Psychoanalysis Lost—And Found—In Our Culture of Simulation and Enhancement

Clinical psychoanalysts routinely face the complex challenge of embracing life in a fast-paced technologically-mediated culture of simulation and enhancement while simultaneously participating as psychoanalysts in that emerging culture. However, many psychoanalytic habits of mind—developed in a vastly different predigital context—unnecessarily constrain a robust exploration of the experiential possibilities created within an emerging techno-culture. Such constraints further marginalize psychoanalysis and deprive the emerging culture of needed psychoanalytic expertise. This article first documents the widening gap between psychoanalysis and the culture in which they practice. It then develops a both–and approach to the relationship between psychoanalysis and the wider culture by recounting the history of the fight between Lawrence Kubie and Walter McCulloch at the dawn of the information age during the Macy Conferences on Cybernetics (1946–1953). Finally, the contemporary clinical resonance of the issues present in that fight are recounted through an extended case example in which a self-destructive woman finds true love, but only with the assistance of technologically mediated communications whose significance her analyst had to struggle both to see and appreciate.