Laboratory Alice: A Lacanian Rereading of Lewis Carroll's Alice-Stories as Anticipatory Reflections on Experimental Psychology and Neuroscience

Although coming to terms with Lewis Carroll's Alice's Adventures in Wonderland (1865/1965) and Through the looking-glass (1871/1965) seems like playing at “riddles that have no answers,” as Alice puts it (1865/1965, p. 70), numerous scholars have taken up the challenge, and the academic corpus of Alice-interpretations is quite substantial. Carroll's stories have been analyzed and annotated in numberless ways (Phillips, 1971, p. 15), spawning a “seemingly never-ending academic industry” (Snider, 2009). And yet, they continue to excite interpretative desire.

In this paper, Carroll's Alice-stories will be analyzed from a Lacanian psychoanalytic perspective. Notably, it will build on Jacques Lacan's suggestion to regard them as an “epic of the scientific era” (Lacan 1966/2002, p. 12). Although Lacan initially “correlates” these stories with Darwin's Origin of Species (seeing Wonderland as a countervailing “idyll” opposing Darwinian “ideology”), in various Seminars he emphasizes connections with other research fields, notably linguistics, topology, and experimental psychology. The latter came into being in the 1870s, the Lewis Carroll-epoch, during which Wilhelm Wundt established the first psychological laboratory in 1879. In Seminars VI and XII, Lacan explicitly compares Carroll's stories with the work of Jean Piaget, describing Carroll's literary approach to human cognition and language as far more revealing and groundbreaking than Piaget's scientific contributions