Privacy, the Self and Psychoanalytic Practice in the era of the Internet

Over a decade ago, the playwright Sam Shepard made the following observation: «The struggle with the land is finished… now the frontier is the computer, so it has become an internal thing. Computers cause protracted dreaming about what might be, and the frontier everyone is seeking is now in the imagination» (Gabbard 2000, 10). Today, a retrospective assessment of Shepard's comment was that it was prophetic, but perhaps did not go far enough. That cyberspace is «an internal thing» is only partly true, but it also has a lot in common with transitional space in Winnicott's sense. In other words, it is not truly an internal realm, but it lies somewhere between external reality and our internal world. When we sit at the computer, we are both real and not real. There is a fundamental paradox in cybercommunication: it presents a radical challenge to our traditional notions of privacy but also offers us a place to hide. It allows for the possibility of a playful expansion of the self. This screen persona is both me and not-me. As Sherry Turkle (1997) put it, «You can have a sense of self without being oneself» (258).

Moreover, to an alarming extent, the assortment of electronic instruments that hold us hostage - Twitter, social networking, blogging, email, texts, etc. -may conspire to turn us away from the internal realm and demand attend to the external signals that surround us and command our attention. To a psychoanalyst, all these new developments would see to work at odds with the notion of reflection that is at the heart of psychoanalytic work.

Jaron Lanier is the author of You are Not a Gadget and a leading critic of the social changes brought about by technology. He addressed this problem