Technological Grammatization and psychic apparatus
On Sigmund Freud‘ s « Note on the ‘magic block’ » (1925)
Hidetaka Ishida (the University of Tokyo)
Today we use more and more the computer tablet as macintosh i-Pad, which has a strange similarity to the writing tool described by Sigmund Freud in his famous small text of 1925 "Note on the magic block '' ('Notiz über den' Wunderblock '") : the English name of Wunderblock is the "Magic Pad". This parallel between i Pad and Magic Pad, seems particularly interesting, because if the i-Pad has become our everyday tool - our "mental prosthesis" in some way - Freud had elected the Magic Pad as a model to illustrate his conception of the psychic apparatus (psychic) (seelischer Apparat).
I'll deliver my reflexions on the implication of informatics apparatus in today's psychic life by tracing the evolution of the theoretical conception of the psychic apparatus - so is his theory of topography - in Freud throughout his work.
I consider Freud not as abstract thinker; he is more engineer of the human soul. The reflection that I bring today is part of a work that tries to show that contrary to what said Dr. Jacques Lacan, the Unconscious is not structured like a language, but it is structured like a cinematograph: it is graphic - grammatologic - and technologic.
1 « Note on the ‘magic block’ » (1925)
First, let's see what Freud says on the magic bloc. I assume you have already read the small text and we all understood what is magic block.
For economy of time, I will not read all the passages I mention; I refer to quotations by number.
Freud compares this memory-making tool called the magical blog or Magic Pad to his conception of the psychic apparatus ("if it is examined more closely it will be found that its construction shows a remarkable agreement with my hypothetical structure of our perceptual apparatus.").
He says. On note paper we can write but can not erase the surface for new writing. On the slate tablet, writing can be erased but you cannot keep traces. There is an incompatibility between renewable inscription and indefinite registration: between Perception (or Consciousness) and Memory. Freud recalls his distinction of "Perception-Consciousness (Pc-Cs)" and "Memory traces" in his Interpretation of Dreams (Die Traumdeutung 1900), we will return to this work further.
It is precisely a system making both possible that Freud discovered in this "little instrument" called "Magic block" :
But if it is examined more closely it will be found that its construction shows a remarkable agreement with my hypothetical structure of our perceptual apparatus and that it can in fact provide both an ever-ready receptive surface and permanent traces of the notes that have been made upon it. (SE 209)
The magic block is provided with a "transparent celluloid plate" which serves as a "protective shield against stimuli"; real "stimulus-receiving layer" is located just below the celluloid, which is the "thin translucent wax paper " :
The celluloid is a "protective shield against stimuli"; the layer which actually receives the stimuli is the paper. I may at this point recall that in Beyond the Pleasure Principle [trans., 1922, 22 ff.; new trans., 1950, 30 ff.]. I showed that the perceptive apparatus of our mind consists of two layers, of an external protective shield against stimuli whose task is to diminish the strength of excitations coming in, and of a surface behind it which receives the stimuli,namely the system Pcpt.-Cs.(SE 210)
These two layers of surfaces are, Freud believed, just like the system "Perception-Consciousness"; since his Project for a psychology (Entwurf einer Psychology 1895), the human psyche (the system Ψ) for Freud is defined as discharging the energy Q of the outside world; it is only the reduced amount of energy Qη that can be invested in the psyche; the Perception is through the φ neurones, the Consciousness by ω, both permeable, while the Memory Traces are formed of impermeable ψ neurons (we'll talk just now "contact barrier" and "facilitation "). This is the apparatus φψω, the first draft of the psychic apparatus.
The wax tablet constituting the bottom of the magic block which will settle the traces of writing is compared to the "Unconscious" :
It is true, too, that, once the writing has been erased, the Mystic Pad cannot "reproduce" it from within; it would be a mystic pad indeed if, like our memory, it could accomplish that. None the less, I do not think it is too far-fetched to compare the celluloid and waxed paper cover with the system Pcpt.-Cs. and its protective shield, the wax slab with the Unconscious behind them, and the appearance and disappearance of the writing with the flickering-up and passing-away of Consciousness in the process of Perception. (SE 211)
Freud wrote that "The magic block can not, anyway," reproduce "from within writing, once it cleared: it would indeed be a magic block if he could accomplish this as our memory. ". But precisely if it was i Pad, it would be possible to update the memory; so that i Pad would actually be the achieved form of magic block as a model of the Freudian psychic apparatus.
