You do not currently have permission to view the full text for this document. Please sign in to an account with an active subscription or contact support.
Readers of this journal may well be familiar with Sigmund Freud's claim that we are driven by a death instinct to repeat traumatic and other experiences in the psychological form afforded by memories and dreams. Readers may be less familiar, like me, with the related claim made by the philosopher Jacques Derrida regarding the compulsion to memorialize ourselves and others in written and other archival form.
Now, thanks to psychotherapist Tara Blake's book, Archive Fevers, I know more about Derrida's claim. This is due to Blake illustrating it in terms of an engaging email correspondence between a fictional psychotherapist Hannah and her patient Scarlett beginning in early June 1997 when Scarlett's work takes her to the archive of the anthropologist Margaret Mead in Washington DC.
‘It's an odd mix of the trials of [Mead’ s] personal life and her research, and I can't help reading one into the other’, Scarlett says of this archive in one of her first emails to Hannah. ‘You say that you find yourself reading the personal life of the researcher into her research, and perhaps you are inviting me to do the same with you’, Hannah not unreasonably replies (pp. 22, 25).
‘It sounds like the line between what is yours … and what is there in the archive … is quite muddled for you’, she notes in another email that July (p. 40). Scarlett in turn urges Hannah to read Derrida, including his speculation that psychoanalysis would have been quite different had Freud and his colleagues corresponded with each other by email—a form of correspondence which Derrida characterized as ‘technology of archivization’ (p. 56). To this, Hannah responds by asking Scarlett, ‘What is it that you feel unable to say in your own words and in your own name?’ (p. 62).
Scarlett is preoccupied with Derrida. More than this, she is worried by her mother's worsening illness with cancer. She is appalled that, despite this, Hannah
nevertheless insists on taking an email-free holiday break from Scarlett's psychoth