CHAPTER TITLE I

THE PSYCHODYNAMICS OF
SOCIAL NETWORKING
PSYCHOANALYSIS AND POPULAR CULTURE SERIES
Published and distributed by Karnac Books
Consulting Editor: Brett Kahr

Series Editors: Caroline Bainbridge and Candida Yates

Television and Psychoanalysis: Psycho-Cultural Perspectives

edited by Caroline Bainbridge, Ivan Ward, and Candida Yates
THE PSYCHODYNAMICS
OF SOCIAL
NETWORKING
Connected-up Instantaneous
Culture and the Self
Aaron Balick
First published in 2013 by
Karnac Books Ltd
118 Finchley Road, London NW3 5HT

Cover design © Richard Kahwagi.

Copyright © 2013 to Aaron Balick.

The right of Aaron Balick to be identified as the author of this work has been
asserted in accordance with §§ 77 and 78 of the Copyright Design and Patents
Act 1988.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in

a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic,
mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior written
permission of the publisher.

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

A C.I.P. for this book is available from the British Library

ISBN 978 1 78049 092 2

Edited, designed and produced by The Studio Publishing Services Ltd

www.publishingservicesuk.co.uk
e-mail: studio@publishingservicesuk.co.uk

Printed in Great Britain

www.karnacbooks.com
CONTENTS

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS vii

ABOUT THE AUTHOR xi

SERIES EDITORS’ PREFACE xiii

INTRODUCTION: Putting it into context xv

CHAPTER ONE
Psychodynamics 1

CHAPTER TWO
On searching and being sought 27

CHAPTER THREE
The matrix 49

CHAPTER FOUR
Who’s afraid of being an object? 71

v
vi CONTENTS

CHAPTER FIVE
Being in the mind of the other 101

CHAPTER SIX
Identities are not virtual 129

Conclusion 149

NOTES 159

REFERENCES 165

INDEX 179
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Seeing this book from conception to completion has been a long

process that has involved a great number of people. First and fore-
most, I would like to thank those directly involved in its coming
into being. Brett Kahr, who first proposed the idea, and Caroline
Bainbridge and Candida Yates, the series editors, who have given
me the honour not only of being included in this exciting series,
but also many other aspects of their prolific endeavours in psycho-
analysis and culture. Those at Karnac Books who have so beneficently
guided me through this process; Constance Govindin and Rod
Tweedy, who so helpfully and rapidly responded to my myriad
e-mails, and Oliver Rathbone for taking this book on. I am also eter-
nally grateful to Alain Bartolo, a true and treasured friend, who
was a constant source of encouragement and helpful criticism, and
the first reader of so much of this book. Alain, merci. Further, this
book would never have been possible were it not for my own client
“Thomas”, who was not only instrumental in helping me think
through the implications of our own “virtual impingement” and all
that followed, but generously gave consent for me to use his material
in this book.

vii
viii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

In writing a book there is a series of individuals who take on less

formal roles that I would also like to thank. Foremost, I would like to
thank two of my mentors, who have both “parented” me in deeply
important ways in my development as a psychotherapist and writer,
Andrew Samuels and Susie Orbach, both of whom have been pioneers
in the application of the depth psychologies to society and culture.
The executive board and members of the relational school have all
been there from the start, providing a fertile proving ground for this
material, testing it, challenging it, and adding spice and content. I am
grateful to the entire membership for their contribution and particu-
larly the executive board; Shoshi Asheri, Sally Berry, Robert Downes,
Jane Haberlin, Sue Jenssen, Pam Kleinot, Marsha Nodelman, Jane
Nairne, and Judy Yellin. Also highly influential to me are my friends
and colleagues at the Centre for Psychoanalytic Studies at the Univer-
sity of Essex, particularly Matt ffytche and Kevin Lu, alongside all the
wonderful students who passed through our classes. I am also grate-
ful to Ford Hickson for his help in my understanding of statistical and
quantitative studies.
No book can be written without the love and support of those
around you. On this point, the biggest acknowledgement goes out to
my civil and life partner, Will Nutland, who, as part of his very being,
effortlessly assuages my doubts, consistently settles my insecurities,
and grounds me in the solid foundations of his love and affection. To
Richard Kahwagi, not just for creating the beautiful cover, but also for
his wonderfully accessible warmth, effervescent curiosity, humour,
and relentless support. And to Juan Sanchez, whose quiet and patient
belief in me has been profoundly sustaining.
I am deeply lucky to have a large family of origin and family of
choice: too many to name. However, I would especially like to thank
my mother, Leslie Balick Picker, and father, Stanley Balick, to whom
I owe so much; my dear sister, Kheyala Rasa, and her two wonderful
children, Ananda and Zack, who came back into my life during the
writing of this book; and my stepfather, Lester Picker, who has been
a great support. To my extended family, you know who you are, and
to my family of choice all over the globe, I am most deeply grateful.
 ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS ix

Permissions and copyrights

Epigraphs
Introduction:
Kranzberg, Melvin. Technology and history: ‘Kranzberg’s Laws’.
Technology and Culture, 27(3) (1986): 545. © 1986 by the Society for the
History of Technology. Reprinted with permission of the Johns
Hopkins University Press.
Chapter Two:
Reprinted from Hope and Dread in Psychoanalysis, by Stephen A.
Mitchell. Available from Basic Books, an imprint of Perseus Books
Group. Copyright © 1983.
Chapter Three:
McLuhan, Marshall (1964). Understanding Media. New York:
Routledge (2001), p. 52.
Chapter Four:
“Birdhouse in Your Soul”, by John Linnell and John Flansburgh,
Copyright © 1991 TMBG Music. All rights administered by Warner-
Tamerlane Publishing Corp. All rights reserved. Used by permission.
Chapter Five:
Bollas, Christopher (1987). Shadow of the Object. Pages 48–49. ©
Christopher Bollas 1987. First published by Free Association Books,
London, UK.

Throughout
Copyright © 2011 Sherry Turkle. Reprinted by permission of Basic
Books, a member of Perseus Books Group.
 To HB and TT
In memory of SWB
ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Aaron Balick is a UKCP registered psychotherapist and supervisor,

and a media and social networking consultant working in London. He
is also an honorary lecturer at the Centre for Psychoanalytic Studies
at the University of Essex, where he participates in the postgraduate
MA and PhD programmes in psychoanalytic studies; in addition, he
lectures and runs workshops in a variety of psychotherapy trainings
in the UK. As a founding and executve member of the Relational
School UK, he works to develop and promote relational thinking in
the UK and abroad. Dr Balick writes for both academic and lay
audiences, having published several academic articles and book
chapters, while at the same time contributing a psychological angle in
the national press and on national radio; he has also written a self-help
book for children. He is a media spokesperson for the UKCP and a
regular contributor, as the “resident psychotherapist”, to BBC Radio
One’s phone-in show, The Surgery with Aled and Dr Radha.

xi
SERIES EDITORS’ PREFACE

The application of psychoanalytic ideas and theories to culture has a

long tradition and this is especially the case with cultural artefacts that
might be considered “classical” in some way. For Sigmund Freud, the
works of William Shakespeare and Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
were as instrumental as those of culturally renowned poets and
philosophers of classical civilisation in helping to formulate the key
ideas underpinning psychoanalysis as a psychological method. In the
academic fields of the humanities and social sciences, the application
of psychoanalysis as a means of illuminating the complexities of iden-
tity and subjectivity is now well established. However, despite these
developments, there is relatively little work that attempts to grapple
with popular culture in its manifold forms, some of which, neverthe-
less, reveal important insights into the vicissitudes of the human
condition.
The “Psychoanalysis and Popular Culture” book series builds on
the work done since 2009 by the Media and the Inner World research
network, which was generously funded by the UK’s Arts and Human-
ities Research Council. It aims to offer spaces to consider the relation-
ship between psychoanalysis in all its forms and popular culture,
which is ever more emotionalised in the contemporary age.

xiii
xiv SERIES EDITORS’ PREFACE

In contrast to many scholarly applications of psychoanalysis,

which often focus solely on “textual analysis”, this series sets out to
explore the creative tension of thinking about cultural experience and
its processes, with attention to observations from the clinical and
scholarly fields of observation. What can academic studies drawing
on psychoanalysis learn from the clinical perspective and how might
the critical insights afforded by scholarly work cast new light on clin-
ical experience? The series provides space for a dialogue between
these different groups with a view to creating fresh perspectives on
the values and pitfalls of a psychoanalytic approach to ideas of self-
hood, society, and popular culture. In particular, the series strives to
develop a psycho-cultural approach to such questions by drawing
attention to the usefulness of a post-Freudian, object-relations
perspective for examining the importance of emotional relationships
and experience.
The Psychodynamics of Social Networking: Connected-up Instantaneous
Culture and the Self addresses the themes of the “Psychoanalysis and
Popular Culture” series as discussed above by placing psychoanalytic
understandings of selfhood, relatedness, and popular culture at
its core. The author, Aaron Balick, draws on his expertise in clinical,
academic, and media fields to explore the experiential processes of
social media and their role in shaping subjectivity in the settings and
contexts of everyday life. The book examines the dynamic interplay
between the socio-cultural forces and technological developments that
have facilitated new ways of relating and communicating with one
another, creating spaces for the psycho-cultural imagination, where
the fantasy life of object relating can take place. Aaron Balick explored
some of these themes and ideas in public roundtable and workshop
discussions organised by the Media and Inner World research
network, and the editors of this series are very pleased that this asso-
ciation has proved to be so fruitful. (For further details of that activity,
see: www.miwnet.org.) This book builds on some of that work and
provides a highly innovative, psychodynamic perspective on the
experience of social networking and the dilemmas of that experience
for the subject in the contemporary mediatised age.

Caroline Bainbridge and Candida Yates

Series Editors
Introduction: putting it into context

“Technology is neither good nor bad; nor is it neutral”

(Kranzberg’s First Law of Technology, 1986)

Given the rapidly evolving nature of the world of online social

networking, this book knowingly works within the risk that things
will have surely changed even by the time the binding glue cools as it
comes off the presses. The pace of change in today’s new media and
mobile technology is such that as soon as words go on to a page in
relation to them, they are at risk of becoming out-dated by the time
the ink has dried. Maybe you are reading this as an e-book, in which
case the idea of the ink drying and an actual paper binding already
seems anachronistic. In my research for this book, I came across many
examples of “the next big thing” that the tech gurus predicted would
come to define our culture for the next decade; most of these were
flashes in the pan, trends that disappeared as quickly as they
appeared. Even the notion of “defining a decade” is changing—a
decade is too long and things are changing too quickly. Just think of
the rapid rise of MySpace or Second Life, both of which captured the
cultural imagination only to be rendered practically obsolete eighteen
to twenty-four months later. One by one these entities burst on to the

xv
xvi INTRODUCTION

scene only to wither on the vine, to be replaced by new iterations of

online social experiences. I have learnt a great deal by reading about
their rapid rises and slightly more protracted near demises; you see,
they never seem to die: they simply revert into rarefied social niches
with cult audiences. In order to future-proof this text as much as
possible, I have chosen to take a process-orientated approach rather
than a content-orientated one. While a content-orientated approach
would be primarily interested in examining social networking sites
(SNSs) as they currently exist, the alternative process-orientated
approach will focus instead on the processes in which individuals and
our society at large are implicated and mediated within online social
media itself. Hence, the use of the word “psychodynamics” in the title
should alert you that it is the dynamics (the forces behind) that will be
the locus of interest, not the object itself. Psychodynamics is utilised
as an umbrella term to identify a whole series of theories and practices
developed through the various schools of psychoanalysis that investi-
gate human motivation, meaning-making, and unconscious process.
Because SNSs are likely to continue to develop rapidly in as yet unex-
pected ways, the question of how humans might psychologically
adapt to these rapid changes remains open. Naughton (2012a) notes
that disruption and change is essential to the Internet as a whole, not
just social networking. For Naughton, the Internet

is a global machine for springing surprises—good, bad, and indiffer-

ent—on us. What’s more, it was explicitly designed to be like this,
though its designers might not have expressed it in precisely those
terms. In other words, the disruptiveness of the Internet is a feature,
not a bug—it stems from the basic architectural principles of the
network’s design. It’s what the network was designed to do. So you
could say that disruptiveness is built into its virtual DNA. (p. 33)

The way in which the disruptive nature of online technology oper-

ates alongside the ways that social media mediates the basic human
dynamics of relating will consistently be the centre of interest of this
text; this model should continue to be amenable to application to as
yet unanticipated iterations of social networking. We will keep
coming back to the question of where and how virtual DNA meets
human psychological DNA; how the contemporary mode of digital
expression meets our deepest unconscious need to recognise, be
recognised, and relate to others: our psychodynamics.
 INTRODUCTION xvii

