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Post-pandemic society seems to be coming apart at the seams (Pivnick 2021; Davoine 2022). Anomie, an insurrection in the U.S., and polarized political discourse evince the group regression and search for authoritarian leadership that Freud (1921) depicted over a century ago. How can we reknit our social cohesion while preserving our sanity as differentiated
individuals? Can psychoanalysis help society meet this challenge? Can technology better help us change how we function? Is technology a suitable substitute for a more idealized leader?
While it is a psychoanalytic truism that the analyst's reverie helps transform preconceived sensations and expectations into thinkable thought (Bion 1962), thinking with evocatively conceived objects helps computer scientists transform the operations of their machines into manageable algorithms that change both our perceptions of the world and the actions we take to modify it (Turkle 2011). Together, analysts and computer technology modify thinking and inform important aspects of our body politic. Internalized as large “groups-in-the mind” composed of many smaller groups and individuals and their mediated relations with one another, technologically mediated groups undoubtedly contribute to our psychic functioning (Eng and Han 2000; Hassinger and Pivnick 2022; Pivnick and Hassinger 2023). But are they prosocial?
When beginning her career, the psychoanalyst and MIT professor of psychology Sherry Turkle realized that since “real life is lived with thought and feeling joined” she could shed light on both social-emotional life and scientific thinking by studying how people change through interacting with technology—and how technology in turn changes how we think about ourselves and our increasingly complex world. In her recent memoir, The Empathy Diaries, she shares her dire conclusion: our technology is leading us to severely devalue personal connection and empathy.
This cogent, lively memoir transports us through Turkle's life and lov