ABSTRACT
When it comes to presenting a psychoanalytic perspective on technology, Freud’s essay Civilisation and Its Discontents provides an obvious point of departure. In this psychoanalytical classic, Freud describes how human beings, equipping themselves with “auxiliary organs,” may evolve into “prosthetic gods,” although such organic extensions evidently introduce new challenges and frustrations as well—which explains why technology, allegedly beneficial to humans, at the same time triggers ambivalence and discontent. Freud’s view on technological entities as organic extensions is complemented by a somewhat different approach, initiated in a manuscript dating from the early days of psychoanalysis and known as the Entwurf. Here, Freud proposed the outlines of a philosophical anthropology, which is fleshed out in more detail many years later in another psychoanalytic classic, namely, Beyond the Pleasure Principle. After presenting the core ideas developed in these texts, the focus of my contribution will shift to work of Jacques Lacan, who will also guide our reading of Freud. Lacan’s famous programmatic “return to Freud,” I will argue, does not solely consist of close textual re-reading. Rather, Lacan combines textual analysis (the retour to Freud) with an imposing series of detours, reframing Freud’s concepts and discoveries by connecting them with important developments in twentieth-century research fields, such as structural linguistics, ethology, cybernetics, informatics, and molecular biology. Whereas Freud’s own understanding of science remained very much indebted to research practices in which he himself had been initiated during the final decades of the nineteenth century (notably neuro-physiology), Lacan demonstrated the relevance of psychoanalysis for coming to terms with contemporary technoscience, resulting in a psychoanalytic philosophy of technology, albeit in outline. My contribution will notably zoom in on the role of technology in what Lacan refers to as the “symbolisation of the real.” Finally, I will focus on Lacan’s assessment (or rather: diagnostic) of information technologies, especially paying attention to the role of gadgets, as technological entities with a specific profile of their own.