A very short history of online social networks

Online social networking has penetrated our social landscape, satu-

rating our methods of relating with profound speed and accelerating
growth. This has been made possible by the social shaping of tech-
nology (see Chapter Three), that is, the interplay of socio-cultural
forces and technological development that has enabled technology to
more readily meet the needs of the non-specialist population, a pro-
cess exemplified in the enormous success and popularity of Facebook.
The speed at which Facebook has become the world’s most popular
and ubiquitous SNS is unprecedented. On 4 October 2012, Mark
Zuckerberg announced that Facebook had one billion active accounts
(Facebook, 2012a); it is estimated that thirty-eight per cent of Internet
users throughout the world are active on Facebook (Solis, 2012). With
a world population of around seven billion, Facebook represents 12%
of it; if Facebook were a nation, it would be the third largest in the
world (Solis, 2012). At present, Facebook is the second most visited
site in the world after Google (Fitzgerald, 2012). Setting the context for
how this became so can begin to give us an idea about what kind of
psychological role the modern online social network is providing for
its everyday users.
It was a series of failures and half-starts that paved the way for
Facebook’s dominance. Facebook is merely the most recent and domi-
nant iteration of SNSs that developed out of smaller projects explicitly
aimed at connecting people in new ways. It is no accident that the
same telephone lines that have connected people for the previous
century have become the conduit for the next generation of techno-
logical connection. Alas, the lowly telephone line proved itself too
slow for the increasing demand for speed; across the connected-up
world, old copper telephone lines are being ripped out and replaced
by faster fibre-optic cables. Expansion of Internet use has been excep-
tional, resulting in the developments of what has been termed “Web
2.0” (Creeber & Martin, 2009), that is, the shifting of the World Wide
Web from being dominated by static content-heavy web pages to
becoming more interactive and explicitly social. Naughton (2012a)
describes Web 1.0 as “a world-wide repository of linked, static
documents held on servers distributed across the Internet” (p. 134).
The main driver behind the shift to Web 2.0 was e-commerce, “which
desperately needed to transform the Web into a medium that
xviii INTRODUCTION

facilitated transactions” (p. 136). Although Naughton is referring to

financial transactions, the same motivation that enabled their devel-
opment also facilitated the ease of human-to-human interactions. This
move towards interaction is largely responsible for shifting focus from
a content-focused platform to one that relies upon user engagement;
in this sense, you can see the development of Web 2.0 as a relational
process itself, one that has been inexorably moving towards a
connected-up, instantaneous culture. Although Web 2.0 continues to
be content-heavy, it is the nature of the social networking process that
has arguably drawn the Internet into the lives of everyday people.
However, it was not always thus.
In the simplest terms, the Internet1 was developed as the most expe-
dient way to send and receive information. In order to do this in the
best possible way, it was based on two rules; that there should be no
central control and that it should be simple, that is, not optimised for
any single application (Naughton, 2012a, p. 186), which is why it is just
as easy to send video, text, voice, images, or anything else from point
A to point B. According to Wikipedia, the word “Internet” with a cap-
ital “I” is meant to indicate the Internet that we use every day, distin-
guishing it from internets in general, which can refer to any connected
online network. The Web (or World Wide Web) is the series of net-
worked “pages” that we use to interface across the Internet (but it is not
the Internet), whereas SNSs are the parts of the Web upon which we use
social networking. The distinctions are important. While the Internet
itself developed earlier than the social web that carries our SNSs,
today’s SNSs developed atop this infrastructure, emerging from their
less “user friendly” forebears during the infancy of the World Wide
Web, developing explicitly with the aim of connecting people.
Early adopters will be familiar with the Internet bulletin boards
systems (BBSs) that emerged in the 1980s across the aforementioned
clunky modems in which telephone receivers sat like birds in nests.
Those who forged the earliest social networks were not seen as pioneers
at the time by their social network-naïve public, rather, they were often
seen as feckless and antisocial “computer nerds”. They were, however,
relating to other people the whole time, only through the medium of a
computer-mediated network pioneering a completely new way of
online relating that would revolutionise our social world. It was these
early hobbyists that forged ahead with the more user friendly interfaces
that would, in later years of the first decade of the twenty-first century,
 INTRODUCTION xix

be utilised by hundreds of millions of people who would not know

what a “baud”2 rate was if it hit them in the face, or be familiar with the
screeching noise that used to accompany every online connection.
These informal BBS networks (usually hosted on a computer hobbyist’s
home server) were followed by commercial ventures, now mostly
forgotten, such as Prodigy and, later, AOL (America On Line), which
continues today in a different form; these packages made it easer for
those who were not serious computer hobbyists to join the fun—and it
soon caught on. The growing ubiquity of email to the general public
from the early 1990s ensured that more and more people were wired
in, if not yet connected to the growing World Wide Web that was
hurtling toward 2.0. Each development produced a new human-to-
machine interface that became more intuitive and more human with
each iteration: the development of the web browser being a prime
example of this process. This is the social shaping hypothesis (Baym,
2010) in action: technology meets human desire, and then by way of
human innovation, the technology adapts to better meet these desires.
Gone are clunky monochrome screens and indecipherable DOS com-
mands; welcome the intuitive touch screen you can put in your pocket
and a colourful human interface with all the creepy architecture well
hidden in the background. This is, of course, a double-edged sword. We
have accepted the ease of the interface at the expense of not under-
standing how these technologies operate, and that has grave conse-
quences, many of which we have yet to fully comprehend.
Off the back of these rather clunky BBSs, SNSs had a few incarna-
tions before becoming mainstream, including Six Degrees as early as
1997 and Friendster in 2002 (boyd & Ellison, 2007). Growth became
exponential, particularly with the development of Myspace, which
launched in 2004. Myspace started to attract large numbers of partic-
ipants, gaining a million subscribers in its first month of operation in
February of 2004, growing to five million by November of the same
year; by 2005, the BBC reported that it was the most viewed inter-
net domain in the USA (Stenovec, 2011). The first indications of the
scope and range of the SNS was now becoming apparent. Although
Myspace never achieved the ubiquity that Facebook would, it was,
none the less, the first social network to really become a household
word as well as being the first online public venue through which
our culture would first come across the notion of cyberbullying and
cyberstalking: the instant fame that the internet made possible, and
xx INTRODUCTION

the “go-to place” for journalists to more easily find photographs and
material on individuals involved in political scandals and other head-
line-grabbing news. While Myspace was still largely the preserve of
the young, and in many ways the hip music-aware young, the idea of
the online social network started becoming part of the cultural con-
sciousness across the social spectrum. Facebook opened up to the
wider public in 2006, two years after Myspace, though its popularity
soared, taking over Myspace’s 75.9 million subscribers a mere two
years later (Stenovec, 2011). Just four years after that, Facebook’s
online population reached half a billion (Facebook, 2011), before
doubling two years after that. These statistics are important to note, as
they indicate the vast amount of individuals motivated to visit these
sites: further, they exemplify in pure quantitative terms that moving
towards online social networking is catchy, once a critical mass of indi-
viduals comes on board, they attract more and more, ultimately
making this form of relating mainstream. Put in the perspective of
mainstream relating, we can see the draw: Facebook and other SNSs are
tools that we use to relate to others; as this text will draw out, the
motivation to relate to others is one of the most profound drives that
lie at the centre of what it means to be human. The way in which SNSs
seek to harness the massive power of this motivation is one of the
main attractions it has to investors and marketers who are constantly
seeking out ways to capitalise on them. The potentially psychody-
namic consequences of this drive towards capitalisation, as exempli-
fied in Facebook becoming a publically traded company in 2012, will
be discussed in Chapter Four.
Facebook was not initially successful in monetising its operation,
experiencing a serious drop in its share price shortly after its initial
public offering (IPO); struggling until the summer of 2013 to recover
to near its offer price; we can expect continued volitility. Perhaps one
of the reasons why the users of Facebook have initially seemed reluc-
tant to turn a profit for those that run it may have to do with the
nature of what an online social network actually is, and what funda-
mentally motivates it to grow. Its main attraction appears to be its
ability to create an environment for people to connect to each other,
rather than to shop, much to the consternation of those trying desper-
ately to exploit this paradigm better for this purpose. But what is it
that explicitly defines a social networking site? Throughout this text,
I will be using boyd and Ellison’s (2007) definition of the SNS:
 INTRODUCTION xxi

We define social network sites as web-based services that allow indi-

viduals to (1) construct a public or semi-public profile within a
bounded system, (2) articulate a list of other users with whom they
share a connection, and (3) view and traverse their list of connections
and those made by others within the system.

To this, I would add other staples of modern-day SNSs, such as the

ability to comment upon and share information, post photos, and a
whole variety of other activities that are primarily based on sharing
things with others across an online network. These elements seem to
operate as an underlying architecture among the variety of social
networks that come and go. In addition to traditional online social
networks such as Facebook and Twitter, there are a plethora of other
online platforms that contain social elements, such as Internet gaming,
Internet dating sites, and virtual worlds like Second Life, a variety of
social applications such as Instagram (sharing photographs) and
Foursquare (sharing venues with friends such as restaurants and
bars), smartphone applications for finding instant sexual gratification
like Grindr and Blendr, and other platforms all together, such as
YouTube and Vine for sharing videos. While all of these are important
loci of online human experience and psychosocial research, they
cannot possibly all be investigated in depth in this text.
Google search, while not a traditional online social network, is the
most visited site on the internet (Alexa, 2012) and although it is mostly
associated with searching for information about stuff, Chapter Two
will look at it in the context in which it is often used to seek informa-
tion about other people and ourselves; rather than being a simple source
of data, the information collected about individual persons on
Google’s knowledge graph has psychological consequences for the
way we see ourselves and others. That Google is also under investi-
gation in this text necessarily opens up the set of technological plat-
forms that can be considered as domains of online social relating
worthy of interest: these include mobile technologies such as smart-
phones and tablets (Chapter Three) and other online interactional
environments, such as comment pages on news sites (Chapter Four),
alongside a whole variety of other online spaces that enable online
interpersonal relating. While the main focus for this book will be on
the function that SNSs have as a virtual site of person-to-person relat-
ing and its nature as a primary medium through which this is
xxii INTRODUCTION

currently taking place, other domains of interpersonal relating will

come in when appropriate.

Why psychodynamic?
As the title of this book clearly suggests, the theoretical underpinning
of this text will be psychodynamic. While Chapter One will draw out
the details of what I call a relational psychodynamic approach, at this
stage it is important to simply note that “psychodynamic” is an inclu-
sive umbrella term for a range of theories and therapeutic practices
that developed out of psychoanalysis and take the nature of the
dynamic unconscious as a central tenet of its worldview. There are
many schools of psychoanalysis (from Adler to Žižek) that share a
common ancestry back to Freud, although to this day the field
remains “schoolist” and divided. Therefore, the word psychodynamic is
used as an inclusive term that allows for the insights of a variety of
these schools to be applied to our object of investigation, allowing a
flexible and less dogmatic approach to the material at hand. While
left intentionally broad, my use of the term is bound together by guid-
ing principles outlined by Jacobs (1998), in which the essence of
psychodynamic theory lies in three domains: first, conceptual model-
ling, which is derived from the clinical situation and therapeutic
relationship through which the understanding of the patient’s un-
conscious relational dynamics are laid bare by “working through
defences and resistance, as well as the use of transference and counter-
transference” (p. 1); second, from the theoretical perspective, with
regard to models of human development, “how people develop
through childhood and through adolescence into adult life; and what
this process imparts to them along the way” (p. 2); third, a compre-
hensive mapping of personality structure, “models of how the mind
works, or of how the personality might be structured” (p. 5). Each of
these domains rests upon a fundamental acceptance of a dynamic
unconscious that underlies each of them. While these main themes
inform the broad psychodynamic approach, more precise terms will
be brought in from individual traditions of psychoanalysis when
appropriate.
Given that we are investigating a thoroughly contemporary
paradigm that is both fast-moving and embedded within the tech-
 INTRODUCTION xxiii

nological world, it is fair to ask why a discipline that was developed

in the nineteenth century and originally required nothing more than
a couch and a chair is an appropriate lens through which to view this
highly modern technological phenomena. While, on the one hand, one
might argue that psychoanalysis is an outdated and anachronistic
model with which to approach cutting edge modernity in the form of
online social networking, on the other hand, we can clearly see that a
psychoanalytic perspective includes models of unconscious motiva-
tion, identity development, and a theory of relational structures that
allows us to approach social networking with a depth that might not
be readily available from other methods. These models, rather than
having been preserved in Victorian aspic, have undergone well over
a century of working through and revision, resulting in a modern
iteration of psychoanalysis that has not only undergone changes
within its own paradigm, but also allowed itself to be influenced by
a variety of social and cultural disciplines, including sociology, femi-
nism, critical theory, postmodernism, and the observational and
empirical sciences, from attachment studies to fMRI scans in neuro-
science.
Relational psychoanalysis, which will be discussed in detail in
Chapter One, is considered a development of the object relations
tradition, as hinted at in Freud’s late writings and developed by Klein,
Fairbairn, Winnicott, and others (Mitchell & Greenberg, 1983). Object
relations theory shifted the focus from libido as a pleasure seeking
energy requiring release to the new paradigm of the libido as object-
seeking3 instead, in which “[t]he fundamental motivational push in
human experience is not gratification and tension reduction, using
others as a means toward that end, but connections with others as an
end in itself” (Mitchell & Black, 1995, p. 115). The nature of this moti-
vation resulted in the images of other people, or parts or aspects of
other people (referred to as “objects”) taking up residency in the indi-
vidual subject as internal objects. Paraphrasing Fairbairn, Mitchell and
Black (1995) describe people as, “actually structured into multiple,
subtly discontinuous self organizations, different versions of our-
selves with particular different characteristics” (p. 121); these versions
of ourselves are directly related to our internalisations of others.
While object relations was a great advance, it suffered from reducing
others to “objects” in the mind of the subject under study, rather than
as subjects in relation to other subjects. British psychoanalyst Donald
xxiv INTRODUCTION

