The Digital Age on the Couch

Psychoanalytic Practice and New Media

Alessandra Lemma

• Editorial: Routledge
• Año: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781351815932
• Edición: 1
• Categoría: Psychologie
• Categoría: Conseil en psychothérapie

The Digital Age is on the couch. Working today, it is essential that clinicians understand the world we live in. The transition from an industrial economy to an information economy impacts not just the external structure of society and commerce, but also the internal psychic economies of our brains and, inevitably, how clinicians conceptualise the analytic setting in which they practice as therapists and analysts.

The Digital Age on the Couch seeks to understand more about how new technologies interact with the prerogatives of an individual's internal world, how they may alter psychic structure itself in fundamental ways and the implications this may have for the individual's functioning and for the operation of society. This book attempts, from the perspective of a working clinician, to make some sense of this. The impact of mediation via technology and the consequent disintermediation of the body represent central themes throughout, as they impact on the experience of embodiment, on the 'work of desire' and on the way new media influences psychoanalytic practice.

New media offer opportunities for increasing accessibility to mental health care, including psychoanalytic interventions. However, this requires a sophisticated understanding of how to best create and safeguard the analytic setting. Alessandra Lemma here guides the clinician through an exploration of the limitations and risks of mediated psychotherapy, illustrated with clinical examples throughout.

The Digital Age on the Couch offers an accessibly written guide to combining existing psychoanalytic theory and practice with the challenges presented by digital media. It will appeal to psychoanalysts, psychoanalytic psychotherapists and counsellors.

Part I
Outside in

Man has, as it were, become a kind of prosthetic God. When he puts on all his auxiliary organs he is truly magnificent, but those organs have not grown onto him and they still give him much trouble at times.

(Freud, 1930: 37)

Chapter 1
Imagined embodiments, lived embodiments

When we write we always write at a precise moment in time. What we write will be read at a different point in time by an audience who will be far removed from the spatio-temporal space framing the writer’s embodied experience as they wrote. Yet that ‘frame’ embodies the ideas: it is important as it locates in space and time – and hence in the body – the thoughts that are eventually received by the reader.

So let me share my writing ‘frame’. As I sit at my desk and start to write this chapter in London in January 2016, I am filled with images of David Bowie’s video, Lazarus, released only three days before his death on 10 January 2016. I have downloaded and watched this video several times on my laptop. It compels me and haunts me in equal measure.

The opening scene exposes us to a blindfolded, fragile-looking Bowie lying in bed. Two small buttons over the blindfold serve as his eyes – a reference one assumes to the coins used to pay the ferryman, Charon, for safe passage across the river Styx to get into the underworld of Hades. It becomes clear that Bowie is in a hospital bed. Soon he begins to float above it, signifying his journey towards death, which he was anticipating as he was diagnosed with terminal cancer at the time.

I choose to start this chapter with this reference to Bowie because as I watched this video on my laptop I was struck by the powerful visceral effect on me of images of Bowie’s convulsing body and of his music, all received remotely. Yet Bowie’s experience of embodiment is anything but ‘remote’ in the impact it had on me. The images of Bowie’s body in the video resonated and evoked actual physical sensations in my body, and reflections on my body and mortality. I could feel my body respond and be altered by the images and music as I projected myself into this sensory experience.

We might say that my experience is as virtual as any experience can be in cyberspace:¹ I was not physically present at the filming of the video or at Bowie’s death. I have not even had to use my body to leave the comfort of my house to purchase the video in a shop. I am in control of when, where and how often I choose to download the video. I can conjure up in an instant the version of him that I like best. Bowie is a virtual figure for me – as virtual as any character in a computer game – because Bowie is whatever I have needed him to be for me during my lifetime and at this particular juncture. I am not even wearing any virtual ‘gear’ to simulate any physical sensations. In the profoundest sense, however, the experience of watching and hearing him in the video is all too real for me at the level of the affects and fantasies it arouses and, importantly, in how this impact is registered and mediated by my body. It changes how I feel in my body and how I feel about it. These changes are real for me. Importantly my relationship with this visual and auditory content, mediated by the computer screen, contributes to changes at the level of my representation of my body in my mind, at least in the short term. The technology and what it permits interacts with my inner world and my body becomes through it.

