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“The Thread of the Fable”
The thread that the hand of Ariadne left in the hand of Theseus (in the other hand was the sword) so that he would delve into the labyrinth and discover the center, the man with the head of a bull, or as Dante wants, the bull with the head of a man, and give him death and could, once he achieved the feat, unravel the nets of stone and return to her, his love.
Things happened that way. Theseus could not know that on the other side of the labyrinth was the other labyrinth, that of time, and that in some preset place was Medea.
The thread has been lost; the labyrinth has been lost as well. Now we do not even know if what surrounds us is a labyrinth, a secret cosmos, or a haphazard chaos. Our beautiful duty is to imagine that there is a labyrinth and a thread. We will never come upon the thread; perhaps we find it and we lose it in an act of faith, in a cadence, in a dream, in the words that are called philosophy or in mere and simple happiness.
Memory and Dread or the Memory of Childhood is the first part of a trilogy, a brilliantly erudite meditation of the interwoven threads of psychoanalysis, philosophy, history, literary criticism, and neuroscience in relation to memory. The author, Néstor Braunstein, is an Argentinean psychiatrist and psychoanalyst who arrived in Mexico as an exile in 1974. He has lived there ever since and has taught at the Graduate Schools of Psychology and Philosophy and Letters at the National Autonomous University of Mexico since 1975. He is the author of numerous articles, such as “Freud and the Malaise in Mexican Culture — Mexico is Burning,” , and books, including Ficcionario de psicoanálisis [Fictionary of Psychoanalysis] (2001) and El goce. Un concepto Lacaniano [Jouissance. A Lacanian Concept] .