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In 1983, I had noted that
The neurotics of earlier days could love but had sexual inhibitions; today's patients can perform sexually but struggle with inability to love. … The metaphor of psychotic symptomology has also changed with increasing industrialization, automatization, and decline of organized religion. In the persecutory hells of paranoid patients, incubus and succubus have given way to control by computers and hypnosis, and witches and demons have been replaced by remote-control devices and the FBI. (Akhtar, 1983: vii)
Twenty years later, this comment regarding the pathoplastic impact of cultural milieu upon manifest psychopathology came back to mind as I considered the topics of the three books reviewed here: telephone psychotherapy, modern treatments of infertility, and the pursuit of sexual pleasure via the internet.
Clearly, a lot has changed around us. The past two decades have witnessed the explosion of information-transfer technology (VCRs, CDs, DVDs, fax, email, cell phones, the worldwide web of the internet, and so on) as well as the deep penetration of biomedical engineering into the day-to-day clinical world (CT scanning, MRIs, in-vitro fertilization, mapping of the human genome, cloning, and so on). These technological advances have had a profound impact on the human experience. Look at this example and you will see my point. Immigration from one country to another no longer carries the quantum of separateness tensions as it did before the days of fax, email, and cell phones with an intercontinental reach. These electronic “tethers” (Akhtar, 1992) help maintain connection with objects left behind and thus reduce the disorientation anxiety of the migrant. In the process, these mechanical devices become “new objects” (to extend the definition of a psychoanalytic concept in a direction that is both literal and playful) themselves; they stir up fantasies, evoke affects, and become targets of displacement and projection ection.
The three books under re