In Chapters 2 and 3 I will explore some of the more adverse implications of new technological developments. But at core I do not subscribe to a wholly dystopic view of these developments. In this chapter I will suggest that technology and new media present us with as many risks as they do opportunities: what makes the difference is how we use them. I will explore the ways in which the way a patient uses technology and new media might afford opportunities alongside an analytic process. In particular I will focus on how bodies become through their relations with the multitude of images, representations and visceral experiences that new technologies make possible remotely to suggest that an imagined embodiment facilitated by technology and new media may support a constructive psychic developmental process.

Embodiment is a complex process that underlies our relation to the world. Our lived body generates our understanding of the world and of ourselves. Any reconstitution of the body through its interaction with technology and new media will result in a transformation of subjective experience, however temporary or enduring and however helpful or destructive. Psychoanalytic theorising on the body needs to focus not only on how technology/new media effect bodies, but also on how bodies are experienced through technology/new media and on how these experiences may limit or extend the becoming of bodies. To this end I draw on Deleuze’s concept of ‘becoming’ to propose a model for approaching our thinking about the body and technology grounded in process where bodies and technology/new media are not seen as separate entities between which relations operate, but as constituted through their relationship (Coleman, 2011).

The reality of the virtual

A central point of debate in discussions about new technologies concerns whether virtual reality may be considered to be a dimension of the real world or whether in its passive immersion it draws us into a distancing fascination that insulates us from the real (Žižek, 1997b). I want to suggest that virtual reality need not be a literal enactment of Cartesian ontology. Artists and theorists like Monika Fleischmann (2009, cited in Brians (2011)), for example, who are engaged in how the body actually interacts with technologies, have been very helpful in bringing to the fore the fact that even in virtual environments the material body remains relevant. To this end Fleischmann introduced the concept of mixed reality – a powerful notion that enables us to consider the body as simultaneously taking part in, and being formed by, both the ‘material’ and the ‘virtual’. Material bodies, their virtual representation, human imagination and computer hardware/software all interact to produce a reality that has both material and virtual elements.

If we take Second Life as a working example, like other emerging media technologies of the early twenty-first century that possess the qualities of real-time interactions, visualisation and a sense of inhabiting space together, the virtual world offers everyday users an experience that is neither entirely virtual nor real, but one that has been described by some media theorists as ‘virtually actual’ (Coleman, 2011).

Any consideration of the virtual has to consider Deleuze’s ideas because he is the philosopher of the Virtual par excellence. However, let’s be clear: what matters to Deleuze is not virtual reality, but the reality of the virtual. Virtual reality in itself is a rather uninspiring idea as far as he is concerned: that of imitating reality, of reproducing its experience in an artificial medium. The reality of the virtual, on the other hand, stands for the reality of the virtual as such, for its real effects and consequences. If we adopt Deleuze’s suggestion that ‘the virtual is opposed not to the real but to the actual’ (1994: 208) then the virtual is fully real insofar as it is virtual. The virtual here is conceived of as a finite set of potentialities through which some potentialities are actualised (as opposed to an infinite set of potentialities, some of which are realised).

In order to engage theoretically as well as clinically with new technologies we have to move beyond the binary logic of virtual and real, and understand the world we are currently living in. The virtual, as I use the term here, does not substitute the real. Rather it is an attribute of the real, an expression among many of reality. The virtual brings into relief notions such as the possible, the potential, the probable, the fictional. Something is virtual when it exists in an not-as-yet-actualised form.

