One inspiration for this newsletter is to question and rethink the cultural relevance of psychoanalysis. It is motivating to imagine the liberation of psychoanalysis from some of its ideological and institutional incarnations, wherein it dares to fashion new applications that investigate mental health in the context of the socio-political world we currently inhabit. In one sense, this is a tall order, as the pace of contemporary life escalates relentlessly, and we have moved more and more to grant technology the power to govern our fates. It is a widely shared perception that the pace of psychoanalysis is too slow to keep up or to fathom our present reality. In another sense, psychoanalytic thinking and practice continue to offer a much-needed alternative to tendencies in the field of mental health and in our culture that, at best, provide minor satisfaction, and, at worst, sell false consolation.
Sherry Turkle is a compelling writer on the topic of how technology is transforming our lives. She has been writing about our relationship to technology for over 25 years, evolving from being enthusiastic about the potential for technology to change our lives to raising serious concerns about its impact, on young lives especially. Turkle specifically worries about how adolescents struggle to engage in face-to-face encounters, have difficulty in sustaining conversation, and ultimately have come to expect too little from one another. While Turkle is not a technophobe, she does make the argument that the way that we use technology provides the illusion of connection at the same time as it leaves us feeling a greater sense of isolation. More and more, we use technology to avoid empathy and to silo ourselves to be amongst people with whom we agree. This is a crucial point, as the consequence of primarily identifying with people whom we see as being like us is that we are becoming increasingly deskilled at being able to contend with disagreement and conflict between self and others.
I was excited to read Turkle’s most recent book, The Empathy Diaries, which is a memoir and thus a splendid opportunity to learn more about her and the source of her ideas.[i] I should mention that I have been reading tons of memoir lately, as my new book project is a study of memoirists who mention therapy (and exploring what this means to them).
Turkle’s memoir is a fascinating work that deserves recognition beyond what it has received so far. She invokes her Brooklyn Jewish childhood in a way that will ring true for those of us who grew up in New York—for example, nostalgia for Chock Full of Nuts’ date nut sandwich (for a history and also a recipe see: https://www.politico.com/states/new-york/albany/story/2012/07/lost-foods-of-new-york-city-date-nut-bread-sandwiches-at-chock-full-o-nuts-075712). Turkle shares fond memories of Chinese food on holidays and a summertime bungalow in the Rockaways with her grandparents. She was an excellent student, and the family had high hopes for her success. However, her life was shattered by her parents’ divorce, and she had no contact with her father (until she tracked him down many years later). She had and maintained a close relationship with her maternal aunt, Mildred. Her relationship with her mother seems more complicated. Turkle appreciated her mother, but something about their relationship eludes articulation here.[ii]
A perfect summary of Turkle’s childhood is expressed in the following: “I grew up with two convictions. Something was wrong with me because of my name. Four loving adults had made me the center of their lives” (p. 24). Turkle is referring to her last name, Zimmerman, which was her father’s name. Her name was changed to Turkle when her mother remarried. The name change seems like a relief to her. Nevertheless, her stepfather proved to be a difficult, self-centered man who compulsively voiced his insecurities to her, and then, after her mother/his wife died of cancer, expected young Sherry to take care of him and even huffily rejected her when she wanted to return to college.
Turkle’s life was launched as a student at Radcliffe. The memoir covers her evolution as a scholar, her determination to be interdisciplinary thinker, and embracing psychology but holding onto issues about its social import. After a brief time in Chicago as a graduate student, Turkle returned and completed her degree at Harvard. She identifies as a clinical psychologist and is licensed, although she is not a practitioner. Turkle has forged an original career path for herself, which has not been without hardship.
