ABSTRACT
This chapter explores the impact of new technologies on the 'work of desire' illustrating this with a selective psychoanalytic reading of Spike Jonze's film Her. In order to discuss the work of desire in contemporary culture, the chapter considers how time and space are experienced through new technologies. Cyberspace is especially reinforcing of these primitive modes of experience. Generally speaking technology can foster the greater use of primary process in the management of reality. Focusing on virtual reality and hence virtual connectedness raises the important question of the fate of the body in the mind as the very experience of intimacy is altered because virtual reality is a form of communication that is predicated on distance and on a self whose embodiment is experienced differently. Her allows us to observe the seductive pull of cyberspace and its 'costs'. It successfully conveys how technology can be used to manage difficult aspects of psychic reality and the demands of intimacy.
