I may be accused of blasphemy around here, and my lecturers may call for my immediate disembowelment, but I really think modern artistic criticism is too ingrained in Freud. In my culture seminar today, it seemed Trish wanted to relate everything in Heimat to the oedipal complex, to the extent that she seemed to distort it slightly.

Don’t get me wrong – I do have time for Freud. Increasingly, I’m using him in my essays, as well as Lacan. They seem, oddly, to fit: lacan’s tripartite of the imaginary, symbolic and real seems, in fact, to relate to my situation. I have my imaginary self – how I see myself – and my real self – my outward appearance, how others see me. The symbolic bridges the gap between the two; but for me, my symbolic is generated by a machine, which has very little to do with either concept, for it cannot fully reflect my Imaginary self in the real. It’s interesting, if unscientific, you must admit. These hypothetical structures seem to fit some sense of reality: we always think of our inner selves ad different from our outer selves.

Mind you, I still think basing most artistic criticism on this is something of a mistake.