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THE ONLINE CONGRESS — INTERVIEW WITH S. TURKLE
Q: Referring to French psychoanlysis and, especially, to Lacan, and to Saussure’s influence and to the concept of signifier and signified and, what from this tradition do you consider in your studies about man-machine interaction?
A: I got to know the French psychoanalytic tradition when I studied the French "infatuation" with Freud in the years after 1968. After a long period of reticence toward Freud, psychoanalysis became very popular in the years after 1968. My own personal analysis was not in France at that time, but later, in Boston, an analysis in the classical tradition. In my work on technology I try to respect the disjuncture between signifier and signified, looking to the meaning of technology rather than to the object itself, what it evokes, what it recalls. In my view, we must be more attentive to this "subjective side" of technology. We are surrounded by objects to which we ascribe a "sort of" life; this leads us to ask ourselves, in a world with these objects, we must ask "What is a person," "What is a relationship?"
Q: What do you think about the possibility of considering virtual reality as a part of real world? A: I do not like to make a distinction between reality and virtuality: we have a physical reality and a virtual one. The communication that can take place via the Internet is real and has consequences on our thoughts and feelings, even if our communication might be richer in certain ways when people meet face to face
Q: What is the impact of the technological innovations (animals and dolls robot) on the development of child’s identity? A: I’m not against electronic toys, but I think we’re at dawn of knowledge in this field and underestimate the impact of technology on the way children grow up thinking about the question of "what is alive?" human life. And when robots are presented as companions for children and elders, it can activate their fantasies about being loved. We must reexamine if we really want to put these fantasies into play.
Q: Have we moved from a psychoanalytic to a technological culture?
A: We need ways of thinking to understand our new forms of relationship with our technology. So the need for a sophisticated culture of relational psychologies (psychoanalytic and psychiatric) has become ever more urgent.
Q: Do computers invite us to fantasies of perfection? A: One of the ways in which computer’s seduce us is to offer us a medium in which we attempt to grasp perfection. For some people, this promise of perfection — "if you do it right, it will do it right and right away" — is a fundamental element of "computer holding power."
Q: In virtual reality, are feelings real or virtual? A: People have only one kind of feelings. In virtual space, very "real" feelings come into play. We need to understand human-machine interaction in rich psychological terms; the participation of psychiatric/psychoanalytic clinicians is of the greatest importance here. | Dato l'alto numero degli avvenimenti congressuali che ogni anno vengono organizzati in Italia e nel mondo sarebbe oltremodo gradita la collaborazione dei lettori nella segnalazione "tempestiva" di congressi e convegni che così potranno trovare spazio di presentazione nelle pagine della rubrica. |
