The Freudian Robot offers the first in-depth study of the political history of digital writing and its fateful entanglement with the Freudian unconscious. In her innovative analysis, Lydia H. Liu brings Claude Shannon into conversation with James Joyce, Lacan with John Von Neumann, and Marvin Minsky with Freud while documenting other significant meetings of minds and disciplines. Here Liu shows how the earlier avant-garde literary experiments with alphabetical writing and the word-association games of psychoanalysis contributed to the mathematical making of digital media. Such intellectual convergence, Liu argues, completed the transformation of alphabetical writing into the post-phonetic, ideographic system of digital media, which not only altered the threshold of sense and nonsense in communication processes but also compelled a new understanding of human-machine interplay at the level of the unconscious, Ranging across information theory, cybernetics, modernism, literary theory, neurotic machines, and psychoanalysis, The Freudian Robot rewrites the history of digital media and the literary theory of the twentieth century.