ABSTRACT
Cybernetics, a crucial antecedent of digitality, is replete with references to psychoanalysis. After addressing the problematic status of the psy-sciences via Edmund Husserl, in this chapter, my non-psychological psychoanalytic critique aims to understand why AI-theorists and cyberneticists traded Freud for mainstream psychology. First, Marvin Minsky is discussed as a prime example of AI-theorists taking recourse to the psy-sciences and winding up in a (neuro)biological and naturalising approach. Norbert Wiener regressed to psychology, first, in an attempt to save the liberal humanistic subject, and second, due to his horror at entropy. While Wiener understood entropy as material and natural, what if his fears really concerned informational entropy: (inter)subjectivity disappearing into information? The chapter then considers Gregory Bateson’s essentialist conception of the analogic, with my counterargument being that it is only from the digital perspective that the analogue, the necessary other of digitality, sees light. Finally, I discuss Warren McCulloch, who vehemently rejected Freud. My critique of McCulloch’s claim to model the digital after neurology is that he sets out from a psychologising model of the human to design the artificial, from which he subsequently claimed to be able to make inferences about human nature.