However, for a discipline like psychoanalysis – one predicated on the fundamental human tension between the lure of the ‘pleasure principle’ and the dampener of the ‘reality principle’ (Freud, 1923b) – the virtual is to the real what the copy is to the original: it is a reproduction that allows wishes to colonise reality. This definition of ‘virtual’ typically stands in opposition to the notion of ‘real’. The virtual here is always ‘less than’ the original. The virtual is seen to omnipotently divest the so-called ‘real’ of its flesh and bones reality. As such thinking about the nature of virtual reality can become polarised: the virtual becomes equated with ‘not authentic’, a retreat away from so-called reality. Even though virtual reality may be used to effectuate a retreat away from reality – and our clinical everyday practice attests to this – we could equally argue for a notion of a virtuality that is not always about a ‘safe copy’ of, or ‘alternative’ to, the ‘real’.

Problems arise, of course, from a psychological point of view, when we are no longer thinking in terms of the virtual as a space for experimentation or augmentation but more along the lines of the virtual as alternative to the real (Lemma, 2014). And yet psychoanalysis helps us to also appreciate the fundamental importance of fantasy to psychic survival and development, for better or for worse, and just like fantasy, cyberspace and the kind of virtuality it promotes may represent a necessary step towards the realm of what is possible. In other words, it may contain the seeds for imagining oneself as different and hence at some stage for being different. Here the real may be seen as partial, flawed while the virtual promises a resolution to come, which may then be experimented with in virtual reality before being actualised in reality. To take a recent physical example of this, in a remarkable medical breakthrough, patients left paralysed by severe spinal cord injuries have recovered the ability to move their legs after training with an exoskeleton linked to their brain. The training involved the patients using virtual reality to control a computer avatar with a brain–machine interface. When these individuals thought about walking forward, the avatar would move as if it was their body. They then used the same system to control a robot and finally an exoskeleton that the patients could wear (Johnson, 2016).

Designers, and the code they construct, go a long way toward making a virtual world real. Sometimes they create imaginative scenes only found in science fiction or fantasy but they also help mirror the offline world by creating more straightforward representations of our everyday environments. In each case they significantly provide a means of embodiment for the user. For graphical worlds, this comes in the form of avatars – those pictorial constructs used to actually inhabit the world. It is in large part through these avatars that users can come to bring real life and vibrancy to the spaces. Through avatars, users embody themselves and make real their engagement within a virtual world. Avatars, in fact, come to provide access points in the creation of identity and social life. The bodies people use in these spaces provide a means to live digitally – to fully inhabit that space. It is therefore not simply that users exist as just ‘mind’, but instead construct their identities through avatars.

Needless to say the detailed and highly specified ‘worlds’ that can be accessed in cyberspace are in some important respects far removed from reality, not least because reality does not pre-exist in the form of specified representations to be recovered by consciousness. Reality cannot be programmed in advance because the chaotic elements from the many systemic forces that shape our daily lives – not least the unconscious mind – work to produce the generative breakdown from which subjectivity emerges and which we call ‘life’. Virtual reality instead functions more like fantasy: as a kind of filter and focus presenting to the mind (and acting on the body) only those details essential for enhancing a specific experience.

The persistence of the flesh

Cyberculture popularised a world where the body becomes redundant or, as the work of body artist Stelarc illustrates, where the body is an empty structure that new technologies can sculpt (Lemma, 2010). In truth, however, virtual bodies have never been virtual if by that we mean non-material. This is why the techno-fantasy of escaping the body in a bodiless cyberspace fails: we are constituted through a dynamic interaction between our biological bodies, their virtual representation and signification, our physical and social environments and the myriad conscious and unconscious processes that produce them.

Paradoxically what is at stake when we consider the body in virtual reality is how it exposes the limits of the body: it does not deny them or render the body obsolete. Rather it confronts the body in its limits. From this standpoint the virtual body puts the real fleshy body into perspective. It is the latter that we all struggle to accommodate into our subjective experience. This brings to mind Kant’s dove. Kant observed a dove might think it would find flying easier without the encumbrance of air around it but such a bird would, inevitably, soon discover flight in a vacuum impossible. Like Kant’s dove if we deny the fleshy, messy, limited nature of the body we cannot begin to understand who we are.