While studying in Paris, Turkle became interested in psychoanalysis, specifically the work of Lacan. She notes that psychoanalysis in the US was already considered passé; however, she was drawn to this particular version of psychoanalysis that sought to incorporate social critique (Turkle’s first book in 1978 was Psychoanalytic Politics: Jacques Lacan and Freud’s French Revolution). Turkle’s powers of self-observation are highly developed, so she duly notes the irony of her attraction to the thinker associated with “the law of the father,” given that she had no relationship at the time with her own father and had been rejected by her stepfather. The saga of Turkle’s relationship with Lacan is amusing—that he treated her respectfully but struggled when she brought him to the US, where he stormed out of the Ritz Hotel restaurant in Boston, rather than wear a tie, and was not well-regarded by intellectuals he encountered (like Chomsky, who saw him as “a genial charlatan”). Ultimately, Turkle is a bit cagey about her own opinion of Lacan and whether it soured after the visit to the US.
Besides depicting her personal life, Turkle traces the evolution of her intellectual interests. She was intrigued with the question of how people change their minds. This is, indeed, relevant to her later work on technology, since the dominance of commercial interests on social media was not inevitable, and there remains hope that we can make technology better serve human interests. Recruited to work at MIT in a newly created program on social studies of science and technology, Turkle had a front row seat at the dawn of the computer age. She observes that cognition was valued to the exclusion of emotions, and she then characterizes her consuming interest in both cognition and emotion. In her words, we ought to construe “thinking and feeling on the same floor” (p. 182). Affirming the value of both cognition and emotion makes sense, but it also stops short of specifying how they might be integrated.[iii]
Although Turkle does not state it explicitly, perhaps we can think of her focus on empathy as embodying an integration of cognition and affect. Given the title of the book, I had hoped that Turkle would explore the construct of empathy with greater specificity. For example, there are downsides to our propensity to act on empathy, as Paul Bloom has argued.[iv] In addition, there is a distinction between emotional and cognitive empathy, the latter overlapping with perspective-taking and mentalization [v]. Turkle wishes to defends empathy as essential to humanity and jeopardized by technology; it remains less clear what empathy refers to in the title. In a recent video interview, Turkle refers to social media as “an anti-empathy machine” (https://www.apa.org/news/podcasts/speaking-of-psychology/anti-empathy-machine).
Throughout her work, Turkle has affirmed the value of human relationships. In an intriguing formulation, she describes her work as an “intimate ethnography of contemporary life” (p. 193). The memoir includes a history of her own relationships—an early engagement that fell apart, a marriage to Seymour Papert, a brilliant mathematician, whose dalliances marred trust in their relationship, a new husband (about whom she does not say much, and apparently is now divorced from) and a daughter. Turkle does not obscure how her search for her father served as an organizing wish that played out in her relationship to men. After her mother’s death, with the encouragement of her husband Seymour, she made the decision to find her father, hiring a detective, and contacting him. She visits him, meets his companion, is struck by physical similarities between them, but also experiences a painful reckoning with her father as dilettante scientist who, apparently, conducted disturbing experiments when taking care of her. The nature of these experiments was inspired by Skinnerian behaviorism, involved deprivation, and led Turkle’s mother to decide to leave her husband. It is, with a doubt, the most heart-wrenching part of the book to hear about Turkle’s reflections on this encounter with her father, as well as a later one, in which her father attempts to enlist her to help him with her professional connections at MIT. Meeting a parent who has not been involved in one’s life is likely to be a mixed experience, but it can also be profoundly disappointing.
Although Turkle veered from a path of becoming a practicing psychologist, she did log time as a patient in psychoanalysis. Her experience is not elaborated on in detail. She mentions a story that she could not bring herself to tell her analyst: that while shopping for a wedding ring with Seymour Papert, he purchased a ring contemporaneously for a friend who was a former lover. She mentions that her analyst was helpful to her in terms of how to deal with her father, encouraging her to “deactivate” the relationship, since she had been the one to initiate it in the first place. Finally, in an intriguing passage, Turkle understands her experience as a patient as becoming “a stranger to my own voice in order to hear it in a different way” (pp. 339-340). Psychoanalysis, on this account, creates an environment, where solitude can foster an internal dialogue within the self. More contemporary versions of psychoanalysis emphasize the intersubjective aspect of the experience, where the analyst is, inevitably, an integral part of what happens. Yet, the reminder that psychoanalysis has room to foster solitude is valuable, even more so as a contrast to our busy digital lives.
