It's been a year since the Psychogeography: The Landscapes of Memory roundtable, which examined how the external world of landscape and terrain affects the development of the interior life. We typically conceive of an inner landscape dictated by the prerogatives of personal history, genetics, and the kinds of conflicts and compromise formations that are the subjects of psychoanalytic theory. But what if, by some quirk of quantum physics, it was possible to enter a wormhole that placed us in either the past or the future? Would we necessarily find what we conceive of as "ourselves"? We might very well discover that the self is merely a disembodied consciousness, wholly independent of the neuronal pathways from which memory derives. We might experience a state of being akin to the estrangement an amnesiac feels.

This is an indirect way of pointing to the fact that there is a history of sensibility that differs from age to age. Imagine a group of actors who perform the same script, but with a different set, director, and mise en scène, similar to the way modern productions of Shakespeare are transplanted into a contemporary context, a trend inspired in part by Jan Kott's Shakespeare Our Contemporary, which revolutionized the theater in the early 1960s. Men are born with XY chromosomes and women with XX, and terms like libido, id, superego and romantic love continue to be applicable, but the creatures occupying the temporality of, say, 1968 and 2008 are walking in different worlds.

During the Psychogeography roundtable, the writer André Aciman talked about how once he writes about something he immediately eradicates all earlier impressions of his subject matter. Writing is like signing a death warrant, in which articulation kills all past memory. I believe there is an economy to memory, with new impressions constantly replacing previous ones, without the politesse of Microsoft Word, which asks us if we are ready to overwrite an old document. The world that populates the imagination, from which mental representations are built, is always changing, and while it may not account for as great a piece of the human puzzle as drive theory, it certainly has its effect. Does romantic love in the year 2008 feel the way it did in 1968? Does nature play second fiddle to nurture? To what extent is acculturation as important a phenomenon as the immortal conflicts described in the canon of traditional psychiatric and psychoanalytic thought?

If we look at the films spanning the two periods as a litmus test of sensibility, it seems obvious that a substantial change has taken place. In David and Lisa (1963), the tragic love object is a schizophrenic girl. By 1970 the femme fatale of Erich Segal's Love Story suffers from incurable cancer, and by 1980s, in the BBC series Brideshead Revisited, the love interest is a place, rather than a person, that is doomed. Flash forward to the 2006 film Children of Men, and it is childbirth and inevitably the race itself that is threatened. What gives the love object its currency radically shifts in each of these eras, with the femme fatale achieving global importance as the future of the race in the last and most futuristic of the movies. We think we know what an author means when he posits romantic love in Beowulf, Chanson de Roland, Faustus, Tom Jones, Great Expectations, The Man Without Qualities, The Remembrance of Things Past, or Infinite Jest, but the worlds in which the characters of these novels operate is so radically different as to create the necessity of totally redefining the relationships depicted in them. I'm not suggesting we abandon our models of human behavior or that the Philoctetes Center move from the New York Psychoanalytic Institute to the Museum of Natural History, but it does occur to me that that history plays a greater role in the structure of our inner lives than we generally realize or credit. As the British novelist L.P. Hartley wrote in The Go-Between, "The past is a foreign country. They do things differently there."
-Francis Levy, Co-Director