Sigmund Freud-Museum | Newsletter - Sigmund Freud Museum Wien

wall of solidarity, explaining: “We’re neither software nor hardware. We’re your parents.” The issue is
the irreducibility of human beings and human meaning. We are back to the family, to the life cycle, to
human fragility and experience.13 We are back to the elements of psychoanalytic culture.
With the turn of the millennium, we came to the end of the Freudian century. It is fashionable to argue
that we have moved from a psychoanalytic to a computer culture, that there is no need to talk about
Freudian slips now that we can talk about information processing errors. In my view, however, the
very opposite is true.
We must cultivate the richest possible language and methodologies for talking about our increasingly
emotional relationships with artifacts.
We need far closer examination of how artifacts enter the development of self and mediate between
self and other. Psychoanalysis provides a rich language for distinguishing between need (something
that artifacts may have) and desire (which resides in the conjunction of language and flesh). It provides
a rich language for exploring the possibility of the irreducibility of human meanings. Finally, to come
full circle, with the reinterpretation of Freudian slips in computational terms – with the general shift
from meaning to mechanism – there is a loss of the notion of ambivalence. Immersion in programmed
worlds and relationships with digital creatures and robotic pets puts us in reassuring microworlds
where the rules are clear. But never have we so needed the ability to think, so to speak,
“ambivalently,” to consider life in shades of gray, to consider moral dilemmas that aren’t battles for
“infinite justice” between Good and Evil. Never have we so needed to be able to hold many different
and contradictory thoughts and feelings at the same time. People may be comforted by the notion that
we are moving from a psychoanalytic to a computer culture, but what the times demand is a passionate
quest for joint citizenship.
Sherry Turkle |
Sherry Turkle is a clinical psychologist and professor for the sociology of science at the Massachusetts
Institute of Technology. She received her doctorate at Harvard for a work on Jacques Lacan’s role in
the history of French psychoanalysis, which was published in 1978 under the title Psychoanalytic
Politics: Freud’s French Revolution (New York: Basic Books). In the ’80s she began her exploration
of the interaction between people and computers. With the books The Second Self: Computers and the
Human Spirit (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1984) and Life on the Screen: Identity in the Age of
the Internet (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1995; in German: Leben im Netz. Identität im Zeichen
des Internet, Reinbek bei Hamburg: Rowohlt, 1998) she contributed influential studies on the
psychical effects of new technologies.
* Sherry Turkle presented this text as the Sigmund Freud Lecture on 6 May 2002 at the
University of Vienna.
1 Sigmund Freud, “Slips of the Tongue,” in The Psychopathology of Everyday Life, in The
Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, vol. 6, ed. and trans.
James Strachey, London: Hogarth Press, 1960, pp. 53–105.
2 I came into that class as a student of psychoanalytic culture in terms of the sociology of
sciences of mind. I went on to study how computers carry ideas about mind, how the computer
becomes an evocative object for thinking about the self.
See Sherry Turkle, Psychoanalytic Politics: Jacques Lacan and Freud’s French Revolution,
New York: Guilford Press, 2nd revised edition, 1992, and The Second Self: Computers
and the Human Spirit, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2nd revised edition, forthcoming.
3 Sherry Turkle, “Psychoanalysis and Artificial Intelligence: A New Alliance,” Daedalus, 117/1
(Winter 1988).
4 Donna Haraway, “A Cyborg Manifesto,” in Simians, Cyborgs and Women, New York:
Routledge, 1991.