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Human Virtuality and Digital Life: Philosophical and Psychoanalytic Investigations
Winner of the Gradiva® Best Book Award 2022, and the Courage to Dream Book Prize 2023 from the Academy of the American Psychoanalytic Association!
This book is a psychoanalytic and philosophical exploration of how the digital is transforming our perception of the world and our understanding of ourselves.
Drawing on examples from everyday life, myth, and popular culture, this book argues that virtual reality is only the latest instantiation of the phenomenon of the virtual, which is intrinsic to human being. It illuminates what is at stake in our understanding of the relationship between the virtual and the real, showing how our present technologies both enhance and diminish our psychological lives. The authors claim that technology is a pharmakon - at the same time both a remedy and a poison - and in their writing exemplify a method that overcomes the polarization that compels us to regard it either as a liberating force or a dangerous threat in human life. The digital revolution challenges us to reckon with the implications of what is being called our posthuman condition, leaving behind our modern conception of the world as constituted by atemporal essences and reconceiving it instead as one of processes and change. The book’s postscript considers the sudden plunge into the virtual effected by the 2020 global pandemic.
Accessible and wide-reaching, this book will appeal not only to psychotherapists, psychoanalysts, and philosophers, but anyone interested in the ways virtuality and the digital are transforming our contemporary lives.
This book is a psychoanalytic and philosophical exploration of how the digital is transforming our perception of the world and our understanding of ourselves.
Drawing on examples from everyday life, myth, and popular culture, this book argues that virtual reality is only the latest instantiation of the phenomenon of the virtual, which is intrinsic to human being. It illuminates what is at stake in our understanding of the relationship between the virtual and the real, showing how our present technologies both enhance and diminish our psychological lives. The authors claim that technology is a pharmakon - at the same time both a remedy and a poison - and in their writing exemplify a method that overcomes the polarization that compels us to regard it either as a liberating force or a dangerous threat in human life. The digital revolution challenges us to reckon with the implications of what is being called our posthuman condition, leaving behind our modern conception of the world as constituted by atemporal essences and reconceiving it instead as one of processes and change. The book’s postscript considers the sudden plunge into the virtual effected by the 2020 global pandemic.
Accessible and wide-reaching, this book will appeal not only to psychotherapists, psychoanalysts, and philosophers, but anyone interested in the ways virtuality and the digital are transforming our contemporary lives.
314 pages, Kindle Edition
Published August 12, 2021
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Displaying 1 of 1 review
September 1, 2022
his is an academic and ambitious read with a big payoff. It addresses how digital technology affects our existential experience. What do phones have to do with shame, power, narcissism, and death? Is there really even a difference between the virtual and the real? Why are we not more comforted by our phones when we’re addicted to them?
This book delves into all these questions and more, thinking about technology on both a philosophical and psychoanalytic level. This was a fascinating read that will make you feel like you’re back in college, and from which you might emerge more able to view the modern age with a curious and inquiring distance.
Quote: “The drive toward the cyber-realization of desire aggravates our relation to desire’s lack. Because of the unending virtual availability of what we most desire, that we can have as much of exactly what we want, without interference, we are tricked by the seductive promise of the erasure of lack, that desire can be truly and finally satisfied. We can’t stop looking. We can’t stop searching. We can’t stop believing that we will ultimately find the right combination of sounds and images that will fully extinguish our desire. But in the end, we are entrapped by the masochistic search for the ever elusive object.”
This book delves into all these questions and more, thinking about technology on both a philosophical and psychoanalytic level. This was a fascinating read that will make you feel like you’re back in college, and from which you might emerge more able to view the modern age with a curious and inquiring distance.
Quote: “The drive toward the cyber-realization of desire aggravates our relation to desire’s lack. Because of the unending virtual availability of what we most desire, that we can have as much of exactly what we want, without interference, we are tricked by the seductive promise of the erasure of lack, that desire can be truly and finally satisfied. We can’t stop looking. We can’t stop searching. We can’t stop believing that we will ultimately find the right combination of sounds and images that will fully extinguish our desire. But in the end, we are entrapped by the masochistic search for the ever elusive object.”
Displaying 1 of 1 review