The common wisdom emerging over the last few years is that the Internet will change everything. The pundits (along with all those investors pouring money into newly launched Internet stocks) all seem to agree that no area of life, from scholarship to commerce, from family life to research, will escape transformation by the expanding digital revolution. Most also agree that the changes to come will be far-reaching and positive, like the development of the printing press, only bigger and better. In newspapers, magazines, and TV, the shrill buzz announcing a new, cyber-improved world has become familiar cultural noise.
But things are less clear once one looks a little beneath the punditry and hype, and even less clear when we begin to look in detail at our corner of the world. One vital concern is how psychoanalytic scholarship, education, and outreach can and should be affected by the emergence of the Internet as a tool of mass communication. It is so easy to lose sight of the important questions and get captured by the “tool illusion” — when you have a hammer, everything starts looking like a nail. But there are important questions to be asked: What are we trying to do? What are the values served? What organizational agendas are being met? And how do we get it all done?
These are difficult questions to answer, in part because the answers do not yet exist. We're writing the rules of the road as we go along. It will probably take several more years before the contours of anything resembling reliable answers begin to emerge. And when they do emerge, the answers will come from our collective experience with various online activities and projects. JAPA decided last year to get creatively involved in this process and be part of how the online culture of psychoanalytic scholarship develops. The journal, in collaboration with the Psychoanalytic Connection, launched a project called the JAPA Psa-Netcast in the fall of 1997 to respond to some of the challenges posed by the digital revolution.
The JAPA Psa-Netcast is a kind of online discussion group, analogous to a faculty seminar. A select faculty of psychoanalytic clinicians and scholars gathers for an in-depth exploration of a specific topic. Our online faculty comprises members of the journal's editorial board, authors, and invited guests. So far, we have used specific target articles from JAPA to set the agenda for the discussion among the online faculty, although in the future we may try other arrangements as well.
The online faculty is only a very small percentage of the total number of people involved in the JAPA Psa-Netcast. Along with the faculty responsible for the discussion, anyone can “attend” the online faculty seminar and have access both to the target articles and to the developing conversation. And like those attending a face-to-face seminar, those attending the JAPA Psa-Netcast online faculty seminar can submit questions and comments for consideration by the faculty.
All that is necessary to attend the seminar is access to e-mail or the Web. In this way we freely distribute it throughout the Internet [see box on this page]. So far, with just about one year's worth of experience with this project, the JAPA Psa-Netcast has grown to include more than 500 people. With our first year behind us, we can look back proudly on the content of the discussion and can be optimistic about the future growth and development of this project.
Two topics have been discussed so far. The first took as its target article a paper from JAPA 45(3): “What Is Consciousness?” by Mark Solms. We also formally considered the commentaries published in response to that article. David Olds deserves special mention for his participation and organizational efforts in helping this all come together. The ensuing discussion lasted for several months and covered such areas as neurophysiology, philosophy, clinical experience, and experimental evidence. As will be the case for all topics, a full online archive of the discussion can be found at .
In the spring of 1998, we turned our attention to the second paper considered by the online faculty, Joseph Lichtenberg's plenary published in JAPA 46(1), “Experience as a Guide to Psychoanalytic Theory and Practice.” Again we were fortunate also to include published commentaries. Like the first, this discussion also developed many of the ideas from the original. Questions of goodness-of-fit, the need for new models, the strengths and limitations of affect-based theories of motivation, among others, were considered over the course of this discussion.
The authors of the two articles discussed showed great generosity of mind and time. Both Solms and Lichtenberg became central and active participants in the online seminars, responding to the questions and commentaries with considerable care and thought. How, if at all, this kind of involvement in a vibrant, ongoing discussion conducted after a paper is published will influence subsequent thought and writing is a question well worth asking in the years ahead.
Where does that leave us with those other questions about what this project is trying to do and what values it serves?
We hope that it is clear that the JAPA Psa-Netcast is an educational project trying to bring psychoanalytic scholarship to the Internet and to increase online psychoanalytic educational opportunities. Time will tell how well this project accomplishes those aims.
We want to reach all those who might be interested. “Attending” the JAPA Psa-Netcast should be as easy as possible. We have tried to make it so by making it possible to participate via both e-mail and the Web. Accessible online archives make it easy to go back and see what was missed. It is reasonable to expect that as the project grows, these archives can become useful resources for face-to-face seminars and journal clubs. To further increase accessibility, the JAPA Psa-Netcast is free; no fees are necessary to participate.
It is important to keep in mind that for many, especially among the next generations of candidates, Internet-based scholarship will give people their first taste of how psychoanalysts think and what we think about. Putting our best foot forward and having JAPA intimately associated with innovative and high-quality Internet-based scholarship helps everyone. We hope the JAPA Psa-Netcast will become an important contributor to the development of a vibrant, accessible online culture of psychoanalytic scholarship.
Todd Essig, Ph.D., is on the faculty of the William Alanson White Institute and is a member of its Council of Fellows. He is an editorial associate of JAPA, an associate editor of Contemporary Psychoanalysis, and the founder and director of The Psychoanalytic Connection. He can be reached at tessig@psychoanalysis.net.