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Published online: 8 July 2025
© The Author(s) under exclusive licence to Springer Nature Limited 2025
Ensuring that the discipline of psychoanalysis remains vibrant and engaged in contemporary public discourses has, over the history of the discipline, involved continually reworking theory in the context of an ever-evolving ethos. This is the exact kind of project Goodman and Clemente accomplish with The Routledge International Handbook of Psychoanalysis, Subjectivity, and Technology. The book earns its title of “handbook” because it boasts an international array of authors who all engage in careful exploration of how human subjectivity is interlaced with technology and it guides readers through ways that psychoanalysis illuminates important features of our modern technologically saturated milieu and how such a milieu aids in the continual evolution of psychoanalysis.
It is impossible to discuss all 31 of the chapters spanning five parts of the handbook; we can only discuss some chapters for the illustrative purposes, and we apologize to the authors not directly discussed. Part I involves chapters about ambivalences emerging from our current technological milieu. For example, Frankel (chapter 3) presents how technology allows one to engage in unreal fantasy that is usually the domain of dreaming, which is inherently ambivalent because such fantasy allows for creativity while the boundary between reality and fantasy is degraded such that one need not confront problematic disassociative fantasy enabled by technology in the same way one confronts the content of the dreamworld. Part II involves authors who write about the context of technology that situates links between the theory and practice of psychoanalysis. An example of work in this chapter comes from Romanyshyn (chapter 9) who uses the story of Frankenstein to reflect on how the current technological milieu has created caricatures of others that turns them into monsters and so raises the challenge of learning to bet