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Ken Corbett, Assistant Clinical Professor of Psychology at the New York University Postdoctoral Program in Psychoanalysis and Psychotherapy and author of Boyhoods: Rethinking Masculinities (Yale University Press, ), offered a thought-provoking presentation addressing psychoanalytic treatment within the changing context of sexual culture reconstructed through advances in technology. The increasing use and integration of technology into our relational world is changing the modern sexual order in ways that become very visible in the stories that patients bring into treatment. These changes underline the dynamic nature of patients' lived experiences. Corbett uses this context of change to demonstrate the need for analysts to go beyond normative or static expectations about interpersonal relationships and consider how the virtual space that is opened up by modern technology can generate psychic spaces that may be used productively in treatment.
Corbett identified two forces that prompt the need to rethink psychoanalytic ideals about sexual well-being. The first he terms the “revolution” in modern gay life. The reappraisal of gay life posed a challenge to “the reproduction of matrimonial relations” and illuminates the “regulatory anxiety and caustic paranoia” surrounding the attempt to force individuals to live inside overly simplistic traditional roles that could not accommodate their experiences. Corbett points out that by countering this anxiety, the gay revolution is universally liberating. A diversity of sexual cultures and practices has been explored by theorists within the movement that goes beyond the traditional paradigm. It provokes the consideration of how this regulatory drive and normative expectations around “healthy” relationships emerge within psychoanalytic ideals and practice.
The second factor is the proliferation of technology as an integrated and integral element in people's daily lives that has significantly altered the pattern of interpersonal interac