consequences of this writing analogy is that those notions in psychoanalysis compromised with the idea of an origin -or that are treated as original in terms of the genesis of the psychic apparatus- cannot be further sustain as unaltered nucleus. Primal repression is one of the Freudian notions that operate anchored to these compromises.

Without remainder: ruins and tombs in Shakespeare's Sonnets

In the sixteenth century, observes Margaret Aston, ‘England acquired a whole suite of ruins’.1 The widespread destruction of monastery buildings and church fabric – the sheer ubiquity of the destru...

Mr. A’S Creative Adventure: Reflections on Drives and Psychic Conflict

The author discusses psychic conflict in the context of Freudian drive theory and its relationship to primal fantasies and repression. Freud’s metaphor of the “Mystic Writing Pad” is reviewed, with particular attention to psychotic perception, especially the lack of ability to differentiate between self and object. Psychoanalytic psychodrama is proposed as an effective treatment modality in such cases, and an illustrative clinical example is presented.

A Note Upon the "Liquid Crystal Screen" and Victorian Poetry

In an attempt to discuss the implications that advanced computer technology will have on future research on Victorian Poetry, it might be worthwhile re-visiting Freud's 1925 essay "A Note Upon the 'Mystic Writing-Pad.'" 1 In this influential piece, Freud offered an examination of memory and perceptual-conscious systems, using as examples two writing materials —paper and slate—and a toy, the "Mystic Writing-Pad." He began the essay by noting that the subject is "able to supplement and guarantee" the workings of memory "by making a note in writing" (p. 429). This note is for Freud "a materialized portion of [the] mnemic apparatus" which we "carry about with [us] invisible" (p. 429). This technique keeps "intact" the memory, "unaltered" by the subject's actual memory. By keeping in mind where the note is, the subject can easily recover and reproduce the memory at any time. [End Page 531]

The ABC and the Mystic Writing PAD

The ABC and the Mystic Writing PAD

Nakagami Kenji's Mystic Writing Pad; Or, Tracing Origins, Tales of the Snake, and the Land as Matrix

Nakagami Kenji's Mystic Writing Pad; Or, Tracing Origins, Tales of the Snake, and the Land as Matrix

Saturn Is Mostly Weather: Selected & Uncollected Poems by Gene Frumkin

276 Western American Literature prompts or improvisations than complete poems. Who teaches a river to walk? Do mountains lie down? Is a bird disappointed with air? Why don’t bones go through the skin ofthe sky? The imagery invokes a primitive literary Mystery, but little insight or revelation. The poet, it seems to me, is still too stunned by the extremity of her recent experience in the Arctic to meditate effectively on its significance, to convey its complexity, its sheer weirdness. There is too little of Ehrlich’s usual attentive­ ness to physical detail and its interconnecting metaphors. It’sonly fair to remind the reader again that the poem-cycle is intended as part of an elaborate collaboration. But reading the poem-cycle out of that context disappointed me. Again, in her foreword, Ehrlich says far more than she may intend when she asks Siobhan Davies what the ballet is about. “Oh, I don’t know,”Davies replies, “something about love and memory and walking.” Regrettably, ArcticHeartleaves me with the same sense of itsvagueness. DAVIDAXELROD La Grande, Oregon Saturn Is Mostly Weather: Selected & UncollectedPoems. ByGene Frumkin. (El Paso: Cinco Puntos Press, 1992. 96 pages, $9.95.) This elegantly-producedvolume provides afine introduction to the workof an important poet who has lived in New Mexico since 1966. Frumkin has been publishing poems for more than thirtyyears and shows a striking range and an impressive power of development. He has worked with surrealism without losing touch with the particular: this book contains some outstanding surrealist poems from the late Fifties and a good helping of the poems in which he has brilliantly captured the NewMexico aura. Hisfrequent sojourns in Hawaii have led to poems evoking that ambience also. And Frumkin remains one ofthe best love poets of our time, capturing a variety of erotic moods, from the earthy to the tenderly elegiac, not to mention the humorous. His book-length poem, Comma in theEar, with its exploration of Language poetry and literary theory, has not been represented, but much of his other major sequence, The Mystic WritingPad, is reprinted. In The Mystic Writing-Pad, Frumkin explores the extremes ofopacityand transparency in perceptual terms drawn from a famous essaybyFreud on the workings ofthe mind. He explores an abundance of polarities—light and dark, ideal and sordid, systematic and chaotic—with wit and subtlety. Acomparable new poem is Stagesin Assemblinga Mirror, which looks at the male conception of the feminine. And another new sequence, The Mandelstam Poems, is a powerful homage to the great Russian Reviews 277 poet. Like Mandelstam, Frumkin is a poet of technical virtuosity and deep emotional resonance. At the same time, he is a poet of ideas, writing as easily about the construction of the self through discourse as about the Canyon de Chelly and Taos. Cinco Puntos Press has provided uswith an opportunity to take a close look at the long and distinguished career of a poet who always strives to transcend himself. BERTALMON University ofAlberta TheFirebirdPoems. By Gerald Locklin. Edited by Donna Hilbert. (Palm Springs, California: Event Horizon Press, 1992. 134 pages, $12.95.) Since the release in 1967 ofhisfirst collection, SunsetBeach, California poet Gerald Locklin has published more than 50 volumes of poetry, prose, and scholarlywork. This latestcollection, TheFirebirdPoems, mayverywell extend the reputation of a poet described by Charles Bukowski as “one of the great undiscovered talents ofour time.” Editor Donna Hilbert has collected 99 poems that “show the range of Gerald Locklin’sstyles aswell as the wide range ofhis interests.”Earlier poems, for example, reveal the poet’sstruggles and experimentswith poetic constructs. These serve well as counterpoints to later works characterized by a style that is leaner, more precise, even conversational. Readers also encounter a wide vari­ etyofperspectives—that ofthe husband, father, professor, friend, critic, enemy, son, and so on—on an impressive range of subjects: children, wives, lovers, modern art, ski lifts, Pink Panther cartoons, life in L.A., chili, even Gerard Depardieu’schin. In the collection’s introduction, Edward Field writes that if there is an ideological bent to Locklin’spoetry, it is the poet’s “defense of the male spirit.” However, the messages of the poems herein must not be confused with the...