And Freud added that the timing of gestures of detachment of the cover sheet could be compared with the discontinuity of the stream of innervation from within the body of the organism. This final remark shows that he also sees a dimension to illustrate the instance Id he had introduced in his second topography with The Ego and the Id (Das Ich und das Es 1923):
If we imagine one hand writing upon the surface of the Mystic Writing-Pad while another periodically raises its covering sheet from the wax slab, we shall have a concrete representation of the way in which I tried to picture the functioning of the perceptual apparatus of our mind. (SE
I do not so much talk about the iPad at this stage. I only say that i Pad while constantly renewing our Perception-Consciousness, in permanent liaison with the networks, records and keeps all traces; it is also able to recall them all. This means that our mental apparatus interfaces with the real magic block. Our Pr-Cs - our retention - interfaces with the communicative surface that is renewable at any time (our prosthesis of presence); our memory is assisted by the third memory machine; our Unconscious is traversed right through by this Technical Unconscious, let alone about energy.
２ The Interpretation of Dreams (Die Traumdeutung 1900)
In the "Note on the 'magic block,'" quoted Freud the psychic apparatus of the Traumdeutung. Indeed, Freud had presented his first psychic apparatus (psychic device) - the "first topography" in chapter VII "On the psychology of the dream process" of the book. The diagram is not actually fundamentally different from that of magic block. Freud apparently adopts the optical metaphor - the systems of the telescope lenses - to explain the diagrams:
Accordingly, we conceive the psychic apparatus as a compound instrument, the component parts of which we shall call instances, or, for the sake of clearness, systems. We shall then anticipate that these systems may perhaps maintain a constant spatial orientation to one another, very much as do the different and successive systems of lenses of a telescope. (SE 536-537)
This first Freudian topography is well known: it illustrates in the three diagrams how the psyche called "Ψ Systems" was formed from the Perception (W / Pr), forming the "Memory traces" (Er, Er, ... / S , S ', ...).
Freud has just abandoned his recently neurological project, that's why he uses the optical and spatial metaphor, but it still remains behind the neurological hypothesis and so there must be read neurological implications.
1 The diagram of « reflex apparatus » :
The psychic process runs usually from the perceptive end to motor end (SE 537)
2 The diagram showing the formation of "memory traces" or "memory".
We now have reason to admit a first differentiation at the sensory end. The percepts that come to us leave in our psychic apparatus a trace, which we may call a “memory-trace”. The function related to this memory-trace we call the “memory”.
The fact of association, then, consists in this - that in consequence of a lessening of resistance and a smoothing of the ways from one of the Er(Memory)-elements, the excitation transmits itself to a second rather than to a third Er(Memory)-element. (SE 538)
We know that behind this representation according to an optical model, there is a neurological account as he tried to formulate in his Project of Psychology (Entwurf einer Psychology 1895). Freud introduced the neuron theory of contact barriers and facilitations which is a synapse theory in today's terms. These facilitations (Bahnung) are shown in the diagrams through approximation of memory traces in the stimulus current, while smoothed ψ neurons are invested of Qη energy, if we reinvested the theoretical concepts that had been developed in the Project of 1895.
Note in passing that the various editions of the Traumdeutung not all faithfully reproduced Freud's diagrams.
Er 1 simultaneity
Er2 resemblance etc.
3 The "Perception-Consciousness W-Bw" / "the Unconscious Vbw" / "the Preconscious Vbw"
At the motor-end of the process is assigned the system Pcs. In the letter to Fliess in 1896, Freud wrote: "The Preconscious is the third transcription related to verbal representations corresponding to our official ego. Investments arising from this Preconscious become conscious according to certain laws. This secondary cogitative consciousness, which appears later, is probably linked to the hallucinatory reactivation of verbal representations; and neurons in the conscious state would be again perception neurons and in themselves foreign to memory. "(Letter No. 52 of 6-12-1806).
