Technophobia and Technophilia

‘Technology’ is a wide and often problematic term; I shall be using it here to refer to consumer goods which are the products of modern industry (and so will be straying into ‘consumption’ across the categories into which today's papers are placed). I will be drawing on psychoanalysis - amongst other intellectual resources - in an exploration of our attitudes towards these products, and in particular towards one very important consumer good, though some of the observations I want to make should also help to understand attitudes towards other goods, and indeed towards other forms of technology such as information and medical technologies.

I will use the terms technophilia and technophobia not to invent new diagnostic formulations, but as a way of highlighting how technologies evoke in us strong positive and negative feelings which impede rational discussion of them, and which produce reverential or dismissive attitudes rather than realistic appraisal of their social and environmental costs and benefits.

But, as a short preamble, let me first make an observation on the nature of this conference. When Ivan Ward, who has organised it, first told me about it, I thought what an excellent idea it was and wondered why no-one had organised it before. But I have a concern about what people here may be expecting from it. I suspect that a number of you will be hoping to hear an announcement of the marriage of psychoanalytic insight with environmentalist politics.

As quite a close and long-standing friend of both parties, I would take great pleasure in their betrothal. But in what I have to say, I will be pointing out that this relationship cannot be a completely harmonious one, and the blame for this would in a sense lie with psychoanalysis. Analysis is a relentlessly critical character. As we know, it refuses to take what people say at face value, and is constantly probing for a reality which is more complex and usually less congenial than is at first apparent. Because of its uny