Winnicott can, in many ways, be retrospectively seen as “relational”

because he shifted focus again toward a more intersubjective angle on
the infant–mother relationship. Although his insights were focused
primarily on the perspective of the infant’s internal world, he deviated
from the object relations tradition as associated with Klein and
Fairbairn by noting that the nature of the facilitating environment
provided by the “good enough” mother was essential in healthy
psychological development. This change recognised the importance of
others in the subject’s own psychological development.
This move towards intersubjectivity and the nature of objects vs.
subjects became the key change that developed into relational psycho-
analysis, originally inspired by Mitchell and Greenberg (1983) and
further developed by Mitchell (1988, 1993), Benjamin (1988, 1995)
Aron (1996), and a raft of others found in the edited compilations
of papers by Mitchell and Aron (1999) and Aron and Harris (2005).
Contemporary psychoanalysis has been influenced by all of these
developments, enabling a contemporary post-Freudian psycho-
analysis to develop a creative alternative to its predecessors and make
it possible to address developments in our modern twenty-first
century culture from a refreshed psychodynamic perspective. The
nature of SNSs is fundamentally relational and calls upon its users
to interact with them through both their internal object relations
and intersubjective engagements with others; relational psycho-
analysis offers a series of models to understand these processes.
Therefore, two positions will be axiomatic throughout this text: first,
that the primary motivation that lies at the bottom of people’s social
networking use is relational in nature. Second, that by taking a
process-orientated approach to social networking use, we can gain
a foothold into the meanings that these relational motivations hold
for individuals through the mediation and architecture of the online
social network. Following on from these axioms, it seems clear that
a multi-disciplinary approach, broadly housed under the title psycho-
social, offers us the necessary theories and concepts to apply to this
material in a grounded and flexible, yet critical, fashion. It is necess-
ary that the psycho here is indicative of contemporary psychoana-
lysis rather than the field of experimental psychology, which is
so much better represented in the field of social networking
research.
 INTRODUCTION xxv

Social networking is individual, intersubjective, and social:

it is also commercial and potentially objectifying
While a broadly psychosocial and phenomenological approach seems
an obvious avenue into the online social networking phenomenon, it
is hardly surprising that the bulk of the material I encountered in
preparation for this book came not from psychoanalysis, but, rather,
from the world of commerce, in particular the marketing and brand-
ing sectors of industry that are producing reams of material focused
on customer engagement (with products and brands) and the use of
social media as an engine of person-to-person “informal” advertising:
an application within social media that is on the verge of creating vast
amounts of money. Because of this, a great deal of research has been
going into how best to capitalise on the vast stores of personal infor-
mation collected by SNSs of their users, and rather less on trying to
understand how users make meaning of their SNS activity (something
that is unlikely to produce a financial return). The writing of this book
overlapped with the IPO of Facebook, launching with a headline-
grabbing value of over 100 billion US dollars, making it an opening
day record for a technology company and the third largest IPO ever
launched on the New York Stock Exchange (Pepitone, 2012). Shortly
after its launch, Facebook shares lost a substantial amount of value as
a result of both financial irregularities in relation to the IPO itself and
continued doubts about how Facebook might be able to monetise its
vast resources, particularly on mobile phones that have little room for
advertising space. The enormous size of the initial financial invest-
ment Facebook’s IPO attracted, alongside continued interest in its
highly volatile share price, indicates the value that commercial enti-
ties and investors are placing on Facebook’s potential to understand
people’s social networking habits in the name of profit. The collection
of these habits as a whole is considered a resource of great value and
the exploitation of this resource is referred to as “data mining”. The
virtual world has become the site of the next “gold rush”, a land full
of data mines where speculators flock to exploit their potential value.
In the early days of the Internet during Web 1.0, brands hoping
to exploit the web for commerce frequently repeated the mantra
that “content is king”, a phrase meant to indicate that marketers
needed to prioritise their thinking on the online content they provided
in order to promote their brand, maximise interest in their products
xxvi INTRODUCTION

(by encouraging people to their websites), and, ultimately, increase

their sales. This focus on content is related to the nature of the Web
1.0 itself because of the static characteristics of its infrastructure. More
recently, with the development of Web 2.0, the key idea has shifted
from “content” to “engagement”, a shift that acknowledges that
providing good content is no longer enough: advertisers must now
engage their customers not only with their products, but with each
other about their products. This shift, in many ways, can be seen as
analogous to the shift in psychoanalytic theory from object relations
to relational psychoanalysis: a move from a subject relating to objects
to subjects relating to other subjects, in this case, across a digital
network. The shift of focus to engagement from content seems to indi-
cate that those who wish to utilise social media for commercial gain
are seeking to exploit the primary human motivation to relate to
others for their commercial purposes: a human motivation that
psychoanalysis has been occupied with for well over 100 years. Just
think of how early advertisers relied on Freud’s findings with regard
to sexuality by using sex to sell products. Today’s advertisers appear
to be keeping up with developments in psychoanalysis and have
moved on from using just sex to sell towards using personal relation-
ships to do exactly the same thing. Just as relational psychoanalysis
sits on top of its forbears in a holistic way by being inclusive of earlier
theories that are still seen to bring value, advertisers, too, have not
dropped using sex to sell, they have just added relationships to their
toolboxes.
Psychoanalysis has always preferred to focus on underlying
process, looking into the fundamentals of psychological engagement
rather than being consumed solely with the narrative content. For a
psychoanalyst, it is a novice’s error to be “taken in” by content at the
expense of process; a patient’s narrative content is not quite as impor-
tant as the way in which that narrative is deployed in the consulting
room by way of their process (transference, projection, etc.). The
analyst asks not only what the patient is saying, but at the same time
enquires into the way in which they are “engaged” in the therapeutic
relationship. The analyst is not just looking for the narrative that is
being consciously communicated, but also what is being communi-
cated unconsciously, communications that also effect change in the
other. Freud (1915e) notes, “it is a very remarkable thing that the Ucs
[system unconscious] of one human being can react up on that of
 INTRODUCTION xxvii

another” (p. 194). Outside the clinic (and online) these unconscious
communications are part and parcel of human relating: within the
consultation room, it is the very object of interest. The analyst uses
herself in a particular way to receive the unconscious intersubjective
communications from the patient; she then assimilates it and delivers
it back, enabling the patient to make it conscious for himself.
Interestingly, for our purposes, Freud (1912e) offers the metaphor of
the telephone in helping us to understand how unconscious-to-uncon-
scious communication operates:

[the analyst] must turn his unconscious like a receptive organ towards
the transmitting unconscious of the patient. He must adjust himself to
the patient as a telephone is adjusted to the transmitting microphone.
Just as the receiver converts back into sound wave the electronic oscil-
lations in the telephone line which were set up by sound waves, so the
doctor’s unconscious is able, from the derivatives of the unconscious
which are communicated to him, to reconstruct that unconscious,
which was delivered by the patient’s free associations. (pp. 115–116).

While the content of the narrative remains an important aspect of

the analysis, it is the unconscious motivation and relational dynamics
that interests the psychoanalyst and the “working through” of that
motivation that ultimately moves the therapy on. To carry on Freud’s
metaphor, the words that are conveyed over the telephone are impor-
tant, but it is the intention behind the words and why those words are
deployed that carry a further and more profound meaning. By under-
standing the process—the desire and motivations behind social
networking—do we really access not just the “what” but the “why” of
social networking? It seems to me that the vast amount of resources
that are currently going into working out how to utilise social net-
working data for commercial advantage is being developed at the
expense of using some of the same resources to enable us to under-
stand people better. Most worrying about this trajectory is the amount
of energy going into fostering brand loyalty among young people at
the expense of understanding young people themselves. Fortunately,
some researchers (e.g., Clarke (2009), boyd (2008), Turkle (2011), and
others) are doing some very exciting work in seeking to understand
engagement with SNSs beyond basic commercial aims. It is also worth
noting that the bulk of non-commercial psychological research into
social networking is not concerned with the meaning-making that
xxviii INTRODUCTION

has so interested psychodynamic therapists, but, rather, large-scale

studies of groups (frequently university undergraduates) to learn
about how online time is allocated, or to find correlations between
personality and social networking use. Where relevant, these studies
will be included and read with a psychodynamic eye.

Methodology: applied psychoanalysis

By applying principles of psychodynamic theory, I will be provoking
some questions about the processes that underlie the unconscious
motivations behind the way individuals engage with SNSs, that is, the
nature of what goes on in between the individual and the online social
network itself, as well as that which goes on in between those individu-
als engaged with each other as mediated by the social network. Turkle
(2011) opens her excellent book, Alone Together: Why We Expect More
from Technology and Less from Each Other, with a rather pithy, profound
quote, “Technology proposes itself as the architect of our intimacies”
(p. 1). This statement naturally provokes inquiries into the nature
of this architect, and how its mediation affects our intimate lives.
Language has long been the architect of our intimacies, and the
written word a tool of that architect. What technology has proposed
itself more as an architect to our intimacies than the love letter? Today,
how many young people receive their first love letter not on scented
wax-sealed paper, but, rather, in the form of a message over Facebook
chat, or a text on their mobile phone? Heartbreakingly, how many
intimate relationships are finished by way of text message or email?
Social media and other social technologies, such as those embedded
in smartphones, have become the new technologies of our intimacies.
In order to gain some purchase on the ways in which this technology
both mediates and structures our intimate and not-so-intimate inter-
actions, I will be applying psychodynamic theory in reading both
existing (non-psychoanalytic) research and analyses of publicly avail-
able cultural artefacts, such as news articles, blogs, and media com-
mentary. My approach in this text is not a comprehensive study in its
own right, but, rather, a thematic and psychodynamic interpretation
of the materials I have come across in researching this book.
Both relational psychoanalysis and contemporary qualitative
psychosocial research methodologies require a degree of reflexivity
 INTRODUCTION xxix

from the clinician or researcher. For both disciplines, this reflexivity

acknowledges the subjectivity of the analyst or researcher in the hope
that biases will be honestly apprehended while also acknowledging
that the presence of a human subject, be it a psychoanalyst or a
researcher, affects their patient in analysis or, indeed, those individu-
als or groups of individuals who are the subjects of research. In the
spirit of this reflexivity, I wish to declare that during the writing of
this book I have embedded myself in social media and have relied
heavily on it to acquire much of the data I have chosen to analyse. For
example, when I began to write this book I reluctantly set up a Twitter
account to “follow” many leading thinkers in the field and, through
this account, I have managed to collect a great deal of material to
analyse. Many people who have no experience of Twitter are unaware
that more than simply supplying snippets or fragments of minutiae,
tweets can contain links to research papers, blogs, articles, and a
whole raft of information, given that one takes care to follow the
appropriate people. My personal engagement in SNSs, and particu-
larly Twitter and Facebook, have given me a different perspective
compared to what I have frequently found to be a knee-jerk suspicion
in the psychoanalytic community about these platforms. Seligman
(2011), for example, states,

Web 2.0 seems to take what used to be called the ‘sound bite’ to a new
extreme, implying that you can represent yourself with a few words
and images and describe your status in a phrase that you can change
with a few keystrokes . . . or communicate what’s going on at the
moment in 147 [sic] characters or less. [p. 504]

With all due respect to Seligman, I have some doubts that he has
engaged across these platforms well enough to really know this to be
true. If he had, he would know that statuses are social and interactive
in nature and, as we shall see in this text, usually regulated and inter-
acted with by known others. Second, he would have known that while
Twitter may be used to communicate what is going on in a moment
(140 characters or less, not 147) it is also a multi-media platform in
which individuals communicate with others, share links to important
papers, make requests and have them kindly answered, among a
whole variety of other potential interpersonal and social experiences.
Without wholly putting oneself into the experience, it may be difficult
to fully understand it. Furthermore, as many psychoanalytic writers
xxx INTRODUCTION

are theorising from the position of their patients’ problematic relation-

ships with the virtual world, their opinions on the nature of the para-
digm as a whole may be somewhat skewed towards pathological
modelling
In addition to my Twitter profile, I also set up a public Facebook
page on social media research to collect both information and stories
about people’s social networking use, though this has been far less
successful4 and of less use to me than Twitter. Probably partly due to
this book, my own personal use of SNSs has increased, even though I
came to social networking rather later than many of those in my “real
world” social network, creating my first SNS profile (a private
Facebook page) at the end of March 2007 (or so my Facebook timeline
tells me). My previously casual engagement with social networking
has become clearly more intensive, something about which I have
been forced to become reflective. After the purchase of a smartphone,
my use of Twitter increased a great deal, at times approaching an
intensity of interest analogous to a compulsive quality. I have been
mindful of my own SNS use across the period of writing this book and
have kept process notes about it. Because of this experience, it might
be said that this research is somewhat ethnographic, and that I have
“gone native”. An ethnographic approach is one that has a focus on

an entire cultural group . . . typically it is large, involving many people

who interact over time . . . Ethnography is a qualitative design in
which the researcher describes and interprets the shared and learned
patterns of values, behaviours, beliefs and language of a culture-shar-
ing group. (Creswell, 2007, p. 68)

Traditional ethnographies are complex affairs and conducting ethnog-

raphy online brings with it its own set of problems. Kozinets (2010),
however, notes that desire to produce a “real” or “authentic” ethnog-
raphy is a misguided one. For Kozinets, ethnography is always cultur-
ally contingent, “there is no really real ethnography, no de facto
ethnography, no de facto perfect ethnography that would satisfy every
methodological purist” (p. 62). This text does not purport to be a tradi-
tional ethnography, but, as will be expanded upon in Chapter One, it
does use insights from the ethnographic tradition to help understand
what I believe to be happening across SNSs. After all, the inspiration
for writing this book emerged not from my engagement in SNSs, but
through a clinical experience I had that was provoked by a Google
 INTRODUCTION xxxi

search that will be discussed in detail in Chapter Two. Until the

moment that the Google search became clinically relevant, I had not
considered the platform to be replete with psychological meaning,
although I found to my surprise that it was. I have come to see that
some of the basic elements I discovered in coming to understand the
psychological meaning inherent in my clinical experience with Google
are equally implicated in SNSs, as they, too, are embedded in our
culture. It is the nature of the psychological role that this embedded-
ness enables in our culture that will be the focus of this book.