As a conclusion, I would like to assess Turkle’s work by considering how it has been influenced by psychoanalysis. At the center of her concern about technology is how it impacts our subjective experience. Turkle discerns unconscious forces as operating to impel us to believe that social media connects us, although it reinforces our isolation. She worries, too, about how technology serves to render us passive, a point that might be contended. Of course, like everyone else, I waste too much time on devices; but at least some of the time, I pursue meandering searches that promote my curiosity and thirst for knowledge. This does not seem passive.
What is profoundly psychoanalytic in Turkle’s work is how she captures the perversity of being constantly in touch, as we grow more out of touch with ourselves as well as others. Turkle elaborates “a psychoanalytic first principle: If you don’t teach your children to be alone, they’ll only know how to be lonely” (p. 336). Turkle deserves recognition for pushing us to confront self-deception and not to avoid anxieties that easily elude acknowledgement in everyday life. I am less convinced than Turkle that on-line interaction necessarily entails an inferior form of human relationship. As a clinician, I observed that patients responded differently to remote psychotherapy, with some struggling to maintain connection, while others (a schizoid patient comes to mind) who became more forthcoming with the added measure of distance. In general, though, I am sympathetic to Turkle’s point that self-reflection can be distorted by social media and that psychoanalysis remains a place where self-reflection is cultivated and valued.
Perhaps, there is hope that the pandemic has created additional space for us to value solitude and, correspondingly, to be more open and receptive to others. For some, though, the pandemic brought an excess of solitude; for others living with lots of family, there was too little.[vi] The challenge of post-pandemic life will be to hold onto a measure of solitude, as we indulge the rich, rewarding, but complicated gratifications of in-person human contact.
[i] S. Turkle (2021). The Empathy Diaries. New York: Penguin.
[ii] Turkle reflects on her relationship to her mother, in particular, how it was affected by the process of writing the memoir, allowing her to become more empathic, in a recent article: https://lithub.com/writing-a-memoir-taught-me-how-to-see-my-mother/
[iii] My work on “mentalized affectivity,” for example, provides a model of how cognition illuminates emotion at the same time as it allows the emotion to live. See: 1) E. Jurist (2018) Minding Emotions: Cultivating Mentalization in Psychotherapy (New York: Guilford); 2) D. Greenberg, S. Rudenstine, R. Alaluf, and E. Jurist (2021) “Development and Validation of the Brief 12 Item Mentalized Affectivity Scale (B-MAS): A Measure of Emotion Regulation and Mentalization,” The Journal of Clinical Psychology; 3) D. Greenberg, J. Kolasi, C. Hegsted, Y. Berkowitz, and E. Jurist (2017) “Mentalized Affectivity: A New Model and Scale of Emotion Regulation,” PLoS ONE 12 (10): e0185264; and 4) E. Jurist (2005) “Mentalized Affectivity” Psychoanalytic Psychology, 22(3); 426-444.
[iv] P.Bloom (2016). Against Empathy: The Case for Rational Compassion. New York: Harper Collins.
[v] J. Decety & K. Yoder (2016) Empathy and motivation for Justice: Cognitive Empathy and Concern, but not Emotional Empathy, Predict Sensitivity to Injustice for Others, Social Neuroscience, 11:1, 1-14, DOI: 10.1080/17470919.2015.1029593, and A. Smith. (2006). Cognitive Empathy and Emotional Empathy in Human Behavior and Evolution. Psychol Rec 56, 3–21, https://doi.org/10.1007/BF03395534.
[vi] Turkle’s experience in the pandemic is documented in a piece in the New Yorker: https://www.newyorker.com/culture/persons-of-interest/sherry-turkles-plugged-in-year