In our time, as many contemporary psychoanalysts have noted, the failure to understand what is going on within ourselves is likely to come not from repression, but from the scattering and fragmentation of our internal lives – the inability to figure out the connections between our disparate activities, or even to remember them, or to give them personal meaning. This of course mirrors the fragmentation of our external lives, and is greatly exacerbated by digital technologies and the scattering of attention – of mind and feeling – they encourage.