It’s more about the why than the what

Above, I asked why a discipline that emerged in the nineteenth cen-
tury might be helpful to us in our thoroughly modern age of intense
technological change. Turkle (2004) notes that it is fashionable to see the
start of the new millennium as the end of the Freudian century and
the start of the computer culture; this, she argues, is wrong:

We must cultivate the richest possible language and methodologies

for talking about our increasingly emotional relationships with [inter-
active digital] artefacts. We need far closer examination of how arte-
facts enter the development of self and mediate between self and
other. Psychoanalysis provides a rich language for distinguishing
between need (something that artefacts may have) and desire (which
resides in the conjunction of language and flesh). It provides a rich
language for exploring the specificity of human meanings in their
connection to the body. (p. 29)

One of the primary dynamics I will be investigating throughout

this text is the role that social networking has in the way contempo-
rary users come to understand themselves and others through the
media of online social networking: I wish to use the rich language of
psychoanalysis to do so. Underlying the entire text will be the ques-
tion that everyone seems to be asking these days: “Is the development
of what has come to be called ‘Web 2.0’ and similar technologies (such
as smartphones and tablets) changing us in some fundamental way,
or are they simply novel technological platforms through which the
same old psychological traits express themselves through a different
medium?”
xxxii INTRODUCTION

Although this is a question that it may be too early to answer with

confidence, indications do seem to be leaning towards the “yes it is
changing us” side of the equation. Naughton (2012a), reflecting on his
two and a half decades of writing, thinking, and lecturing on the
Internet, notes that

our society has become critically dependent on a technology that is

poorly understood, not just by its users, but also by people (like
government ministers) who are in a position to make decisions about
how it should be regulated and controlled. (pp. 10–11)

Morozov (2011) has a similar concern,

The Internet does matter, but we simply don’t know how it matters.
This fact, paradoxically, only makes it matter even more: The costs of
getting it wrong are tremendous . . . [the Internet] can never be really
understood outside the context in which it manifests itself. (p. 30)

Engaging deeply within the context of the Internet with regard to

social networking and the meta-phenomena that come with it is a
stated aim of this book. The question of the empirical effects that
SNSs, the Internet, and other technologies in general have on our
brains and behaviour are currently being widely undertaken.
Although these studies will not be the central focus of this text, such
findings will be addressed where relevant. Those studies that do look
at brain response and behaviour have emerged in response to the
ubiquitous nature of online engagement that is unprecedented among
both adults and young people. There is undoubtedly something very
compelling about social networking that is simply evidenced in the
fact that it has achieved the rapid growth and population penetration
that we see today. When a psychoanalyst thinks about “something
compelling”, as a rule she is likely to be thinking about motivation:
that which unconsciously compels. Whether referring back to Freud’s
notion of “libido” or “drive,” Fairbairn’s “object seeking”, or Bowlby’s
interest in “attachment”, all are concerned with what unconsciously
motivates human desire and behaviour and, secondarily, the mean-
ing-making that is built atop these same unconscious motivations. The
details of this more precise conceptual approach will be covered in
Chapter One, as will the details of the nature of such an application of
these concepts outside the clinical situation. The transfer of psycho-
 INTRODUCTION xxxiii

dynamic applications from within the clinical situation to outside of it

is an important development in researching social systems; the func-
tioning and understanding of the intersubjective relationship as it is
enacted unconsciously is central to both clinical psychotherapy and
social research. In this sense my psychodynamic approach is essen-
tially relational in nature, guided by the principle that human motiva-
tion is profoundly relational in nature: that our need to relate to one
another is fundamental.
From the relational perspective, relating to each other is not just
what motivates us from birth, but it continues to be the site of our
challenges, pathologies, repetitions, and delights throughout the rest
of our lives. Our histories strongly influence the ways in which we
relate to each other in adult life, and relating to each other (whether
with families, lovers, colleagues, or friends, or, more recently, our
“friends” on Facebook or “followers” on Twitter) can both challenge
and satisfy us like nothing else. The recent development of the social
network which offers new technologies through which relating is
mediated is a vast new world in which the way we make meaning of
our relationships can be explored.
When we consider the compound term “social networking” itself,
we can see that its construction contains both the basic elements of
relating and technology; the technology is the “network” and the
social is the human motivation that deploys the technology to this
end. We are using the technology as a medium to relate, and that is
why psychoanalysis can be utilised to understand the underlying
processes informing this relating, and the potential consequences of it:
both positive and negative. These consequences include the changing
nature of privacy, the evolving concept of a “friend”, the functioning
of our online reputations and the permanence of our data trails, the
ease and instantaneous nature of our communications across vast
distances, the ease, too, of the replicability of anything that goes
online, the lack of human-to-human feedback in contemporary online
conversations (e.g., our growing reliance on text messaging, SNS post-
ing, and Microsoft messaging (MSM) or Blackberry data services),
among many others. Each of these “natures” are separate, though they
operate alongside each other, overlapping and eventually multiplying
the effects synergistically, resulting in a series of complex effects on
our expectations, communication styles, relational styles, and even
our identities. While the consequences of each technological medium
xxxiv INTRODUCTION

has a different effect on us (e.g., Twitter tends to offer quicker, more

immediate experience than Facebook), all of these media exist in a
soup of “always on” potentialities, and it is the immersion within this
soup that will also be addressed.
I will not delay offering conclusions until the end. By stating them
up front it will be easier to demonstrate the thesis throughout: that the
underlying motivation to relate (online and in “real life”) is the desire
for recognition. As we will see in Chapter One, this is already an
axiomatic position that relational psychoanalysis has come to take in
its understanding of both the psychoanalytic clinical endeavour and
its application in other fields. The variety of recognition that is sought,
however, is what might be called “authentic recognition”, and there
are a series of developmental obstacles affecting the ability both to
accept and to give such recognition. I suggest here that the medium
of online relating complicates this process even further.
The core angle from which I write this text is as a psychotherapist
who, in his daily life, in both the consulting room and outside of it,
has encountered the dynamics of social networking as they affect my
clients, those around me, and myself. While those in my field have
historically taken a case history methodology (Midgely, 2006), with
the exception of the small case vignette in Chapter Two, I will not be
taking such an approach, both for issues of confidentiality, and the
nature of the possibility of skewing the findings towards a patholog-
ical angle, as noted above. While a case study approach may still be
helpful for mental health clinicians working with individuals who are
having a problematic relationship with the Internet, and social
networking in particular, my goal in this text is a broader one: that is,
to utilise the insight that a psychodynamic approach can provide and
apply it to culture outside the consulting room. While the language I
use may be clinically derived, this is not a text about the clinical “treat-
ment” of disorders associated with the online world. It was, indeed,
the event that occurred within my own consulting room that I
describe in Chapter Two that inspired this book in the first place, an
event that showed me how the clinical situation can be used to under-
stand the psychodynamics that are also occurring outside it. Hence,
Chapter One will be the most highly theoretical chapter, setting out
the major concepts from a relational psychodynamic perspective that
will be applied throughout this book. These foundational concepts
will be built upon throughout the text.
 INTRODUCTION xxxv

With the theoretical basis in place, Chapter Two will offer the first
application of theory by way of a clinical event from my own practice
that was provoked by a Google search. Chapter Three will explore
what I call “the matrix”, that is, the ubiquity of social technologies in
our everyday life. Chapter Four will examine the dangers in which
objectification plays a central role in online relating, while Chapter
Five will contrarily discuss how “being in the mind of the other” is an
essential aspect of intersubjective online relating. Chapter Six will
consider the broader questions of how the nature of the online world
can affect the experience of identity. This will be followed by some
conclusions, reflections, and suggestions for future research.
I wish to close this introduction with an acknowledgement that
this is not a text that aims, at the end, to proclaim today’s technology
as a great good or a great evil. In fact, I very much seek to avoid this
kind of dichotomous judgement as much as I can. Coming across the
research and social commentary, one constantly runs into what can
broadly be called optimistic (and even utopian) perspectives and
pessimistic (or dystopian) ways of looking at the continued develop-
ment of the influence of Internet technology on our society. Naughton
(2012a) notes,

The problem with the optimist–pessimist dichotomy is that the opti-

mists rarely address the reality of destruction [of the old ways] while
the pessimists rarely acknowledge the creative possibilities of the new.
We need to transcend this shouting match. (p. 182)

Another word for Naughton’s “shouting match” would be dialectic: a

concept with which psychoanalysis is quite familiar. It is the difficult
but necessary job of the psychoanalyst to hold the dialectic, and this
is what I shall seek to do throughout. Lanier (2011), in his book You
are not a Gadget, alerts the reader early on that he is writing this book
for humans, not computers. He wishes to make it abundantly clear
that his book “is not antitechnology in any sense. It is pro-human”
(p. ix). To this I say, “hear! hear!”
CHAPTER TITLE 1

CHAPTER ONE

Psychodynamics

“No man, for any considerable period, can wear one face to
himself and another to the multitude, without finally getting
bewildered as to which may be the true”
(Hawthorne, 1850)

his chapter will set out the main underlying psychodynamic

T principles that I propose are operating within the intersubjec-

tive system of online relating. I open the chapter by discussing
how psychodynamic concepts may be deployed outside the clinic to
gain insight into unconscious relational processes, before going into
the main psychodynamic paradigm of relational psychoanalysis. This
will be the most theoretically dense chapter of the entire book, as it
lays out the conceptual basis for further developments of theory and
the applications to social networking that will follow. The main aim
of the chapter is to provide an overarching lens through which one
can apprehend online interpersonal interaction from a relational
psychodynamic perspective.

1
2 THE PSYCHODYNAMICS OF SOCIAL NETWORKING

Psychodynamic applications outside the clinic

Psychoanalysis developed from within the clinical situation. It was
Freud’s observations with individual patients that provided the initial
scaffold for the theory of psychoanalysis that was revised and worked
over again and again in the light of new experiences and new evi-
dence. No doubt theoretical dogmatism often obscured new possibil-
ities and prevented fresh thought, ultimately creating a constellation
of schools of psychoanalysis rather than a single theory undergoing
successive revisions. However, the ideal of learning from clinical ex-
perience remained. Historically, applying the scientific method to
psychoanalysis has been problematic, notably because the object of
enquiry, the unconscious, is elusive to empirical observation. This,
however, does not release psychoanalysis from the duty to offer evi-
dence of its efficacy as both a treatment and a theory. Dreher (2000)
addresses the problematic nature of putting the same nomothetic and
quantitative tools so popular in social and empirical methods to use
in psychoanalytic research. Dreher suggests an alternative to conven-
tional research methods for psychoanalysis in which a conceptual
approach may be preferred. That is:

a class of research activities, the focus of which lies in the systematic

clarification of psychoanalytic concepts . . . such research is both about
the history of concepts, so as to trace a concept’s origin and develop-
ment, and equally about the current use of a concept, its clarification,
and its differentiation. (Dreher, 2000, pp. 3–4)

She then notes that conceptual psychoanalytic research such as this is

a constructive as well as a critical tool.
Psychoanalysis has a long history as a constructive and critical
tool, not only in the clinical situation, but also as a cultural applica-
tion, beginning with Freud’s (admittedly often problematic) readings
of cultural influences, including literature (Freud, 1907a), art (Freud,
1910c, 1914b), and religion (Freud, 1939a).
Nowadays, psychoanalytic conceptual research is being applied
more and more in the development of qualitative research methodol-
ogies (Frosh, 2010; Hollway & Jefferson, 2010) in sociology, anthropol-
ogy, and other social research applications. Frosh (2010), in particular,
is interested in how a discipline such as psychoanalysis, which
emerged from the very particular nature of the clinical encounter, can
 PSYCHODYNAMICS 3

be utilised outside that rarefied space that is the psychoanalyst’s

consulting room. Frosh poignantly wonders what happens when
psychoanalysis is taken out of the clinic and asks whether it would
still be considered “psychoanalysis”. For extra-clinical material, Frosh
maintains, with some reservations, that psychoanalysis

offers a distinctive and productive approach to interpreting human

actions, social phenomena and cultural products ‘outside’ the clinic. If
the theoretical constructs generated inside the clinic by psychoanalysis
have any robustness, why should they not be at least suggestive aids
to comprehension of complex events that in their unexpectedness or
emotional intensity seem to show the traces of the unconscious?
(Frosh, 2010, p. 4)

With respect to the psychodynamics of social networking, we will

indeed be utilising psychoanalytic theory to aid us in the “compre-
hension of complex events” that seem to be occurring at the nexus
between the medium of social networking (that is the SNSs them-
selves) and what might be unconsciously motivating those of us who
use them.
The aim, then, is to read the phenomenon of social networking
psychoanalytically, outside the clinical context, and within the larger
socio-cultural sphere. This approach examines social networks them-
selves, inclusive of their cultural epiphenomena: the profusion of
“talk” in the media about social media, which is itself distributed and
promulgated over social networks. Previous psychological and quan-
titative research in the field of social networking will naturally
be incorporated, making this work, in a sense, a meta-analysis. How-
ever, rather than seeking to create a conventional quantitative meta-
analysis, described as “a statistical procedure which brings together
findings from similar studies to estimate overall effects” (Cooper,
2008, p. 22), this approach will utilise existing studies by focusing a
psychoanalytic lens upon them in order to interpretatively deduce
psychoanalytically relational themes that may be present, both explic-
itly and implicitly embedded in the research.
As outlined in the introduction, this is not meant to be a compre-
hensive piece of research in its own right (I have carried out no new
empirical research in the preparation for this book) but, rather, an
interpretation of the existing research, cultural artefacts, and an ethno-
graphically influenced reading of the state of social media and the self.
4 THE PSYCHODYNAMICS OF SOCIAL NETWORKING

