The American Journal of Psychoanalysis

2024

Special Issue: Self, Psyche, and Technology
Guest edited by Robert Prince

The psychological implications of technology are being discussed widely at the present time. This interest has developed almost as rapidly as technological innovation itself, but its heritage goes back to Socrates who forewarned Phaedrus against the new technology of his day, writing, which he believed to be the enemy of memory and wisdom. Two millennia later, neuroscience confirms changes in the brain attributable to the use of technology. Philosophers as diverse as Walter Ong and Marshall McLuhan have addressed the effects of developing technologies of language and communication on how mind and social relations are organized. In any field such advances will expand possibilities well beyond our current understanding. Futurists, like Ray Kurzweil, have written about a technological singularity in which human beings merge with machines and Yuval Harari has discussed the possibility that humans may evolve into a new species through biotechnology.

We are aware of some of these impacts, as daily headlines announce the psychological and political effects of Facebook, Twitter, and other platforms along with the sophisticated algorithms that propel them, but we are only just beginning to grasp the possibilities of Artificial Intelligence and its potential influence. The subjects have ranged from the increase in rates of suicide in adolescence and all sorts of political violence attributable to social media, to a granular change in social and interpersonal relations to the alteration in the ability to trust the senses and sense of space, time, reality and redefinition of “truth.”

This Special Issue will be published in the 2024 June Issue of the American Journal of Psychoanalysis, Volume 84, Issue 2.

2023

Special Issue: Truth and Lies: Psychoanalytic Perspectives
Guest edited by Caron Harrang

Caron Harrang: Introduction. American Journal of Psychoanalysis, 83(4), 443-464.

Articles:

Abel-Hirsch, N. (2023). What might be so close that as psychoanalysts we miss it? American Journal of Psychoanalysis, 83(4), 465-475.

Harrang, C. (2023). On Grotstein’s ‘truth’ in Bion’s theory of ‘O’. American Journal of Psychoanalysis, 83(4), 476-494.

Civitarese, G. (2023c). On Bion’s concept of truth in an extra-moral sense. American Journal of Psychoanalysis, 83(4), 495-519.

Harrang, C. & Civitarese, G. (2023). Interview with Giuseppe Civitarese, MD, FIPA, July 2014. American Journal of Psychoanalysis, 83(4), 520-527.

Eekhoff, J. K. (2023). Between the real and the imaginary: Truth and lies in the psychoanalytic encounter. American Journal of Psychoanalysis, 83(4), 528-546.

Case, S. (2023). Weaving deceptive webs and untangling emotional truths. American Journal of Psychoanalysis, 83(4), 547-565.

Winters, N. C. (2023). ‘A home to the lie’: The contemporary (per)version of truth. American Journal of Psychoanalysis, 83(4), 566-585.