Laboratory Alice: A Lacanian Rereading of Lewis Carroll’s Alice-Stories as Anticipatory Reflections on Experimental Psychology and Neuroscience

This essay rereads Lewis Carroll’s Alice-stories from a Lacanian perspective. Building on Lacan’s suggestion to view the stories as an epic of the scientific era, it sees Carroll’s literary work as anticipating the epistemic upheaval in a range of fields, from logic, mathematics, and linguistics to experimental psychology and psychoanalysis. The essay first casts Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland as the experiences of a research subject inside a laboratory setting, where lab props are sublimated into objects of desire. It then explores the functioning of space and time, elaborating on Lacan’s claim that the Alice-stories open up a modernistic, surrealistic, post-Euclidian spatiotemporal ambiance. Finally, after discussing the stories in light of modern psychedelic trials, it concludes by analyzing a cinematic Alice-version in which Wonderland becomes a psychiatric ward. The essay demonstrates not only how Lacanian psychoanalysis allows us to correlate Carroll’s stories with experimental psychology and neuroscience, but also how Carroll’s literary mirror reveals the continuing relevance of Lacanian psychoanalysis in the era of brain research.