In relation to the research applications of psychoanalysis as delineated

by Hollway and Jefferson (2010), researcher subjectivity is a crucial
tool in bringing understanding to material in which observation
among human subjects plays a major role. The psychoanalytic
encounter has long taken the effect of countertransference, that is, the
feelings that an analyst has in relation to their patient, as an important
source of information about the patient’s internal world as picked up
within the unconscious person-to-person communication between
analyst and patient (Heimann, 1950; Maroda, 2004). Countertransfer-
ence, in particular, is noted as one of the ways in which “the psycho-
analytic principle of unconscious intersubjectivity [can be used] to
theorize the effect of research relationship(s) on the production and
analysis of data” (Hollway & Jefferson, 2010, p. 151). Countertrans-
ference from the clinic to application outside the clinic is, however,
not simply a transferable skill. Frosh (2010), for instance, is cautious
about how its clinical use can be applied outside the clinical setting:

the practice Hollway and Jefferson describe is in some important

respects significantly different from the kind of exploration of uncon-
scious material characteristic of psychoanalytic reflection on the coun-
tertransference in the clinical situation. What the researchers do is
notice how a participant made them feel . . . without the necessary
limitations of the analytic session and contract which would allow one
to understand the validity of this response. (p. 214)

Psychodynamic therapists are trained over several years to work

with countertransference and have had the opportunity to work
through their own unconscious material through a long commitment
to their own psychotherapy, which is something few, if any, qualita-
tive researchers will be required to do; even so, working through what
material is transference, countertransference, or to what degree they
are co-created is a notoriously difficult task, even for the experienced
clinician. Despite all these caveats, however, I would stress that the
dynamics that are occurring are identical in all human-to-human
interactional settings; it is the nature of how they are provoked and
worked with that limits the important differences: both contexts are
mutually co-constructive in nature. I agree with Frosh’s concern about
the direct application of a psychoanalytic process to other kinds of
research. However, I also agree with Hollway and Jefferson that
thoughtful subjectivity can be utilised in ways that enhance meaning,
 PSYCHODYNAMICS 5

or, at the very least, reveal researcher bias. Although I will not be
taking a countertransference approach to my analysis here, I will be
using psychoanalytic language to try to understand the online inter-
action and relational dynamics I believe to be occurring there. Mostly,
however, I will be applying a version of the conceptual approach
described by Dreher (2000), above. Notably, as mentioned in the intro-
duction, I have found it important to immerse myself in SNS use
throughout this process as a way to have a fully subjective experience
of that which I am analysing here.
This is undoubtedly an unconventional methodology, and, by util-
ising it, I accept that I may be opening myself up to criticisms of being
overly speculative in my approach. If this is the charge, then I accept
it. Large-scale quantitative studies, as useful as they are, do not offer
us much insight into the idiographic nature of an individual’s psycho-
logical motivations, meaning-making, and phenomenologically sub-
jective experiences. They do, however, offer tantalising clues as to
what might be going on for individuals and in between individuals on
a personal and interpersonal level. A critical psychoanalytic approach
to this existing research offers a degree of flexibility and freedom to
open up new ways of working through this complex material, provid-
ing a kind of insight that is not available by other means. It is here that
a psychoanalytic methodology offers something new and exciting
because it contains within it an interpretative approach that aims to
access not just what can be witnessed and collected with hard quanti-
tative data, but also allows access to the dynamics that operate under
the level of consciousness. While any reader or fellow researcher
ought to be wary of unbridled supposition, a degree of speculative
freedom (particularly with reference to the unconscious) is necessary
to free a flexible and creative approach required to address this issue
from a psychoanalytic point of view. Freud (1900a), in his pioneering
work The Interpretation of Dreams, notes that “[we psychoanalysts] are
justified . . . in giving free reign to our speculations so long as we
retain the coolness of our judgement and do not mistake the scaffold-
ing for the building” (p. 536). Freud, no doubt, can be criticised for
having, on several occasions, mistaken the scaffolding for the build-
ing; however, he unmistakably cracked open a new way of thinking
about the human psyche in ways that continue to resonate to this
day. My aim throughout this work is to demonstrate as much as
possible the theoretical connections I will be making in an endeavour
6 THE PSYCHODYNAMICS OF SOCIAL NETWORKING

to maintain transparency and clarity; while I aim to be describing the

building, I hope to provide enough evidence to allow the reader the
opportunity to judge for themselves when the scaffolding is obscur-
ing the edifice itself. It is my hope to provide a psychoanalytic frame-
work in which to approach online social networks that further
research may need to amend, adapt, criticise, and refine for further
study in the future. Furthermore, it is my hope that this book will
encourage more qualitative research into this interesting area.
Throughout this text, theory will be illustrated time and again with
existing material to ground the theoretical thinking within the data; to
put it in the vernacular of a poker player, I hope to show my hand at
all times.

Context
While the phenomenon of social networking is of great interest to a
variety of psychological and sociological researchers, it is most heav-
ily researched by those with a commercial interest in the domains of
brand development and marketing research. The vast majority of the
material I encountered in my research for this book made little refer-
ence to psychodynamics outside of the odd journal article or book
chapter and the significant exception of Turkle’s (2011) work, which
has been highly influential, and a special edition of the Psychoanalytic
Review published in 2007—by social media standards, already far out
of date. Malater (2007a), in his introduction to the special issue of the
Psychoanalytic Review lays out the challenges that the Internet offers to
psychoanalysis:

we find very different ideas on the extant to which cyberculture

should be seen as posing basic challenges to current psychoanalytic
thought and practice. Some authors ask what psychoanalysis can
make of the Internet, while others ask what the Internet has made and
will continue to make of psychoanalysis. (p. 4)

This notion that psychoanalysis needs to respond to, and be respon-

sive of, developments in technology is an important one, but this is a
challenge that psychoanalysis as a whole has been reluctant to take
up. This text will be more concerned with what psychoanalysis can
offer to the understanding of online social networking than the other
 PSYCHODYNAMICS 7

way round. Mental health professionals, and particularly the talking

therapies, must also develop strategies with regard to both theory and
practice to meet the particular challenges their clients are facing in
relation to the online world.
In the context of the overwhelming presence that SNSs have in the
life of contemporary individuals, it is hardly surprising that the major-
ity of resources going into social networking research comes from the
commercial sector, a sector that is naturally interested in utilising the
enormous amount of data currently available for the purposes of
maximising profit. This undoubtedly raises many questions about the
potential for the exploitation of people as consuming objects, with
commensurate concerns for privacy and social control.5 As if these
concerns were not important enough to consider with regard to rela-
tively market-savvy adults, there is further concern for children and
young people. Fortunately, not all of the research interest in children’s
SNS use is limited to seeing them as current and future consumers.
Psychologists and sociologists are drawn to studying children to see
what kind of differences may be observable in the these young people,
referred to as “Digital Natives” by Palfrey and Gasser (2008), who
have grown up saturated within an environment of online social
networking. Technological divides that cross generational thresholds
have always provoked concerns in the older generation, and online
social networking is no different. It is through research, however, and
not knee-jerk emotional reactions to what we do not understand, that
will lead us towards a clearer understanding of what is actually going
on. For younger people, current research appears to be mixed in its
conclusions about the health- or pathology-giving qualities of SNSs.
This is probably due to the complexity of online social networking
and the difficulty of designing research to accurately reflect what is
going on. Furthermore, due to its complexity, it is fair to assume at
this stage that different sorts of engagements with different aspects of
SNSs will dictate to a large degree how healthy or unhealthy the
engagement is, making overall statements about the value of online
relating unhelpful. Clarke’s (2009) work demonstrates the ways in
which technology has the capacity to enhance creativity and identity
development in young people:

Emerging identity is an important aspect of early adolescent develop-

ment, and in our existing digital culture children have an immense
8 THE PSYCHODYNAMICS OF SOCIAL NETWORKING

opportunity to explore their world, be creative, play with identity and

experiment with different social mores. Using SNSs is not only enter-
taining for children, but also highly creative and allows them to assert
their identity in a totally unique way, checking out what their friends
think of their creative endeavours. (p. 74)

Clarke’s research has demonstrated many of the positive qualities

that SNSs have for young people, a finding that runs contrary to the
fearful beliefs that many born after the digital revolution, those whom
Palfrey and Gasser (2008) term “Digital Immigrants”, hold about the
internet use of the generations below them. Contrarily, Seligman
(2009) notes that although there is much more research to be done
with regard to the relationship between online social connection and
physical health (morbidity and mortality), he, none the less, cate-
gorises our growing reliance on virtual socialising as a growing public
health problem, particularly for young people. Summarising the work
of Kraut et al. (1998) on the effect of Internet use in families, Seligman
states that:

greater use of the internet was associated with declines in communi-

cation between family members in the house, declines in the size of
their social circle, and increases in their levels of depression and lone-
liness . . . Children are now experiencing less social interaction and
have fewer social connections during key stages of their physiological,
emotional and social development. (p. 19)

It is important to note the date of this study, which was carried

about before Web 2.0 really came into force, meaning that the nature of
the ease of relationality within the Internet had not yet developed to
what it is today. On the other hand, the recent proliferation of tablets
and smartphones (which will be addressed in Chapter Three) that
have emerged since this research has taken place is likely to negatively
affect family life, if only through the sheer constant distraction (and
here I am referring to parents even more so than their children) they
offer, which can get in the way of face-to-face relating. With the
phenomenon of social networking technologies being at the same time
so vast, so new, and so rapidly changing, competing conclusions about
its health or pathology (mental, emotional, and physical) continues to
be contradictory and research into it fraught with difficulty.
 PSYCHODYNAMICS 9

Taking a process-orientated approach offers us a fresh point of

view and provides an alternative perspective in the examination of
unconscious human motivation and online social networking.
Psychotherapists have long known that, with the exception of behav-
iours that are a danger to the self and/or others, behaviour alone is
not necessarily indicative of health or pathology: it is how that behav-
iour manifests itself within the overall experience and meaning-
making of that individual. A helpful metaphor to enable us to
understand the relation between behaviour and the online social
network would be to think about behaviour and its relation to food.
Food is necessary for life, while, at the same time, it is imbued with
individual and cultural meaning. Food surrounds us and it is funda-
mentally plugged into everyday human experience and motivation:
from sating our basic biological needs to offering itself up as a symbol
of our connection to the earth, each other, and, for some, spirituality.
Given its ubiquity and necessity, one could not say that eating is itself
a healthy or pathological behaviour; it is the manner, purpose, and
meaning of the eating that becomes the locus of interest into its health
or pathology (Orbach, 2002, 2006). There is a wide range of behaviours
in what could be construed as “healthy” eating or “unhealthy” eating.
While some behaviours, such as bingeing/purging and starving
oneself are clearly indicative of mental and emotional suffering,6 the
myriad of relationships one might have with food require both a
phenomenological report from the eater, along with some degree of
interpretation to understand its underlying meaning. Orbach (2006),
for example, advocates developing a fully emotional and bodily
knowledge of an individual’s relationship with food so one can make
profound, honest, and integrated decisions about what one’s needs
are in relation to the consumption of his or her food towards a state
of “intuitive eating”; an analogous method could be applied with
regard to online engagement. Thinking in this way releases us from a
dialectical good/bad relationship (in which impossible “diets” are
taken on) and impels a more profound engagement composed of
thoughtfully received signals from the mind and body. For example,
while most fast food constitutes “bad nutrition”, we would not
condemn an individual who sometimes enjoys it as displaying a sign
of poor mental health. Its lack of nutrition does not make fast food
inherently bad, although as a society we must manage the conse-
quences of its ease, inexpensiveness, and ubiquity (Lustig, 2012). The
10 THE PSYCHODYNAMICS OF SOCIAL NETWORKING

way in which online social networking is consumed can be based on

similar principles. If we understand that interpersonal relating itself is
a form of “food” in the sense of how nourishing it might be, then we
can try to comprehend, phenomenologically, how its users consume it
before coming to snap judgements about its health or pathology.
Online social networking is often charged as being the “fast food” of
interpersonal relating, and there is little doubt that it shares many of
these qualities and is often used as such. However, to simply conclude
that online relating is fast food, and therefore unhealthy, is to
conclude without proper evaluation. Interpersonal relating is, for
psychoanalysis, a crucial locus of psychological and emotional health
and well being; relational templates from infanthood and youth are
played out in adult attachment in gripping patterns that can last for a
lifetime. Relational pathology existed long before social networks, but
as social networking is becoming the site of so much interpersonal
relating, it has become a new locus of interest for psychoanalysis.

