We are beginning to study Freud, starting with his 1924 essay “Mystic Writing Pad”. This short piece describes an analogy Freud made to explain the mind upon encountering a children’s toy where writing could be inscribed on a piece of plastic and then erased upon removing the plastic from the wax underneath. The wax underneath - according to Freud - represents the unconscious, where every mark is recorded (much like the sensations we perceive) but not explicitly available on the surface. In our meeting we discussed how convincing this analogy is for describing our conscious/unconscious minds and the nature of how this dynamic plays out in our lives and in our memories.