In Freud, language is conceptualized as word representation (Wort Vorstellung) which is essentially acoustic, whose articulation is active and almost of motor activity. It's articulation give movement to the sound image, to which is associated the thing representation (Ding Vorstellung or object-representation in the terminology of his Study on aphasia, 1891).
Thus verbalization becomes a moment of awareness by joining at the second degree the Perception-Consciousness . Thus the system Pcs reached and invested energy of attention and associated with words, Memory trace elements can access to the "cogitative consciousness." The Ψ process is completed, the verbalization will be a reflexive return to the Pr-Cs.
The last of the systems at the motor end we call the preconscious (Pcs.) to denote that the exciting processes in this system can reach Consciousness without any further detention, provided certain other conditions are fulfilled, e.g., the attainment of a definite degree of intensity, a certain apportionment of that function which we must call attention, etc. This is at the same time the system which holds the keys of voluntary motility. The system behind it we call the unconscious (Ucs), because it has no access to consciousness except through the Preconscious, in the passage through which the excitation-process must submit to certain changes.
(Note added in 1919) The further elaboration of this linear diagram will have to reckon with the assumption that the system following the Pcs represents the one to which we must attribute consciousness (Cs), so that P = Cs. (SE 541)
Freud said that until the system Unconscious is the primary process prevailing in associations, and from the Preconscious the secondary process. This means that until Unconscious system, that is the thing representation, which "consists of an investment, if not direct, of mnemonic images of the thing, at least of the more distant memory traces derived thereof "(" the Unconscious, "1915), with the Preconscious the thing representation is combined with the word representation (that is to say, verbal language in Freud's terms).
We may note here that contrary to Lacan, for Freud, the Unconscious is not structured like a language. The thing representation is rather polyvalent assembly of sensory and visual images. For facilitations of mnemonic traces of the process Ψ, Freud writes: :
On further investigation we find it necessary to assume not one but many such mem-systems, in which the same excitation transmitted by the Perception- elements undergoes a diversified fixation. The first of these mem-systems will in any case contain the fixation of the association through simultaneity, while in those systmes lying further away, the same material of excitation will be arranged according to other forms of combination; so that relationships of similarity, etc., might perhaps be represented by these later systems. It would, of course, be idle to attempt to express in words the psychic significance of such a system. Its characteristic would lie in the intimacy of its relations to elements of raw material of memory - that is (if we wish to hint at a more comprehensive theory) in the gradations of the conductive resistance on the way to these elements.
The first memory traces system is defined by the elements of simultaneous perception. ; the second and following are defined by the similarities, etc. And then by "the intimacy of relationships with elements of mnemonic raw material", etc.
In the theoretical metaphor explaining the stratification of memory traces, Freud likened them to "the various telescope lens systems": it is as if this device - metaphorically optical, métapsychologically psychic and secretly "neural" - proceeded to successive shots of the thing representation in the Unconscious, before the process is doubled by the word representation at the terminal of Preconscious. The process is - one might say - cinematographic. These successions of shots - and multiple conjunctions in latence. And with the Preconscious, this thing representation will be doubled by word representation of language, a scenario will articulate cinematographic narratives rationalizing but always already leaving unspoken elements under censorship and repressions. The Unconscious is structured as a cinema. This is the very meaning of the Return to Freud.
This is also why, when in sleep, the junction with the motility is unplugged and the machine is running in reverse, the psychic apparatus begins to make the "regressing" process - this is the "dream process" according to Freud - and to make hallucinatory projection of "images" on the dream screen.