Object relations

While the central theoretical axis of this text is relational, it is impor-

tant to say something about the psychoanalytic school of object rela-
tions, which, as briefly outlined in the introduction, preceded rela-
tional theory and continues to take an important role in the relational
perspective of the psyche. Put very briefly,7 object relations theory
moved away from Freud’s drive theory (or libido theory), which was
primarily interested in the individual as a repository of strong inher-
ent drives (instincts) that sought release; the “object” was the thing
that could provide the satisfaction of that drive (or need). The object,
however, could be infinitely variable:

it may be an external object, someone in the person’s immediate circle

for example, or part of the subject’s own body. In general, the object is
incidental – it is not specific to any given instance and can easily be
replaced. (Quinodoz, 2004, p. 137)

While the term “object” later came primarily to represent people

or parts of people, the terminology itself comes from this period
in Freud’s theorising, epitomised in his essay “Instincts and their
 PSYCHODYNAMICS 11

vicissitudes” (1915c). Melanie Klein, a psychoanalyst seen to sit

between classical Freudian theory and the development of the object
relations school (Hinshelwood, 1991), shifted focus towards how these
objects in the external world, to which the subject is so drawn, become
important parts of the internal world as “internal objects” through the
process of introjection. These theories were further developed by
British psychoanalysts Fairbairn, Winnicott, and Bion, who, though
going in rather different directions with the theories of the object, are
generally grouped together under the broad title of the British School
of Object Relations.
These theorists, in their own idiosyncratic ways, describe a system
in which the process of introjection brings objects from the external
world into the rich phantasy world of the unconscious of the subject.
These internal objects then form relationships with each other and the
ego itself within the individual (hence the phrase “object relations”) in
which

The experience of the internal object is deeply dependent on the expe-

rience of the external object – and internal objects are, as it were,
mirrors of reality. But they also contribute significantly, through
projection, to the way the external objects are themselves perceived
and experienced. (Hinshelwood, 1991, p. 68)

In this context, the nature of the internal objects as they influence the
external world becomes the focus of analytic investigation. These
internal objects affects the transference to others, that is, the internal
objects as experienced by the subject may be projected on to others so
that the other is perceived by the subject in the same way as an earlier
relationship (e.g., an individual might see their boss as their persecut-
ing father or abandoning mother). Taking this context as axiomatic,
object relations therapy works by seeking to understand

the role that internal object relations play in the creation and mainte-
nance of those [external] relationships . . . The therapist–client rela-
tionship consequently would be viewed as an in-vivo expression of
what is pathological about the patient’s life. (Cashdan, 1988, p. 28)

In other words, the object relations therapist seeks to understand how

the internal relational world comes to affect the external relational
world of the patient: how the patient perceives others through the
12 THE PSYCHODYNAMICS OF SOCIAL NETWORKING

relational matrix of their own unconscious mind. The analyst can do

this by analysing the transference, that is, by understanding how the
patient responds to the analyst herself she can get some idea of what
may be happening in the unconscious object relational world. As we
will see, the relational perspective takes this one step further by
asking how the analyst’s subjectivity is contributing to the relational
structure as well. However, the purely intrapsychic world of the
subject remains an important part of the puzzle. Particularly, when we
are discussing an individual’s relationship to their online world, inter-
nal object relations will be at play, arguably more so than they are in
face-to-face relating, because there is less relational feedback. As
Lingiardi (2011) has pointed out, online life may be a very particular
activity that allows for exploration of these processes:

Online life can facilitate nonlinear experiences capable of generating

states of the mind and self organizations distinct from those we expe-
rience in our off-line life. Computer-mediated communication can
facilitate the exploration of aspects of our psychic functioning that,
without this facilitation, could remain inaccessible or encapsulated in
social prescriptions . . . Although some may well get lost in Reality 2.0,
others can navigate in areas of self that they would never have
allowed themselves to explore otherwise. (p. 493)

A psychodynamic approach can, no doubt, be utilised to enable

closer understanding of this psychic functioning. The relational
approach enables both the intrapsychic (what is going on inside one
psyche) and the intersubjective (what is going on between psyches)
perspectives to be acknowledged at once.

Relational psychoanalysis
In addition to being an heir to the object relations tradition, relational
psychoanalysis further developed out of influences from outside the
field, including disciplines such as critical theory and postmodern
discourses that challenge psychoanalytic authority and epistemology,
thereby deconstructing the assumed power of the psychoanalyst
within the clinical setting. The process of the mutualisation of power
dynamics within the clinical setting began to question how much the
psychoanalyst’s own object relations were present in the consulting
 PSYCHODYNAMICS 13

room and affecting the therapy, producing what came to be under-

stood as a co-created and intersubjective therapeutic space. Although
relational psychoanalysis shares a set of common perspectives around
the issue of intersubjectivity, it is neither a unified theory nor a new
school of psychoanalysis: “[i]t lies on a level of abstraction different
from any theory, it is, rather, a metatheory, a framework or schema
that proves the necessary structure with which to go on building
coherent and comprehensive . . . theories” (Aron & Harris, 2005,
p. xviii). The diversity of the relational community offers a great deal
to the theorist hoping to apply psychoanalytic thinking to extra-clini-
cal cultural artefacts because it is, by its nature, inter-disciplinary and
makes itself available to such applications. With its theoretical roots
firmly in object relations (alongside influences from self psychology,
interpersonal psychoanalysis, continental philosophy, feminism, and
identity politics) the relational perspective is fundamentally organised
around the principle of intersubjectivity. Aron (1996) describes this as
a shift from a “one person psychology” paradigm where, in the clini-
cal situation, the patient is the only psychology (or psyche) in the
room (to whom the analyst becomes the neutral object) to a “two per-
son psychology” paradigm in which both analyst and patient are seen
as two fully vital subjects with their own psychologies which interact
in the relational matrix, forever co-constructing each other. Hence,
transference, classically seen as the projection of previous relation-
ships on to the object of the neutral analyst is, from the relational
perspective, seen as mutually co-created in the analytic encounter in
response to the analyst as subject: the analyst is fully implicated
within it. The distinction between one- and two-person psychologies
can also be termed as that which lies between the intrapsychic and
intersubjective domains. Benjamin (1988) contrasts the intrapsychic as
that “which conceives of the person as a discrete unit with a complex
internal structure” to the intersubjective which “describes capacities
that emerge in the interaction between self and others” (p. 20). While
the intersubjective view is inclusive of the intrapsychic domains of its
individuals, it maintains that

the individual grows in and through the relationship to other subjects.

Most important, this perspective observes that the other whom the self
meets is also a self, a subject in his or her own right. It assumes that
we are able and need to recognize that other subject as different and
14 THE PSYCHODYNAMICS OF SOCIAL NETWORKING

yet alike, as an other who is capable of sharing similar mental experi-

ence. Thus the idea of intersubjectivity reorients the conception of the
psychic world from a subject’s relations to its object toward a subject
meeting another subject. (Benjamin, 1988, pp. 19–20)

In other words, the crux of relational theory is the nature of what

happens between subjects; a perspective that is absolutely crucial to
online social networking because it is mediating so much subject-to-
subject relating. This intersubjective point of view runs in contrast to
classical psychoanalytic theory that was primarily interested in
intrapsychic phenomena, both from a developmental perspective
(how an infant developed as a subject in relation to “the mother”,
usually conceptualised as an object) and clinically (how the patient-as-
subject orientates herself to the analyst as object8). The model of the
intrapsychic and intersubjective is useful in understanding how an
individual might interact with an online social network, an interaction
(like any other) that necessarily involves and provokes both of these
operations. From this perspective, the subject is no longer perceived
as being located within a completely cohesive being in isolation;
rather, he exists both internally (intrapsychically) and between
himself and another; in many ways, he can only experience himself as
existing in this in-between space. In other words, “Mind has been rede-
fined from a set of predetermined structures emerging from inside an indi-
vidual organism to transactional patterns and internal structures derived
from an interactive interpersonal field” (Mitchell, 1988, p. 17, original ital-
ics). In our online world, in which an individual is alone interfacing
with a computer screen, though in constant interaction with others
that are “out there” also interacting alone with computer screens, this
approach seems right on the money.

The true self, the false self, and the persona 9

In the relational paradigm, we conceive of the intrapsychic apparatus
as always operating within the larger relational matrix: what also
might be called intersubjective space. The British psychoanalyst
Winnicott occupies a historically influential place in the development
of relational theory, though relational theory as a discipline and appel-
lation only developed after his death in 1971. His work in the British
 PSYCHODYNAMICS 15

object relations tradition has come to be seen, with hindsight, as funda-

mentally relational in nature. Winnicott’s (1964) axiom that “there is no
such thing as an infant” is designed to indicate that the infant does not
exist outside its relationship with its mother.10 For Winnicott, the
psychological success of this infant is dependent upon good-enough
mothering and an appropriate facilitating environment.11 One of the
most important components of the facilitating environment is what
Winnicott (1960) refers to as “holding”, which will be crucial in the
development of the infant’s subjectivity. Holding represents both the
literal physical holding of the infant alongside the psychological and
emotional holding by the primary care-taker, but, more specifically, “.
. . it refers to a three-dimensional or space relationship with time grad-
ually added” (Winnicott, 1960, p. 589). The holding phase allows for
the ego to integrate and differentiate others from the self; it is the
beginning of a cohesive selfhood and intelligence, and “the beginning
of a mind as something distinct from the psyche . . . symbolic func-
tioning, and of the organization of a personal psychic content
[personal narrative], which forms a basis for dreaming and for living
relationships” (p. 590). This shift during the holding phase is closely
bound up with the infant’s change from being merged with the mother
to being separate from her, or to relating to her as separate and “not-
me”; the infant begins to experience integration, but also regresses
back to disintegration during moments of stress.
As we progress, we can see how this holding environment is
replicated in online relating in a way that can also provoke feelings of
integration and disintegration, dependent on feelings of being recog-
nised or misrecognised or, as we shall see, in relation to presentations
of the false or true self across the network. Winnicott’s deeply inter-
subjective approach can be contrasted to Freud’s perspectives on
psychic development, which are much more focused on the infant’s
internal world, largely excluding the real others that will have influ-
enced that infant/adult. From this tradition, the earliest intrapsychic
models of the personality continue to be Freud’s tripartite model of
the id, ego, and superego. This model still remains a useful shorthand
in referring to the passions/instincts (id), the agency that operates
between the internal and external worlds (ego), and that which
observes and judges these interactions (superego).
Winnicott’s (1956) development of the false self and Jung’s
(1966) alternative but related concept of the persona are models of
16 THE PSYCHODYNAMICS OF SOCIAL NETWORKING

intrapsychic operation that broadly rest upon Freud’s original model

of the tripartite psyche. Although they are from divergent schools of
psychoanalysis, they have a lot in common. Both persona and false
self can be described as ego functions, as they both lie between inter-
nal experience (intrapsychic) and the outside world (intersubjective);
hence, they can both be conceived as “relational” because they
develop for the purpose of managing the space between self and
other. Samuels (2013) notes that Jung’s work on alchemy reflects a
Jungian position that is profoundly relational in nature, “it is like a
chemical combination . . . two or more substances are mixed and their
natures are transformed and a new third thing is created”. Samuels
relates this “third thing” to Ogden’s (1999) psychoanalytic “third”,
which will be discussed in Chapter Two. Both the false self and
persona function in an outside-facing way by utilising the reality
principle to prevent id-orientated aims12 from expressing themselves
in ways which are socially unacceptable. To this end, they both
require that one interacts with the world in a partial way, leaving
aspects of one’s subjectivity more or less unexpressed and unrecog-
nised by the other. For Jung (1966), “[t]he persona is a complicated
system of relations between individual consciousness and society . . .
a kind of mask, designed on the one hand to make a definite impres-
sion upon others, and, on the other, to conceal the true nature of the
individual” (p. 192). The persona, for Jung, is not essentially patho-
logical because it develops as a natural mediator between the internal
and external world. Pathology develops only when the individual
identifies with their persona at the expense of the other attributes of
their personality: when they believe the persona to be “the whole
thing”. These ideas of partiality in the presentation of self with regard
to online life should be self-evident, and will be applied throughout
this text in more detail.
Although Winnicott’s false self developed independently out
of the emerging school of object relations, as opposed to the school of
analytical psychology founded by Jung, it does have resonances with
Jung’s model of the persona. Like the persona, Winnicott’s concept of
the false self is also a result of natural developmental processes.
Although it arises as a defence of the true self, this defence (as in
Jung’s conceptualisation) is not necessarily pathological unless the
false self obliterates an internal relation to the true self. For Winnicott
(1956)
 PSYCHODYNAMICS 17

This false self is no doubt an aspect of the true self. It hides and
protects it, and it reacts to the adaptation failures and develops a
pattern corresponding to the pattern of environmental failure. In this
way the true self is not involved in reacting, and so preserves a conti-
nuity of being. (p. 387)

The defensive structure lies in the way in which the false self
preserves a continuity of being: a continuity that is threatened by
impingement, virtual or otherwise. Interestingly, for Winnicott, the
false self is an aspect of the true self; this is an internal relation that is
crucial to retain in relation to our application of these concepts to how
an individual negotiates her online social world. Unfortunately, the
use of the word “false” frequently gives the reductive impression of a
self that is sort of a fake “add-on” that would be better off dispensed
with. Alternatively, the false self should be seen as a deployment of
the ego that is a creative response to a deficit: the false self arises
specifically to meet this challenge. The false self is the outward aspect
of the psyche that takes on the role of a great deal of interpersonal
work, work such as being nice, saying the right thing, getting on with
people, and doing what is expected. In these circumstances, the false self
is taking on the job of the social role so that the true self can carry on
being. This is similar to the “masking” role that Jung (1966), gives to
the persona in order to face outwardly towards society. Although it is
a mask, it is a particular sort of mask that is suited to the individual
in some way, even if it distorts access to the real self, so to call it
“false” is not completely accurate: to call it partial would be more so.
While this is a system that is brilliantly conceived to manage both
internal and external worlds, there is, no doubt, a rub. The rub is that
while the psyche as a whole seeks recognition, it is those agencies of
the ego that lean heavily on false self and persona that tend to receive
this recognition simply because, by their very nature, these functions
are outward facing; the nature of outward-facing SNSs naturally
invites presentations from the false self. The result of this can leave the
true, or real, self feeling invisible and unrecognised, and, at the deep-
est level, unloved. To use a metaphor, it is as if, in the theatre of life,
there are a whole series of actors milling about the stage, but the spot-
light lands on only one or two; while they bask in the glow, the others
(equally representative of aspects of the self) are left invisible to the
outside world, and begin to feel like invisible understudies. While
18 THE PSYCHODYNAMICS OF SOCIAL NETWORKING

these actors are necessary, the rub “rubs” when the false self offers a
compliance towards the demands of the social world that can become
split off: the compliant self operating for social sanction and positive
social feedback gets taken for the whole thing, rather than an aspect
of the person. Winnicott (1982a) draws a similar metaphor regarding
actors themselves:

there are those who can be themselves and who also can act, whereas
there are others who can only act, and who are completely at a loss
when not in a role, and when not being appreciated or applauded
(acknowledged as existing). (p. 150)

