Psychoanalysis, the Self, and the World: Postphenomenology, Consciousness, and Death. By Mark Leffert. New York:  Routledge, 2023,  216 pp., $33.95 paperback.

Mark Leffert's book raises important questions for psychoanalysis, of which I will focus on two in this review. How should psychoanalysis be aware of contemporary forms of technology's intertwining with psychological life? And how does psychoanalysis relate to questions of existential meaning?

Perhaps the most interesting aspect of Leffert's book is his discussion of technology vis-à-vis psychotherapy and vice versa. Many people across the world today spend inordinate amounts of their lives in cyberspace and, we could also say, in cybertime. Inhabiting cyberreality changes our lives and identities. Leffert claims that this “inhabited Space” (p. 99) has its own ontology: “To the … being of nature (res extensa) and the being of mind (res cogitans), we must now add a third being, res digitalis” (p. 160). This digital being involves “a different kind of Dasein” (p. 100), a term of Heidegger's that we can define as being-human-in-a-context. Dwelling in cyberreality is not escaping from reality; it is participating in a different register of reality. Leffert writes, “By its very existence, anything, including whatever is in Cyberspace, has some kind of reality” (p. 106). To give an ontology is to give an account of the general mode of being or reality of some kind of entity. We can do tool-ontology or art-ontology, for example, to ask what it is to be a tool or a work of art. Phenomenology approaches ontology by claiming that we have to ask about the being of things from within the horizon of lived experience: we ask what a tool is by reflecting on our experience of using

tools. So, with cyberreality, Leffert wants to ask about the kind of being that define