ABSTRACT
In a recent article on the numerous metaphors employed by Freud to represent the mind, Jacques Derrida (1966) seeks to interpret them in relation to the partial solution of the problem of memory offered by the metaphor of the "mystic writing pad": the endlessly erasable children's plaything in which the original script is always retained in its pristine newness by the underlying wax, while new 'perceptions' are constantly inscribed upon it. Dreams and memory for Freud, as we know, are a succession of comparisons with pictograms, hieroglyphs (Bilderschriften), the palimpsest, the double inscription (Niederschrift), Vorstellungen, the rebus, sentences and paragraphs blacked out by the censorship in Russian newspapers, and so forth. While dealing with many of the more strictly mechanistic and spatial metaphors employed by Freud (archeology, the telescope, the microscope, the camera, and so forth), Derrida seeks to emphasize the metaphor of writing in Freud, noting the implication of a postscript, or supplement, in the concept of Nachtraglichkeit. One would add that, for the observer, memory is what is absent from the here and now and thus what has to be inferred; for the subject, it is the nature of memory's passage from absence to a particular kind of presence - the way in which the subject reads the trace - which governs his future possibilities.
