The wish-fulfilling device doubles as the obscurity of other minds

Evidence

What Matheson’s tale adds to Jacobs’ story is the question of knowledge. Matheson’s story brings into play the old philosophical “problem of other minds”, now applied to the marital situation: even those closest to us are ultimately opaque, black boxes into which we can never see. Naturally, this also raises the equally ancient problem of self-knowledge, but given a psychoanalytic edge. We are alien to ourselves; our real desires may be unknown to us, emerging only in parapraxes and dreams. Here the oneiric form of The Box collapses into its content — the box, like the dream according to Freud, fulfils our wishes. — Mark Fisher (edited by Darren Ambrose), K-Punk, 618

Categorization

• XREF: Builds on the author’s whole framework of the box as the wish-fulfilling dream-object — links to the haunting claim that we are alien to ourselves, resonating with Lacanian ideas elsewhere in K-Punk about desire operating without our knowing. — connects to: Ritual is active wishful thinking — acting out desired outcomes — Sheldon Solomon, Jeff Greenberg, Tom Pyszczynski, The Worm at the Core: On the Role of…, 301

Broader Connections

• Ritual is active wishful thinking — acting out desired outcomes #complicates (0.72) — Sheldon Solomon, Jeff Greenberg, Tom Pyszczynski, The Worm at the Core, 301