In the 1990s cyberspace was hailed by some as an arena for the realisation of the disembodied mind: a kind of ‘disembodied technocracy’ (Gunkel, 1998: 119). From a theoretical point of view, in order to understand what is happening in cyberspace, we need to embrace a less accommodating view of disembodiment. Rather than cyberspace being a place for a pure meeting of minds, the body still matters even when interaction is mediated (Lemma, 2015a). After all, even William Gibson’s eponymous cowboy in Neuromancer had to hook himself up to a catheter in order to manage extended time in cyberspace (Brians, 2011).

When in cyberspace we are still embodied even if we might choose to deny this to ourselves. What changes is our experience of embodiment because we are no longer dependent on the old contingent relations to the corporeal. This is why we ought to be interested in the reconstruction of bodies online and how these online activities inform, or not as the case may be, one’s offline experience of embodiment and hence our sense of identity. Of note in this respect is the fact that we have witnessed a dramatic shift from the World Wide Web as a text-only medium for the first twenty years of its life since Tim Berners-Lee’s development, to one that is now increasingly visual. This has important repercussions for our overall experience of embodiment.

The virtual body amounts to a virtual representation of one’s self in physical form (e.g. the avatar) that may or may not correspond closely to one’s objective body. Nowadays we therefore need to consider the objective body that refers to one’s physical form, the virtual body and the body one experiences within immersive environments, that is one’s phenomenal experience of embodiment when in cyberspace.

The virtual worlds of cyberspace provide a fresh arena for the staging of the body in which new dramas can be enacted but where perhaps we can also experiment with new or denied or conflicted facets of ourselves that meet with validation by others. Cyberspace offers a multitude of potentially safe spaces for those who are socially anxious to explore who they are, as well as spaces where those who are unsure of their sexual preferences can explore various aspects of their sexuality. Some individuals intentionally take on different personas in cyberspace (e.g. gender switching) in order to be able to express hidden truths about themselves. My aim in approaching this subject is thus not to demonise the virtual domain.

Body matters

We are naturally prosthetic taking whatever we can from the world. We have a tendency to mix the biological and the technical – a ‘cognitive hybridization’ (Clark, 2003) that allows us to extend our mental and physical capacities. This was at the core of McLuhan’s (1994) definition of media as extensions of human being:

All technologies are extensions of our physical and nervous systems to increase power and speed. (1994: 90)

And:

Any extension, whether of skin, hand, or foot, affects the whole psychic and social complex. (1994: 4)

Thus the wheel extends our feet, the phone extends our voice, television extends our eyes and ears, the computer extends our brain, and electronic media, in general, extend our central nervous system.

To understand the relationship between the body and ‘tools’ I have found it useful to turn to philosophy. Heidegger’s (1962) analysis of tool use is a case in point. For a tool to be ready-to-hand it must, in Heidegger’s terms, ‘withdraw’. In so doing, the tool becomes the means rather than the object of the experience (Ihde, 1990). This has a parallel with the experience of the body: Sartre (1970) sees the body as the perpetually ‘surpassed’ (p. 233). But what Heidegger highlights is how the tool itself is also surpassed as it withdraws into the architecture of the body, forming ‘an embodiment relation’ (Ihde, 1990).

This originary coupling of the human and the technical was also central to Merleau-Ponty’s thinking – a truly extraordinary thinker about the body, which is why I will dwell a bit on his ideas:

… to get used to a hat, a car, a stick is to be transplanted into them, or conversely to convert them into the bulk of our own body. (1962: 143)

To illustrate his ideas Merleau-Ponty (1962) invokes the example of the blind person’s cane. The cane for the blind person is no longer an object, but an extension of the realm of the senses. With the cane as a ‘familiar instrument’, touch is experienced at its end point: ‘its point has become an area of sensitivity’ (p. 143), as he put it, rather than at the hand. The incorporation of the tool into the body gestalt is what Leder (1990: 34) refers to as a ‘phenomenological osmosis’, whereby the body allows instruments to melt into it.² Our childrens’ bodies, if born within the last ten years or so, will have a body gestalt that is quite di...