Should an individual have a proclivity (through early parenting)

towards acting all the time, Winnicott (1982a) warns that “compliance
is then the main feature, with imitation as a specialty” (p. 147) which
is no doubt related to narcissism, as will be discussed further in
Chapter Four. Both Jung and Winnicott, in their idiosyncratic ways,
draw attention to the nature of these partial aspects of the psyche that
have a necessary role in the public-facing side of our subjectivity
while carrying with them the continued risk that their partial role may
be misrecognised by both the individual and those around her as the
full representation of the self.
SNSs such as Facebook and Twitter, as outward-facing technolo-
gies, particularly call upon the persona and the false self accordingly.
They are, par excellence, the social world manifested online and
require the activation of these public-facing psychic agencies more
than any other. This perspective becomes particularly clear when we
see that the main role of the false self for Winnicott (1982a) is to “hide
and protect the True Self” (p. 142). In extreme cases the “False Self sets
up as real and it is this that observers tend to think is the real person
. . . at this extreme the True Self is hidden” (p. 142–143). For Jung
(1966), the persona does a similar job; it is “designed on the one hand
to make a definite impression upon others, and on the other, to
conceal the nature of the individual” (p. 192). The potential trouble
here with regard to online relating is not that we have a false self or
persona, it is more that SNSs might encourage us in some ways to
emphasise these aspects of our psyche at the expense of others. For
Winnicott, pathology appears when a deep and dissociating split
occurs between the false and real self, and for Jung (1966) it is when
 PSYCHODYNAMICS 19

one identifies with his own persona to the consequence that “he no
longer knows himself” (p. 192); what he knows, Jung implies, is only
the partial expression of the self that is outward facing. In both
instances, the dynamic between the two agencies remain in a delicate
balance in relation to the outside world, liable to tip into pathology
when leaning too much into false self or persona, or opening up too
much vulnerability when exposing too much unprotected uncon-
scious material to an external world that might not respond with care.
SNSs can be seen as just another public space in which these same
dynamics are called into action. After all, we protect the more vulner-
able parts of ourselves in a variety of other real-life circumstances,
why would we not do so on a very public SNS?
In many ways, it is much easier for others to express and appre-
hend the nature of our false selves or personae than other aspects of
the psyche, for several reasons: they are the social-facing façades of
our subjectivities, they are our most practised public faces, and they
are the most easily observed by others. For these reasons, it tends to
be the false self/persona that becomes the vehicle for our self-expres-
sion on status updates and tweets, to the exclusion of other aspects of
our wide ranging and multiple subjectivities. In expressing ourselves
in this fashion, we are protecting aspects of our subjectivities that we
feel less happy about projecting into the world. Of course, just like in
real life, different individuals are happy to expose very different sorts
of things to the outside world; while for some it might be their
“OKness”, for others it might, in just the same way, be that they are
not “OK”. At the same time, the public self, as displayed across a
social network, can lack the subtlety and complexity of a full subjec-
tivity as experienced in face-to-face interactions. Winnicott (1982a)
understands the true self as beginning from birth as spontaneous and
unencumbered “sensori-motor aliveness” (p. 149). In other words, the
unguarded and visceral spontaneity of the infant is, in essence, its true
self. Once engagement with the outside world begins to impinge on
this spontaneous way of being, the false self develops to protect it by
taking on the role of interfacing with the external word. Deployed in
this way, the false self contributes to positive psychic health, engen-
dering rational defences to meet the impingements and deficits
always present in the relational world (nobody, after all, can be ideally
met). These defences, which, over time, develop into our everyday
and unconscious relational dynamics, are at play in every interaction
20 THE PSYCHODYNAMICS OF SOCIAL NETWORKING

in the online social networking world; it is the very nature of our

extension into virtual space, which is always cognisant of the imag-
ined other, or what boyd (2007) calls “invisible audiences”. When
observers (on or offline) tend to think the false self is the whole real
person, the spontaneous true self notices that it lacks the recognition
that the false self commands. To follow Jung’s reasoning, the dangers
lie not just in others believing the false self to be the whole thing, the
greater risk is that the individual himself comes to believe it as real.
Hence, the question becomes, how does an individual relate to his or
her own representation of him or herself on the SNS? The answer to
this question, of course, lies within the individual.
Depending on the degree of splitting or lack of integration
between the true and false selves, the recognition received by the false
self will be felt as a lack of recognition to the true self. In this, the
subject might feel as if the recognition were adulterated in some way,
and meant for something that is “not me”, that is, meant for the per-
forming false self rather than the true self. The disturbing result is that
a really effective false self, the one often found in narcissistic person-
alities, is quite good at attracting a certain kind of attention (altered
recognition) but it derives this attention in way that the true self
cannot assimilate. The common experience that many people have of
feeling fraudulent and harbouring fears of being “found out” are
embedded in the dynamic of this split between the true and false
selves. Too much investment in the false self serves to disable the true
self’s ability to experience an authentic and spontaneous expression
under the gaze of the other: “Only the True Self can be creative and
only the True Self can feel real. Whereas a True Self feels real,
the existence of a False Self results in feeling unreal or a sense of
futility” (Winnicott, 1982a, p. 148). In bringing our application of these
concepts to online social networking, we need to ask what it is that the
SNSs ask of us. What aspect of the self is being called to account for
itself? Negotiating this paradigm is fraught with complex issues, such
as what is being sought through the social network and what is moti-
vating that seeking.
While both Winnicott and Jung’s models offer a useful shorthand
to understanding public and private identities within the self, more
contemporary models view identity with a great deal more complex-
ity in relation to social construction, power, politics, and multiplicity.
Although neither Winnicott nor Jung were simplistic in their own
 PSYCHODYNAMICS 21

thinking about these concepts (both are richly and complexly drawn
out by their theorists), identity theory has continued to develop in
response to postmodernism, which has concerned itself with the mul-
tiple and fluid nature of identity as it is embedded in culture; this will
be discussed further in relation to SNSs in Chapter Six. Throughout
this text, however, we continue to use the terms false self, true self,
and persona as a useful shorthand, while recognising that subjectivity
and identity are far more complex than the seemingly simple termin-
ology seems to indicate.

Recognition
The functioning of the false self/persona and the true/real self is a
fundamental component in the response to the intersubjective dynam-
ics of recognition. The seeking of recognition is foundational to relat-
ing in that it works both ways: the desire to be recognised and the
desire to discover and recognise the other (Benjamin, 1988). This inter-
play of seeking recognition while at the same time seeking to recog-
nise is a dialectical tension that commences from the very start of life
within the infant–mother dyad, where initial relational templates are
laid down through to adult life, where they are repeated, worked
through, and, ideally, amended, repaired, and developed further
towards the capacity for intimacy. Benjamin (1988), who pioneered
thinking on recognition and its role in relational processes, notes that
an individual caught in a false self identification may

feel unreal to himself, with the deadness and despair that accompany
the sense of unreality . . . one of the most important elements in feel-
ing authentic . . . [is] the recognition of an outside reality that is not
one’s own projection, the experience of contacting other minds. (p. 37)

Part of the thrill of online social networking is the experience of

engaging with other minds, despite the fact that this engagement is so
frequently made remotely, when one is alone. The relation between
postings on any online social network can be broadly aligned with
Gabbard’s (2001) thinking about the paradox of the email,

The person sending an email message is alone, but not alone. The
apparent privacy allows for freer expression, but the awareness of the
22 THE PSYCHODYNAMICS OF SOCIAL NETWORKING

other receiving the email allows for passionate attachment and highly
emotional expressiveness. The Internet has led to new definitions of
privacy as well as of intimacy. (p. 734)

Interpersonal communications online (email or through SNSs) are

quite limited in contrast to the myriad of relational cues that provide
so much information in real life (facial expressions, tone of voice, body
language, etc.) and the environment is open for projection: a dynamic
that gets in the way of authentic relating and mutual recognition.
While the dialectic between false–true self and personal–real self
offers us a toehold into the intrapsychic nature of engagement, recog-
nition gives us the key to relational processes.
While intersubjectivity is the sine qua non of relational thinking,
recognition is the deceptively simple concept that acts as the philoso-
pher’s stone that lies at the very centre of it. Recognition is funda-
mentally relational in the sense that it absolutely depends upon the
gaze of an “other”, an event that is experienced as both intrapsychic
and intersubjective. Benjamin (1988), states that

Recognition is so central to human existence as to often escape notice

. . . it appears to us in so many guises that it is seldom grasped as an
overarching concept . . . to recognize is to affirm, validate, acknow-
ledge, know, accept, understand, empathize, take in, tolerate, appreci-
ate, see, identify with, find familiar . . . love. (pp. 15–16)

Consider all the verbs in the extract above and one can begin to sense
the relevance of recognition in the social networking paradigm: each
of them can be seen to be mediated, activated, sought, denied, and
returned across SNSs. The simple use of the “like” button on Facebook
can be utilised with one simple click to affirm, validate, acknowledge,
accept, appreciate, and find familiar. It is the simplicity of the click
that offers, with frightening ease, access to experiences of recognition
while, at the same time, risking narrowing the emotional bandwidth
of the very materiality of recognition. Like it or not, recognition is
being traded like a commodity across social networks; it is, indeed,
the fuel that is driving users to them in droves. Recall Turkle’s (2011)
above-mentioned pithy statement: “technology proposes itself as the
architect of our intimacies” (p. 1). This statement, in a mere nine
wisely chosen words, describes precisely the way in which online
social networking technology proposes itself, by way of recognition,
 PSYCHODYNAMICS 23

as the architect of these intimacies as they are mediated online. While

the user engagement of an SNS is often imagined to be solitary, it is
clear that the drive for recognition from another is built into the very
intention of these networks. Andrew Bosworth, Facebook’s director of
engineering, demonstrates this in a statement he made when he was
describing the interactive nature of Facebook in comparison to the
hardware devices made by Apple, “Your Apple product might actu-
ally still be fun without your friends. Facebook is just the most boring
product on the Internet without your friends” (Greene, 2012, p. 74). It
is this very interaction that Benjamin (1988) describes as being some-
thing that is sought for the self, while at the same time it is being
sought with regard to the other: it is mutual,

the necessity of recognizing as well as being recognized by the other

. . . the idea of mutual recognition is crucial to the intersubjective view;
it implies that we actually have a need to recognize the other as a sepa-
rate person who is like us yet distinct. (p. 23)

The capacity to develop mutual recognition, as described here, is

derived from the model of the mother–infant relationship in which
“[t]he subject gradually becomes able to recognize the other person’s
subjectivity, developing the capacity for attunement and tolerance of
difference” (Benjamin, 1990, p. 33). This is a developmental advance
in which the infant begins to see its primary care-taker as a subject
rather than an object.13 It is a relation that ideally requires “emotional
attunement, mutual influence, affective mutuality, [and] sharing
states of mind” (p. 16). Mutuality is also reflected within the social
network, though, as we will see, its architecture leaves it open to some
perversions of both the aim to be recognised and the ways in which
recognition from others may or may not hit its mark. For Benjamin,
“Recognition is the essential response, the constant companion of assertion.
The subject declares, ‘I am, I do,’ and then waits for the response, ‘You are,
you have done” (p. 21, my italics). As we saw in the previous section,
this “I” will have various components of true and false self and
persona. In the interpersonal space, both subjects are interacting from
one complex true–false self subject to another. Across two of the major
social networking platforms, Facebook and Twitter, this underlying
dynamic of “I am” seeking a “you are” in response is wired into their
architecture via the Facebook actions of “liking”, “poking”, and com-
menting on status updates, and via Twitter by way of following,
24 THE PSYCHODYNAMICS OF SOCIAL NETWORKING

“favoriting”, “retweeting”, and replying. Such interactions are offered

up with great ease across a social network. Conversely, in real life, a
healthy mutuality can be difficult to achieve as it depends upon a
complex dialectic of oneness and separateness in the matrix of the true
and false selves which offers up an axis of difference that can be chal-
lenging, particularly with regard to whatever capacities might be
present due to one’s experience of early relationships:

In the ideal balance, a person is able to be fully self-absorbed or fully

receptive to the other, he is able to be alone or together. In a negative
cycle of recognition, a person feels aloneness is only possible by oblit-
erating the intrusive other, that attunement is only possible by surren-
dering to the other. (Benjamin, 1988, p. 28)

This is a developmental achievement that is fundamentally related to

true and false self; that is, recognition goes nowhere if it is the false
self solely (or even mostly) that is being recognised. This is a particu-
lar danger in online social networking because of the partial revela-
tion of self that is possible across the SNS and the ease with which a
form of recognition is deployed through this architecture. Most social
technology operates via quick interactions that can sometimes be at
the expense of the more complex dynamics described by Benjamin.
An example of the difference between being present for real-life
relational exchange and the alternative of simply being a conduit of
information is exemplified by philosopher and computer scientist
Jaron Lanier (2011) when he describes an experience in which he was
speaking to a large audience about his book You Are Not A Gadget.
After introducing himself, he asked audience members not to tweet or
blog while he was speaking.14 Lanier explains that he made this
request

Not out of respect for me . . . but out of respect [for the audience]
themselves. If something I said was memorable enough to be worthy
of a tweet or a blog post later on . . . then that meant what I said would
have had the time to be weighed, judged, and filtered in someone’s
brain. Instead of [members of the audience] just being a passive relay
for me . . . what was tweeted, blogged, or posted on a Facebook wall
would then be you. Giving yourself the time and space to think and
feel is crucial to your existence . . . you have to find a way to be yourself
before you can share yourself (p. ix, my italics)
 PSYCHODYNAMICS 25

The danger in the social network is that it can sometimes jump the
important process of being with something, almost always in communi-
cation with another, that is, being actively and emotionally engaged by
a given internal process before passing it on, or, in Lanier’s words,
being more than a passive relay of information. Such is the compulsion
to share and the ease with which one can do so, online social network-
ing has the capacity to bypass the more difficult navigation of rela-
tional complexity. That is, how one navigates between being present as
a full subject in relation to an other who is also a full subject, yet differ-
ent. Benjamin (1988) notes that “one of the most important insights of
intersubjective theory is that sameness and difference exist simul-
taneously in mutual recognition” (p. 47). Managing similarity is much
easier than managing difference just as much in real life as it is online;
online social networking in all its forms offers an architecture through
which this merging of sameness and difference will be mediated: an
architecture which is neither good nor bad, nor neutral.

