L’art rupestre à la lumière de l’écriture chinoise et de la psychanalyse

Just like children, peoples first drew before they wrote. They made drawings and pictograms to express themselves, to communicate, and to master the outside world. Writing came into existence when signs and symbols were able to organize a universe of transmissible representations. When reading the petroglyphs on the rocks of the Helan Mountains, certain similarities between the rock inscriptions and ancient Chinese writing from the 14th century BC, particularly the figurative nature of the images and the categories of representations such as humans, animals, hunting, and industry, reveal traces of writing in prehistory. The evolution of Chinese writing allows us to trace the processes of human construction since prehistory. Two almost antagonistic hypotheses of its origin arise in parallel. The first relates to human history since the dawn of time, and the second is based on founding myths. The organizers of rock inscriptions find those of writing around the frame of the inscription, the figurability of the image in representation, the spatialization of the component elements, and the expressed impulsiveness. The work of reversibility of images will take place at the point of transformation of the image into the representation of a thing, into the representation of a word and a function according to a law specific to reversibility, similar to that of repression, condensation, and displacement, which would allow us to recover the original representations, as proposed by Freudian psychoanalysis.