Floating listening in the light of the Mystic Writing-Pad

A particular conception of knowledge in psychoanalysis emerges from a re-reading of Sigmund Freud’s "Note upon 'The Mystic Writing-Pad”’, which examines this technical invention in terms of its analogical relationship to memory. In it, the author reflects on two methods for preserving our memories from oblivion, each of which has its advantages and drawbacks. A sheet of paper offers a surface whose ideal receptivity is limited by saturation, rendering it incapable of accommodating new marks beyond a certain threshold of use. By virtue of its erasable nature, the slate circumvents this limitation, allowing each inscription to begin on a blank "skin"; its drawback, as one might guess, is the loss along the way of any previous markings: "Thus an unlimited receptive capacity and retention of permanent traces seem to be mutually exclusive (…) : either the receptive surface must be renewed or the notes must be destroyed". The mystic writing-pad, for its part, is a fairly simple device: its base, or "tablet", is made of soft wax covered by a strip of celluloid. A stylus pressed against the latter leaves impressions that appear in the wax as dark marks: lift the top layer, and the marks disappear. Freud recognised in this invention a mechanism similar to that which, within our psyche, performs the interrelated tasks of receptivity and retention mentioned above, which are assigned to the system Pcpt.-Cs. and the unconscious, respectively. However, this is not a one-to-one analogy, and Freud is indeed quick to qualify it: whilst the mystic writing-pad fully meets this dual requirement, our psychic apparatus is said to have "an unlimited receptive capacity for new perceptions and nevertheless lays down permanent–even though not unalterable– memory traces of them." In this very qualification, we find the elements of the answer outlined earlier in our post on the symptom: the workings of the unconscious resemble those of a "troll" that alters and constantly displaces knowledge… not quite, not entirely. The  mystic writing-pad seems to us to provide not only an image of memory at the interface of Freudian instances, but also of that floating attentiveness which, during the session, must ensure the "eidetic reduction" of all bookish mediation, all haste and all judgement on our part as analysts, who make of it a condition of our clinical practice. Knowledge that is muted, then, and "retractable", like a ballpoint pen – or a landing gear for transference.