The alterability of the memory trace.

This essay is the result of a critical reading exercise of Freud's 1925 text Note upon the Mystic Writing-Pad. This reading led me to argue the necessity of radicalizing some consequences that emerge from the analogy established by Freud between the psychic apparatus, and a certain writing machine. The purpose of this paper is to compare critically such a model of the psychic apparatus and what Derrida describes as processes of inscriptionality. One of the most relevant consequences of this writing analogy is that those notions in psychoanalysis compromised with the idea of an origin -or that are treated as original in terms of the genesis of the psychic apparatus- cannot be further sustain as unaltered nucleus. Primal repression is one of the Freudian notions that operate anchored to these compromises.