In the psychiatric universe of Maudsley as in the gothic universe of Abraham and Torok’s theory of phantomatic transmission, communication and textuality, far from constituting a natural channel for the expression and constitution of the self, seem to generate interference. Interference precipitates the sense of an erasure of the subject and of the demise of the symbolic. The spirits of the dead are everywhere: the subject, a mere heir, a transmitter and transcriber, is condemned to be the voice of another. Displacement is at the core of textuality, as both reader and writer are the unsuspected vehicles of unknown messages. Haunting is the form of all textuality.