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Sandor Ferenczi Society, April 14, 2016
I am not going to attempt to address Philip's formidable body of work tonight; in fact, I am not planning on discussing any of his writings, not even a sentence. And not a single word or a single letter. I shall focus on a symbol: Philip's use of an exclamation point in the title of a paper, “MENTALIZE THIS!” which was written for a volume I co-edited, Mind to Mind (2008), and subsequently included in Philip's book. The Shadow of the Tsunami (2011).1
Let's get some erudition out of the way: punctuation marks, like individuals, have a history, and in this case, the exclamation point was first used in print in the Middle Ages, a way for speech to be able to leak through writing. As Manguel (2015) points out, conventionalized punctuation “was not established until the late Renaissance when, in 1566, the grandson of the great Venetian printer Aldo Manutius, published his punctuation handbook for typesetters, the Interpungendi ratio” (p. 4). Up until the 1970s, exclamation points were not standard on typewriters, and so typists had to undertake the arduous work of lining up two separate strokes as a way to improvise. Compare this to the migration and upgrade exclamation points have now found on computers: located over the number 1 on the top left of the keyboard, that is, even more readily available than the @ symbol, which is over the number 2!2 A whole history of our culture might be written by looking closely at unconscious aspects of technological change—the spirit of capitalism unmoored from the protestant ethic.
Let's also move on to consider a predictable psychoanalytic interpretation: the exquisitely gendered nature of the exclamation point as a representation of both male and female anatomy, although it is doubtful that Philip had this intention explicitly in mind.
OK, let me breathe, breathe deeply, and begin to associate. And what comes to mind? For me, the exclamation point serves as a warning not to construe mentalization