of an aspect of the general phenomenon of manual regression (see p. 6o) and of a new
liberation.’ As to the long-term consequences in terms of the forms of reasoning, and a return
to diffuse and multidimensional thought, they cannot be now foreseen. Scientific thought is
rather hampered by the necessity of drawing itself out in typographical channels and it is
certain that if some procedure would permit the presentation of books in such a way that the
materials of the different chapters are presented simultaneously in all their aspects, authors
and their users would find a considerable advantage. It is absolutely certain that if scientific
reasoning has clearly nothing to lose with the disappearance of writing, philosophy and
literature will definitely see their forms evolve. This is not particularly regrettable since
printing will conserve the curiously archaic forms of thought that men will have used during
the period of alphabetic graphism; as to the new forms, they will be to the old ones as steel to
flint, not only a sharper but a more flexible instrument. Writing will pass into the
infrastructure without altering the functioning of intelligence, as a transition which will have
some centuries of primacy” (GP, II, pp. 261-62. See also EP, Conclusion).
36.The “XXIIe Semaine de synthèse,” a colloquium whose contents were collected in
L’écriture et la psychologie des peuples, was placed under the rubric of this remark of Marcel
Cohen’s (“La grande invention de l’écriture et son evolution”). But at each moment the rich
suggestions made during the colloquium point beyond the graphological project. Mr. Cohen
himself recognizes the difficulty and the premature character of such a task: “We can
obviously not begin to deal with the graphology of peoples; it would be too delicate, too
difficult. But we can express the idea that it is not only because of technical reasons that there
are differences, there may be something else” (p. 342).
37.Text of 1923, collected in the Essais de psychanalyse, tr. fr., pp. 95 f. I shall quote a few
lines: “For Fritz, when he was writing, the lines meant roads and the letters ride on motor-
bicycles—on the pen—upon them. For instance, ‘i’ and ‘e’ ride together on a motor-bicycle
that is usually driven by the ‘i’ and they love one another with a tenderness quite unknown in
the real world. Because they always ride with one another they become so alike that there is
hardly any difference between them, for the beginning and the end—he was talking of the
small Latin alphabet—of ‘i’ and ‘e’ are the same, only in the middle the ‘i’ has a little stroke
and the ‘e’ has a little hole. Concerning the Gothie letters ‘i’ and ‘e,’ he explained that they
also ride on a motor-bicycle, and that it is only a difference like another make of bicycle that
the ‘e’ has a little box in-stead of the hole in the Latin ‘e.’ The ‘i’s are skillful, distinguished
and clever, have many pointed weapons, and live in caves, between which, however, there are
also mountains, gardens and harbours. They represent the penis, and their path coitus. On the
other hand, the ‘l’s are represented as stupid, clumsy, lazy and dirty. They live in caves under
the earth. In ‘L’-town dirt and paper gather in the streets, in the little ‘’filthy’ houses they mix
with water a dyestuff bought in ‘I’-land and drink and sell this as wine. They cannot walk
properly and cannot dig because they hold the spade upside down, etc. It became evident that
the l’s represented faeces. Numerous phantasies were concerned with other letters also. Thus,
instead of the double ‘s,’ he always wrote only one, until a phantasy afforded the explanation
and solution of this inhibition. The one ‘s’ was himself, the other his father. They were to
embark together on a motor-boat, for the pen was also a boat, the copy-book a lake. The ‘s’
that was himself got into the boat that belonged to the other ‘s’ and sailed away in it quickly
upon the lake. This was the reason why he did not write the two ‘s’s’ together. His frequent
use of ordinary ‘s’ in place of a long one proved to be determined by the fact that the part of
the long ‘s’ that was thus left out was for him as though one were to take away a person’s
nose.’ This mistake proved to be determined by the castration-father and disappeared after this
interpretation.” I cannot cite here all the analogous examples that Melanie Klein analyzes. Let
us read the following passage, of a more general value: “With Ernst as well as with Fritz I
could observe that the inhibition in respect of writing and reading, that is,
((334))
the basis for all further school activity, proceeded from the letter ‘i,’ which, with its simple ‘up
and down,’ is indeed the foundation of all writing (Note [Klein’s footnote]: At a meeting of
the Berlin P. A. Society, Herr Rohr dealt in some detail with the Chinese script and its
interpretation on a psychoanalytic basis. In the subsequent discussion I pointed out that the
earlier picture-script, which underlies our script too, is still active in the phantasies of every
individual child, so that the various strokes dots, etc., of our present script would only be
simplifications, achieved as a result of condensation, displacement and other mechanisms
familiar to us from dreams and neuroses, of the earlier pictures whose traces, however, would
be demonstrable in the individual.) The sexual-symbolic meaning of a penholder is apparent
in these examples. . . . It can be ob-served how the sexual-symbolic meaning of the penholder
merges into the act of writing that the latter discharges. In the same way the libidinal
significance of reading is derived from the symbolic cathexis of the book and the eye. In this
there are at work, of course, also other determinants afforded by the component-instincts,
such as ‘peeping’ in reading, and exhibitionistic, aggressive sadistic tendencies in writing; at
the root of the sexual-symbolic meaning of the penholder lay probably originally that of the
weapon and the hand. Corresponding with this too the activity of reading is a more passive,
that of writing a more active, one, and for the inhibitions of one or the other of them the
various fixations on the pregenital stages of organization are also significant” (tr. fr.
[Marguerite Derrida (Paris, 1967) ], p. 98) [English original, “The Role of the School in the
Libidinal Development of the Child,” Contributions to Psycho-Analysis: 1921—1945
(London, 1948), pp. 73-74, 75-76]. Cf. also [Julian de] Ajuriaguerra, [Françoise] Coumes,
[Anne] Denner, Lavonde-Monod, [Roger] Perron, [Mira] Stamback, L’écriture de l’en f ant
[Neuchatel-Paris], 1964) .
38.Cf. Husserl, L’Origine de la géometrie.
39.”L’écriture cunéiforme et la civilisation mésopotamienne,” EP, pp. 74 f.
40.Alfred Métraux, ”Les primitifs, signaux et symboles, pictogrammes et protoécriture.” One
example among many others of what Métraux calls “attempt at phoneticism” : “Thus, the
Cheyenne chief called ‘tortoise-following-his-female’ will be represented by a person with
two tortoises above him. ‘Little-man’ will be identified by the silhouette of a child outlined
above his head. This expression of proper names hardly raises problems when it is a question
of concrete things, but it puts the imagination of the scribe to a hard test if he has to render
abstract ideas through pictography. To transcribe the name of a person called ‘highway,’ an
Oglagla Indian had recourse to the following symbolic combination: strokes parallel to
footprints make us think of ‘road,’ a bird painted close to it evokes the rapidity which is
evidently one of the attributes of ‘good routes.’ It is clear that only those who already know
the names corresponding to these symbols can decipher them. On that count, these designs
will have a mnemotechnic value. As another example, let us take the proper name ‘Good-
Weasel.’ From the animal’s mouth, drawn in a realistic fashion, emerge two wavy lines that