Communications from the Desk of the Unconscious

 Dear Receivers,

The unconscious knows neither time nor history, but history knows the unconscious;  it’s known it for over a century now.  Though psychoanalysis passes in and out of fashion in the larger cultural context, a steady stream of contributions filling out the contents, theory, effects, and forms of the unconscious has remained. How could an international and inter-centennial collection campaign for the contents of the unconscious — contents written and spoken, recorded in books, stories, theories, memories — spring from conversations held in a modestly furnished Viennese home office?

“I think you might do something better with the time,” so said Alice, “than wasting it in asking riddles that have no answers.”  But why is a raven like a writing desk? And is the unconscious structured like either?

 The desk of the unconscious is a clearing station to process portions of the accumulated unconscious.  Freud compared analysis to a kind of telephonic communication without wires passing between mutually tuned unconscious senders and receivers.  This means, among other things, that the psyche is never exhausted by the messages it engenders. These communications from the ongoing history of the unconscious aim for another kind of transmission and reception, but one that still gives witness to the riddle of an unconscious that, having no final answer, is here to stay.

— From the Desk of the Unconscious (January, 2015)

 

Category:New Social Forms