Freud as media theorist: mystic writing-pads and the matter of memory

Abstract

Amongst all the conceptual uncertainty now surrounding the validity of his work, the one key idea of Sigmund Freud that has entered the culture like no other is that of the Unconscious. One can think of it as Freud's answer to the question of human agency: are we self-determined, do we know what we are doing, or are we never fully self-present in our actions, however rational they appear to us? But today the Unconscious can also be understood differently: not as a psychic fact, to explain discrepancies between intention and action, but as the necessary hypothesis in response to a problem for which no other assumption could provide a satisfactory or even plausible answer. What if the Unconscious were a ‘place-holder’ rather than a place? A virtual space, the locus where two apparently incompatible conceptions of the working of the psyche converge, making the Unconscious the ‘provisional’ answer to a problem that Freud encountered. And what is this problem? My suggestion – and not only mine – is that it is the issue of ‘memory’. As Freud boldly noted in 1895: ‘any psychological theory deserving consideration must provide an explanation of memory’.

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