The Royal Road to the Unconscious

Poetry. THE ROYAL ROAD TO THE UNCONSCIOUS was conceived by the artist Simon Morris in order to conduct an experiment on Sigmund Freud’s writing. In this action Morris subjected Freud’s Interpretation of Dreams to an aleatory moment–a seemingly random act of utter madness–by throwing the entire text, cut up into 223,704 words, out of a car traveling at high speed. Ed Ruscha’s project, Royal Road Test (1967), provided Morris with a readymade set of instructions to rupture the syntactical certainty of Freud’s construction. The poetic act of liberating Freud’s text allows us to engage with Jacques Lacan’s register of the real. The psychoanalyst Dr. Howard Britton directed photographers to any slippages or eruptions of the real that occurred in the reconfigured text.