Comma in the Ear by Gene Frumkin

The novel ends in the fall of 1992. We will have to wait to see if history catches up with Dorris and Erdrich’s most satisfactory contemporary myth. DIANE D. QUANTIC Wichita State University Reviews 371 Comma in theEar. By Gene Frumkin. (Albuquerque: Living Batch Press, 1990. Distributed by University of New Mexico Press. 139 pages, $12.95.) Gene Frumkin has written a remarkably ambitious and successful long poem. Frumkin is probably best known for the poems of place collected inClouds and Red Earth, but the new book is a successor to his brilliant medita­ tions on perception and language inThe Mystic Writing-Pad . While the poems sometimes evoke western scenes—Hawaii, New Mexico, LosAngeles—their real setting is the human mind, or, to put it another way, the language that the mind and its culture dwell in. Frumkin was a surrealist early in his career and he has recently been influenced by the L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E movement. He has the technical and philosophical resources to look at the human condition as many best understand it at this time: as a condition of language. Structuralism, post­ structuralism, the dialogism of Bakhtin, so many of our philosophies turn on language. Frumkin is haunted by the theme of exile. One of the chief voices in his poem, a woman who writes letters to a poet figure, isJewish, which helps to keep the theme before us. But we are all in a Diaspora from any comforting religious, political or philosophical framework, Frumkin implies, and language is our one homeland. But Frumkin knows how problematic even language can be, and many sections of his poem meditate in a witty and verbally-textured way (Frumkin’sdiction is dazzling) on such apparently neutral terms as “Of,”“And,” “Like,” and “About.”These are as interesting and suggestive as his musings on apparently grander subjects like “The Subject Decentered” or his bits of story­ telling in a section like “Walter Benjamin in Moscow.” Running through these meditations is the continuing story in letters ofthe poet-figure’s correspondent, an intellectual woman whose loves in a variety ofwestern American settings take on a soap opera quality without losing their pathos. Pathos is a keynote of the poem but so is wit: there are some fine moments of comedy as the speaker explores the ambiguity of gender roles, and odd motifs like tatooing take on meaning while remaining bizarre. A poem as mature, accomplished and pas­ sionately relevant as this one is an event. BERT ALMON University ofAlberta ...

"In der Strafkolonie": Kafka and the Scene of Reading

The fabulous execution machine that is the center of attention Kafka's der Strafkolonie stands in [einem] tiefen, sandigen, von kahlen Abhangen ringsum abgeschlossenen Tal.' At the time represented by the narration, this natural theater is almost empty: no one is there except the principal performers themselves, the officer, the traveller, the condemned prisoner, and the soldier charge of the prisoner. But such performances as the one about to take place did not always attract so small an audience, the officer explains to the traveller: Wie war die Exekution anders friiherer Zeit! Schon einen Tag vor der Hinrichtung war das Tal von Menschen oberfullt; alle kamen nur zu sehen ... Vor hunderten Augen-alle standen auf den Ful3spitzen bis dort zu den Anhohen-wurde der Verurteilte vom Kommandanten selbst unter die Egge gelegt (p. 111). The theatrical character of the proceeding is clearly stressed, and the Zuschauer are clearly represented as the audience of a kind of performance which the death of the chief performer is the climactic--though not central-action. The central action of a proper execution as described by the officer der Strafkolonie is an act of reading. My reader may protest here that I am surely mistaken; that what is involved Kafka's story is clearly an act of writing, and that the attention of the story's reader is focused on the mechanism whereby the machine writes upon the body of the condemned prisoner. There is some justice to this objection, for the process of inscription gets more verbal space than the process of decipherment. But I will try to show that this inscription is simply the reproduction of an act of writing that had taken place long before the time of the narration and that as such it is the embodiment of the intellectual re-production which we ordinarily call 'reading.' My reader may also protest at my reformulation of Jacques Derrida's famous title. The comparison implied by my borrowing is not, I want to stress, between my essay and Derrida's but between Kafka's myth and Derrida's. The object of attention both Kafka's story and Derrida's essay is a machine involved the process of writing and reading. In and the Scene of Writing2 Derrida is particularly interested an analogy Freud had drawn between the operation of the perceptual apparatus and a device called the Mystic Writing-Pad, familiar to American

Locke's Tabula Rasa and Freud's "Mystic Writing Pad"

Locke's Tabula Rasa and Freud's "Mystic Writing Pad"