Introduction

In the1990s, while still in analytic training, I mentioned to a fellow candidate from another institute that I had bought a computer for my office. My friend huffily retorted that “a computer has no place in an analytic consulting room.” Reassessing the bulky monitor, large keyboard, and box of floppy discs that dwarfed my desk, I was forced to seriously consider this commentary on what I had thought of as merely a tool to help with my psychoanalytic training and work. Was my friend correct about the unbridgeable gap between the search for eternal truths that constitutes the psychoanalytic enterprise and the technological innovations that were suddenly becoming a commonplace means of transmitting information? Was this hulking machine an unwelcome intruder into the sanctum of the analytic consulting room? Certainly I had not seen any evidence of such a machina in my analyst's office, or in the offices of my supervisors.

Today such a comment would seem quaint, even antediluvian. Our various devices have become a ubiquitous aspect of our lives. By now, I suspect many analysts' offices sport laptops for professional and personal use. The intersection of psychoanalysis and technology occurs at many levels and raises important issues: the challenge posed by the internet to analyst neutrality and anonymity; the use of technology to carry out long-distance treatment; the didactic use of technology. The first two are the likely source of a general, if not universal, unease regarding the consequences of recent technological advances, as if we suspect that we have made a pact with the devil in exchange for extraordinary ease of communication and information gathering.

We seem to be more comfortable with the didactic uses of our new technologies. As noted in David Scarff's paper on teaching psychoanalysis via distance technology, earlier technological innovations in book printing and the easy accessibility of video recording technology have advanced the spread of psychoanalytic i