Telephone and Psychoanalysis

Abstract

The paper explores the implications of the introduction of telephone at the turn of the century and the impact it has made. It takes the cue from the famous anecdote in Proust's Rememberance of Things Past, when the narrator speaks for the first time with his grandmother by the telephone. Proust lucidly traces the 'ontological' gap opened by the intervention of the telephone and the way it cannot be cured. The second cue is taken from Walter Benjamin's memories of childhood and his account of the way the telephone introduced a new kind of voice. The third and final cue is taken from Freud and his various uses of telephone, most remarkably as the metaphore of the transmission of the unconscious. The paper explores the nature of this new voice and its 'ontological' implications, and argues that it can be taken as a red line through the rise of modernism and the emergence of psychoanalysis.