Interview with Jacob Johanssen

M:

Jacob, we both would like to see the psychoanalytic field benefit from considerations of the effects on the psyche of living in a technologically-saturated culture. So, I’m wondering if I could ask you first to outline your ideas on the helpfulness of psychoanalytic thinking to the study of technology use, as the application of these ideas has evolved from your early work on cyborg subjects through your recent work on digital and online culture, online misogyny, and data perversion. Maybe to start, you could tell us some things about how you got to technology and psychoanalysis as interests of yours in the first place.

J:

Thanks for this interview, Michael, and for the opportunity. So, I got interested in technology first and then in psychoanalysis. It was in that order for me and, as you know, I’m not clinically trained. So I always occupy this position of the outsider a bit when it comes to this field of psychoanalysis.

But, to begin with, my background is in media studies and communications studies. I’m originally from Germany. I grew up in Hamburg.

I did my undergraduate degree in Austria of all places, at the University of Salzburg, because originally I had wanted to work in the media, perhaps as a journalist or something related. That was the very vague idea I had of what I wanted to do, like many young people do still today or like my students do. They all want to work in the media. That seems to be this sort of fascination that’s still very strong for many. I was no different from them to start, but I realized I preferred something like academia and then I did a Master’s at Goldsmiths in London, then I stayed here and did my Ph.D. at the University of East London, which I completed in 2015.

I wasn’t really aware of psychoanalysis as such at that point when I was an undergraduate. But I already had the feeling of a slight kind of frustration in relation to how questions of human identity and human subjectivity, and who the human being is, were being framed, conc