In her lecture Sherry Turkle questions the position of psychoanalysis in a society where the machine is increasingly becoming a subject and mechanistic models of thought are occupying more and more of the social discourse:
"Thinking of the computer as an object enters into how people think about their minds in several ways. First, it serves as a model of mind. Computational views of mind, essentially mechanistic in nature, make easy connections to neurochemical and cognitive models. Second, the computer enters into our theorization about mind through our everyday interactions with computational machines. These days we see a range of new behaviors and forms of "intersubjective" relationships, some of which take the machine as a subject, problematic though this is. Understanding these new forms of interaction – on the Internet, with robotic creatures, in virtual reality – calls for psychoanalytic modes of understanding. New genres of objects in the culture serve as ‘objects to think with’ for a revitalized psychoanalytic discourse.”
Sherry Turkle is a clinical psychologist and professor of scientific sociology at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). She is the author of the book Life on the Screen, which often is referred to as the bible of the internet generation.
Publications:
Life on the Screen: Identity in the Age of the Internet. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1995.
The Second Self: Computers and the Human Spirit. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1984.
Psychoanalytic Politics: Freud's French Revolution. New York: Basic Books, 1978.
Numerous further publications are to be found in various scientific books and journals.