What takes place in the hallucinatory dream we can describe it in no other way than by saying that the excitation follows a retrogressive course. It communicates itself not to the motor end of the apparatus, but to the sensory end, and finally reaches the system of perception. If we call the direction which the psychic process follows from the unconscious into the progressive waking state, we may then speak of the dream as having a regressive character. (SE 542)
During the day there is a continuous stream flowing from the Ψ-system of the Perceptio toward the motility end; this current ceases at night, and can no longer block the flow of the current of excitation in the opposite direction. (SE 544)
3. The Ego and the Id (Das Ich und das Es 1923)
As we know, it is in the Ego and the Id (Das Ich und Das Es) that Freud introduced his second Topography with the system "the Ego, the Id and the Superego." I consider relative the break with the first topography of the Traumdeutung. Moreover, this article is contemporary of the Note on the magic block (1925).
The diagram of the psychic apparatus maintained the Pc-Cs function; he added the Pcs in continuity with the "hearing cap" to the left hemisphere. The memory traces are drawn without being named in the Ego, that is to say the system Ψ; the repression is figured while the Incs is not named, while the Id is introduced to mark the internal excitation source. This instance as a psychic force in fact had existed since the era of the Project(Entwurf).
What interests me in this drawing which loosely contains the human brain with cortical outline is the "hearing cap", the famous hat of Freud :
We at once realize that almost all the lines of demarcation we have drawn at the instigation of pathology relate only to the superficial strata of the mental apparatus—the only ones known to us. The state of things which we have been describing can be represented diagrammatically (Fig. 1); though it must be remarked that the form chosen has no pretensions to any special applicability, but is merely intended to serve for purposes of exposition. We might add, perhaps, that the ego wears a ‘cap of hearing’ —on one side only, as we learn from cerebral anatomy. It might be said to wear it awry. (SE 24-25)
That this "cap of hearing" (which would refer to the Wernicke area) is drawn on the line of continuity of Pcs shows that it is the function of language (word representation) that can bring memory traces to Pc-Cs. The model of the magic block had not inscription of this instance Pcs we could possibly add to the diagram of Freud (it is for this reason that the magic block could not recall the memories).
It is also interesting to note that Freud mentions the "cortical homunculus", of which I give the famous drawing by Wilder Penfield :
The ego is first and foremost a bodily ego; it is not merely a surface entity, but is itself the projection of a surface. If we wish to find an anatomical analogy for it we can best identify it with the ‘cortical homunculus’ of the anatomists, which stands on its head in the cortex, sticks up its heels, faces backwards and, as we know, has its speech-area on the left-hand side. (SE 25)
From the Perception to the motility through the language, the sensory, memorial and language functions are thus modelled on the cortical surface as a place of projection of the proper body.
The place of the Super-ego is not marked in the drawing. But in the advanced variant of the second topography in New introductory lectures on psychoanalysis (Neue Folge der Vorlesungen zur Einführung in die Psychoanalyse, 1933), we find it is well designed, while the famous "cap of hearing" disappears.
Why this disappearance, and the emergence of the Super-ego in the place of auditory function? We find part of the answer in the following passage of the The Ego and the Id :
…it is as impossible for the super-ego as for the ego to disclaim its origin from things heard: for it is a part of the ego and remains accessible to consciousness by way of these word-presentations (concepts, abstractions). But the cathectic energy does not reach these contents of the super-ego from auditory perception (instruction or reading) but from sources in the Id. (SE 51-52)
From there we must probably think that the voice was heard - by telephone - by the "cap of hearing," but the cap has been internalized undergoing energy investments of Id.
The Ψ systems can communicate by telephone from the "speech circuit" of Saussure, while our perception continues to be initialized and our memories to accumulate cinematically on our Magic or i Pads.
4 Provisional Conclusion
Freud formulated the analytic aim: "Wo Es war, soll Ich werden" (where Id was, the Ego should happen." Since Freud, our situation has been fundamentally transformed by our technological environment. Our mental apparatus is connected to the immense quantity of energy Q of machines. Our internal motility is imbued with tremendous excitements. Our Perception-Consciousness is constantly in interface so to the electro-computer interfaces of type i Pad. The contact barriers and synaptic facilitations of our systems Ψ are directly in sync with neuronal pulses machines.
It is precisely this situation that the psychic apparatus of Freudian model makes possible to think, for where it was, in this technological environment, also our psyche should happen.
How can this future be emerging ..?
That is our question.