Alone Together: Why We Expect More from Technology and Less from Each Other Sherry Turkle New York: Basic Books; 2011;  360 pp. Reclaiming Conversation: The Power of Talk in a Digital Age Sherry Turkle New York: Penguin; 2015;  436 pp.

Computers keep us busy. It is as though we have become their killer app.

These startling words, from Turkle's third book in the trilogy1 devoted to the study of the evolution of computer technology and its impacts on the self, cut straight to the heart of her thesis: regardless of the indispensable things computers can do for us, what they do to us, as individuals and societies, is profoundly problematic.

The erosion of “the talking cure” by the culture of the bottom line — medications, CBT, and the like — is a sad reality to which we have (resentfully) submitted. Our new challenge is cyber culture. Turkle's work provides essential context for psychoanalysts to discover how to render our discipline newly relevant in such a changed world. Computer technology has rendered us, willy-nilly, cyborgs — cyber-organisms, “tethered” to our mobile devices, constantly online, “a new kind of nomad, wandering in and out of the physical real” (, p. 152), and without the option of “jacking out” (Essig, 2012, p. 440).2

Even those of us who shun social media, in what Zizek (2004, p. 801) has called the reaction formation of “informational anorexia,” are deeply affected. This does not, however, immunize us against technology's damage. An existential malady — distractibility and overwhelm (ADD), with neurobiological underpinnings — is an epidemic (Jackson, 2008). The deleterious effects on our attention, empathy, emotion-processing, memory, and cognition is copiously documented. My interest in exploring the impact of cyber culture on our mental functioning was initially urgently personal. I was perturbed by my own dystonic development over the past decade of distractibility and decreased capacity to focus and follow through on tasks. Although I attribute some part of this simply to aging, I also knew something else was amiss, and was relieved to learn how deeply and widely neurologists of