From Psychoanalysis to Cybernetics: The Case of Her

The transition from a broadly Freudian or psychoanalytic worldview to a cybernetic, networked, or digital one is one of the most important, if least studied, transitions of twentieth century cultural history. Between the First World War and the 1970s a Freudian hermeneutic for self-interpretation pervaded Western culture as well as making inroads elsewhere in the world, such as India, China, and North Africa. Although the growth of psychotherapy was an important axis of its development, it also helped shape such innovations as pop psychology, advice columns, film noir, pastoral counseling, aptitude testing, Hollywood film, TV, and advertising. Meanwhile during the Second World War a cybernetics movement emerged, closely linked to the invention of the computer. Its basic idea was to bracket questions of subjectivity and interiority of the sort that pervaded the Freudian age, and to focus instead on prediction and control gained through gathering of objective, behaviorist information or “data.”1 While the cybernetics movement did not survive, a data or “network” based view of the world gained increasing ground as psychoanalysis declined. Arguably we can date the beginnings of the hegemony of the cybernetic worldview to the 1980s, when the microprocessor was invented thus making small portable computers possible and leading to the ubiquity of screens and interfaces, with which we are familiar today.

To be sure, the transition from the Freudian to the digital world is a vast topic, which must be studied with reference to the specificity of different domains, such as literature, politics and