The allegory suggests that electronic equipment is the prosthesis not of the analytical mentality, in the way that print turned out to be, but of this wild desire for knowledge outside the logical, rational, empirical restrictions of the legitimate disciplines. The computer is the prosthesis of the body, capable of harnessing, managing, organizing, manipulating into a dream logic the desires that have sustained a fascination with the bodily mysteries of life, death, and the after-life. The implication of the electronic apparatus, with hypermedia writing, is that we now have equipment capable of fusing the analytical resources of print culture with the emotional resources of audio-visual entertainments. This territory of the boundary is in fact the one staked out for exploration and experimentation by this journal. Sort of like a hyper-dimensional cluster of interpenetrating soap bubbles.
Technology seems to be developing certain chiasmatic qualities here.
The fertilizing crossing that interests him in particular is between his disciplinary knowledge of poststructural psychoanalysis and his personal experience of a dysfunctional family that led to his breakdown. The structuralist principle embodied in Smyth's use of the DNA spiral is that any two systems when juxtaposed create a commentary effect in which each explains the other. According to the theory there is such a thing as thinking with the unconscious, but by definition this thinking is not accessible to the thinker. Freud himself had no analyst, but through a process of self-analysis he devised a method for moving between dreams and theory. The mystorical genre that Smyth employs is more closely related to Freud's self-analysis than to the institutionalized method that resulted from it.