eszter toth / אסתר טוט
" The Analysing Machine"
(research completed and project abandoned)
Research project supported by the Centre national des arts plastiques.
Full text (in French) : " Sauvetage et Utopie" available here:
https://www.cnap.fr/esther-toth-0
This dystopian project was imagined to be an interactive work, or an AI work that is a follow up to the trilogy of films with marionnettes.
Initially titled as: In memor.i.am –a postmortem psychoanalysis, further develops the theme of a postmortem therapy already suggested in “Memoirs of a nurse”.
Here it is framed and staged differently, explored with new devices that open up new areas of inquiry.
It was supposed to involve an interactive process of posing a series of questions (as pertinent as possible) to volunteers, who would have participated both in creating the work as well as work on themselves.
The questions would be heard as issuing form the couch. The mechanical therapist would have the voice of a well intentioned and tactful analyst.
Of course, transference wouldn’t really be possible, unless, falling in love or having negative feelings towards the couch, the machine or the voice that comes out of it, is an option.
Precisely because of the « non existence» of the transference, can I still talk of therapy in this case? Or the questions remain only «philosophical» that the analysand asks from her or himself?
Or would the analytic method gain another layer of meaning through an encounter with technology, would it go so far as to alter its “technique”? Or in the least, the length of it?
Based on present practices and methods we can imagine new forms of psychoanalysis that take into account social and technological changes.
The desire to create this couch was born out of the desire to share the analyst or more so the experience of analysis with others, and out of its absence at times.
in a way i can compare this machine to the « ideal mother machine » depicted in «Sisters, a classic case».
«The ideal mother machine» is supposed to ‘feed back’ the desired and/or lacking emotions from the real mother, by pushing a button whenever needed.
This ‘analysing machine’ with her warm, loving voice is an incentive for thought, for analysis, for the possibility of narration of the subject’s story. His/her past. as Ferenczi said, as a ‘mosaique’, will be reconstructed into a whole and some form of liberation from the past will be possible.
Therefore this object was intended to be a reparative object.
But is reparation possible, when the ‘patient’ is left alone with questions? When conversation (the basis of therapy) is not really possible with the Other?
Thus no real relationship is possible, even if as intended, the machine by asking the ‘right’ questions gives the illusion of a total understanding or empathy?
Conclusion: the interrogation regarding this object remains open.
And with it also the question whether such project with all it’s limitations has any value or should remain a phantasy.