Self, Psyche, and Technology. A Brave New World

This issue brings together a diverse collection of papers, ranging from an overview of artificial intelligence to emergent medical technologies to treat treatment resistant depression, to the vicissitudes of remote psychotherapy, to the endurance of Seneca's philosophy, with the aim of wondering about the general and specific effects of technology on the nature of mind and self. These papers together explore tectonic technological advances which have occurred over a very short time but also bring with them very real dangers. Collectively, these papers pose a question: How do revolutionary technological advances, in computers and communication, the internet, artificial intelligence, brain science, nanotechnology, and genetics affect the human psychology; and do they upend the background assumptions that frame how we do our work? We ask you to read them with curiosity about the implications both for psychoanalysis, how we experience the people we work with, and their contexts; and also, for how we live our lives.

The frequently made distinction between the synthetic or ersatz and the authentic is misleading. In fact, the first technology, arguably language, was definitive of the human being and of what it means to be human. A new stage in the evolution of our consideration of what it means to be human has been initiated by a range of new technologies which facilitate human interaction and mastery. These themselves have been shaped by an explosion of our knowledge of the brain and the conception of the self and how the mind works on which we base our models of practice. Communication technologies have not only have had a profound impact on the conduct of practice but also on our quotidian lives which have been correspondingly transformed so that what was unimaginable a generation ago is today considered an essential necessity and life without them unimaginable.