Digital Commons Network^™

Lacan's Cybernetics, Svitlana Matviyenko

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

This project explores the synchronicity of psychoanalytic and cybernetic practices from the mid-to-late nineteenth century by recovery and analysis of a shared material media culture. This project takes as a starting point the work of French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan, who observed the affinity between cybernetics and psychoanalysis, “two roughly contemporaneous techniques,” related to the emergence of the two distinct types of sciences: exact and “conjectural.” I investigate their shared patterns of figuration in the two fields, before they developed significant, and even irreconcilable, differences. This project demonstrates that what Lacan discussed explicitly in the 1950s, particularly, in his “cybernetic” Seminar …