So many concepts, so little time

Each of the general psychodynamic concepts described above are
largely laid down in early life, yet continue to remain active through-
out one’s lifetime. Because they are instigated through primary rela-
tionships, relationships in later life continue to challenge these early
templates by inviting both repetition of old styles of relating and
new potentials to relate differently. Engagement across SNSs is funda-
mentally relational in nature and calls upon these object relational
and intersubjective components that we have been discussing. The
concepts I have chosen to elaborate upon in this chapter are only a
small selection of possible psychodynamic applications that can be
brought to bear upon online social networking. Furthermore, each
concept has a long history and a complex theoretical underpinning,
which is demonstrated in the many tomes dedicated to examining the
nature of each of these concepts alone. The scope of this book has
naturally required a reductionism in theoretical descriptions, both to
accommodate a rather wide application of psychodynamics to SNSs,
and also to allow a wider audience to appreciate the possibilities that
a psychodynamic perspective may bring to this venture. It is my hope
that others will develop the use of psychoanalytic concepts for the
further study of this material. This book presumes to make a start.
CHAPTER TWO

On searching and being sought15

“The individual discovers himself within an interpersonal field

of the interactions in which he has participated long before the
dawn of his own self-reflective consciousness”
(Mitchell, 1993, p. 132)

hese days, online social networking sites are an important locus

T through which the psychodynamic functions described in the

previous chapter are often mediated. However, there is another
domain of the Internet, though not an SNS, which, none the less,
requires investigation from a psychodynamic perspective first. That is,
the most omnipresent function of online life, the Google search.
According to the web information company Alexa (2012), Google is
the most visited website in the world, followed closely by Facebook.
It is the ubiquity of Google that captures our attention here, not so
much as a tool to acquire information about things across the Internet,
but also to gain information about ourselves and people that are
known to us. Vanderbilt (2013) describes how, as the Google search
has developed, it has become more reflective and responsive to the
multitude of search queries it receives, responds to, and learns from.

27
28 THE PSYCHODYNAMICS OF SOCIAL NETWORKING

“We once used search engines to look for information,” notes Vander-
bilt, “now we use search to find us – what once seemed transactional
now seems an extension of ourselves” (p. 107). Behind the scenes,
search engines like Google go about the virtual business of organising
“entities” into a “knowledge graph” that contains more than 500
million of these entities (Vanderbilt, 2013, p. 107); Facebook, alterna-
tively, uses what it calls a “social graph”. These entities become online
identities that are constructed around real human individuals. Such
online identities are compiled on behalf of individuals, mostly outside
of their control, resulting in what I call a passive online identity (as
opposed to an active online identity which may be deployed via a
social networking profile or personal website); it is Google that actively
manages our online identities, while the subjects of those identities
can only passively look on. There are businesses that, for a price, will
offer to manage your online reputation. In reality, they only maintain
the capacity to influence the organisation of content about you online,
increasing the chances that the links you prefer will rise to the top of
a Google search under your name; other information remains online,
it just takes a bit more effort to locate it.

Knowing me, knowing you

While social networks like Facebook may be unwieldy with regard to
their privacy settings, there is, none the less, more than just an illusion
of control over what a person chooses to share and with whom to
share it (though one can never guarantee that these rules will remain
stable). It does not work this way on Google, where information about
an individual from a single source can be radically disseminated
quickly across the Internet and collated in a Google search for anyone
to find. Today, there is nothing unusual about Googling a potential
date, an employer or employee, a partner’s ex-partner, or even one’s
potential psychotherapist. As each person has little control about what
is collated, the Google search provides only a fragmented view of
someone through the elements of his or her life that happen to have
gone online, whether it is winning the custard contest at the village
fete or having been accused of paedophilia. In this sense, online iden-
tities are pre-packaged and ready for quick consumption, creating an
automatic, externally “cobbled-together” identity,16 an identity that
 ON SEARCHING AND BEING SOUGHT 29

can hang like a ghost between individuals, affecting their interper-

sonal relations to varying degrees. This passive cobbled-together
online identity operates both intrapsychically and intersubjectively,
becoming a part of how we view ourselves, our concerns about how
we are viewed by others, and the way others actually view us. As we
will see, it is this virtually constructed identity that exists like a
“ghosted middle” between our embodied subjectivities and how we
appear on Google that enables a variety of psychodynamic responses
that contribute to the way in which recognition is deployed in the
virtual world.
While the functions of online relating and identity construction
will be examined more fully in Chapter Six, the context of Google, in
particular, will be examined here in the face of a series of questions it
provokes in relation to self-conception and concerns about how others
see us:

 How does a readily available assembly of a Google identity, if not

our identity, affect the sense of our own subjectivity in relation to
it?
 Is there a relational co-construction of identity between what we
feel to be ourselves, what we see represented online, and the
nature of other people’s perspectives of us as embodied subjec-
tivities and unbound virtual selves?
 How does the nature of this virtually constructed ghosted middle
affect people at various stages of their relationships, from first
impressions to times when such information is acquired later in
the relationship?

The nature of the therapeutic encounter enables a particular kind

of space to examine these questions, a space that is free of the techno-
logical distractions that are coming under scrutiny. In the consultation
room, ideally at least, the old rules still apply: the patient’s time will
not be interrupted by ringing phones and the psychotherapist will not
be multi-tasking while half-listening to the patient’s material: an expe-
rience all too familiar outside this special space. Importantly, confi-
dential material from the patient’s life will not be broadcast across the
Internet. If the therapeutic setting is about anything, it is about the
therapist’s being absolutely present for the patient, maintaining that
traditional sense of “evenly suspended attention” (Freud, 1912e,
30 THE PSYCHODYNAMICS OF SOCIAL NETWORKING

p. 111), or whatever variation the contemporary psychotherapist

chooses. In this sense, the therapeutic encounter appears to be safe
from the intrusions of the virtual world that are becoming so central
to contemporary life. Although the hour itself is, ideally, free from
these intrusions, they are, none the less, present in the minds of
psychotherapists and their patients. It is not only the stories that
patients bring to their sessions that involve virtual-world content, but
process, too, is impinging on the precious therapeutic space. There is
little doubt that patients will be Googling their potential therapists
long before the first meeting and that this Googling will, in many
unknown ways, affect the ways in which the therapist will be related
to and seen. Hartman (2011) reminds us that it is not just patients
doing the Googling, but that this curiosity has extended to affect the
curiosity of therapists, too:

Haven’t we [psychotherapists] also searched the web and told our-

selves there was no harm in looking? Or Googled a patient to confirm
a hunch spawned by unfettered countertransference? What degree of
emotional engagement in online experience then counts as ‘responsi-
ble’ or ‘real’ or ‘related’. (p. 476)

Google not only offers us information about others and ourselves,

however fragmented or accurate, it also offers this information with
an ease of access never before available. The kind of information one
can find today with a half-diligent Google search would have
required the services of a private detective just some years ago. The
planning, cost, and commitment of that would have deterred most
(and alert them to the fact that their motivations might be transgres-
sive); today, we simply do not encounter these obstacles or the poten-
tial consequences that come with them. With regard to the
information that is found on a Google search, one can find a distinc-
tion between an intentionally packaged web presence that an indi-
vidual might have created via their own personal or professional
website (an active online identity), and all the other information that
might be found on the Internet about them that is outside that
person’s control. In the particular case of the psychotherapeutic
encounter, the information that patients come bearing will infiltrate
the transference and affect the way in which the therapist is perceived;
no doubt this works the other way around for therapists Googling
 ON SEARCHING AND BEING SOUGHT 31

their patients. The likelihood that this will be in play demands a

thoughtful therapeutic response within the professional world of
psychotherapy itself, and, perhaps more importantly, by acknow-
ledging that the rarefied encounter in the consultation room, where the
unconscious relational dynamics occurring between therapist and patient are
the very subject of enquiry, can enable an understanding of these events
outside the therapeutic encounter and inside culture and society.
What follows is an extended case vignette from my own practice.
This vignette is the only “case history” from my own practice in this
text, so it will be a necessary digression to make before moving back
into the broader applications that this clinical experience provoked.
To begin, this therapeutic event produced what I came to understand
as a virtual impingement. A virtual impingement can be understood
to be an event that happens online that impinges upon the psy-
chological space of an individual and disrupts the capacity of that
individual’s “going on being” (Winnicott, 1982b). For Winnicott, an
impingement occurs when the facilitating environment (and particu-
larly the mother) fails to adapt appropriately to the infant’s needs,
causing “a reaction in the infant, and the reaction breaks up the going-
on-being” (p. 86). A virtual impingement can be seen as analogous to
this between any individual and an event that impinges on them from
their virtual environment.
In this case, the virtual impingement was caused by my patient
finding out information about me through a Google search that, due
to his state of mind at the time, created a great deal of anxiety and
anger. The first therapeutic task, of course, was to respond to its
immediate effects by containing the intense feelings that were being
experienced; this was followed by a more detailed therapeutic process
that would allow my patient and I to extract meaning from the expe-
rience locally, that is, in relation to his (and our) psychodynamics.
This local experience between my patient and me provided the origi-
nal material that started me thinking about global online experience,
virtual impingement, and the broader sociocultural online environ-
ment. This ultimately resulted in an exploration of relational dynam-
ics in response to virtual impingement events that I postulate are
occurring between individuals across social networks and Google
searches everyday. The local clinical experience can be used to extrap-
olate, in the first instance, what might be going on outside the consult-
ing room in the face of virtual impingements in general. The event I
32 THE PSYCHODYNAMICS OF SOCIAL NETWORKING

am about to convey was my first explicit experience of a virtual

impingement that made itself known in my consulting room in a way
that absolutely demanded my attention. One of the demands on my
attention was the fact that the virtual impingement directly involved
information about me. While it was my patient that initially felt the
impingement so forcefully, I was impinged upon, too, by the loss of
my privacy, and the way in which this loss had proved to be so hurt-
ful to my patient. Privacy is a major concern in “reality 2.0”, a term
that Hartman (2011) uses to describe how Web 2.0 has affected our
lives even in “the real world”. In this new, virtually infused world,
Hartman notes,

Privacy is a thing of the past: just imagine who it is possible for you
to be; just find what you need to know. In Reality 2.0, access trumps
the need to accept limits as a tool to self-discovery. Networking
replaces containment as the bulwark of meaning. (p. 473)

Important to note here is the combination of ease of access with the

question of what happens to information, meaning, and containment,
processes that will be discussed in the light of this vignette. It would
be impossible to share this story without revealing personal informa-
tion about myself, as it was this very personal information that
provoked the virtual impingement. Like much material that can be
found online, the information itself was rather trivial and benign, but
no less out of my control and, hence, no longer private. It was the
revelation of personal information outside of “containment as the
bulwark of meaning” that was summoned up on a Google search that
provoked the event under discussion here.

It happened on my “private” own time . . .

In order to understand the nature of the virtual impingement as a
general dynamic “out in the world”, I offer an illustrative case
vignette in relation to an actual virtual impingement that occurred to
my client Thomas17 during his therapy with me. First, it is necessary
to first digress into a seemingly unrelated event that occurred to me,
alone, about eighteen months previous to the moment I learnt that
Thomas has been virtually impinged upon. This is a rather bizarre
 ON SEARCHING AND BEING SOUGHT 33

story that begins one evening in 2005 when I was up late writing in
my office/consultation room, which at the time was located in my
home. In the quietness of the late hour, I heard a low-volume, preter-
natural clicking sound emanating from a pile of books and papers
near the wall. I stopped working to listen more closely, at which point
the disturbing clicking was followed by the sound of rustling papers.
I got up from the table and approached the pile with mild trepidation,
readying myself to see a mouse scamper out from under it. When this
did not happen, my curiosity forced me to lift some papers and other
materials off the top of the pile to locate the source of the sound. On
this closer inspection, rather than revealing the rodent I had been
expecting, I encountered a fiendish, prehistoric-looking, nine-inch
centipede whose scorpion-like carapace glistened under the incandes-
cent light of my office. Its multitude of razor-sharp undulating legs
carried it up the wall with a surreal quality of breath-taking speed and
agility. In a state of shock, I dashed off to my kitchen to find a con-
tainer large enough to capture it and ultimately managed to trap it
inside (the sound of the thing’s legs on the thin plastic of the Tupper-
ware doesn’t bear describing).
Realising that this strange animal was not native to the UK, I
arranged a meeting with the chief entomologist at the Natural History
Museum early the next morning. The entomologist quickly identified
that the centipede was indeed an interloper to Britain: it was classified
as a Scolopendra Gigantea—the largest species of venomous centipede
in the world. Its monstrous visual impact accurately indicated that it
was indeed both poisonous and dangerous to humans, capable of
injecting a necrotising poison that had the capacity to cause great pain
and injury to an adult and could be fatal to a small child. Its presence
in the UK was unusual, and for this reason it was of great interest to
the museum. I was relieved to hand it over and obliged when the
press secretary asked if she could use this story in the museum’s
monthly magazine; I had not anticipated that Natural History
Museum would then transmit a press release later on that would
make my centipede saga the most emailed story in the world the
following day. The event had copious radio coverage and all the
British broadsheets and tabloids covered the story; I was later able to
trace the article across dozens of foreign national papers—including
Taiwan’s biggest daily, the Sydney Morning Herald, and USA Today, to
small dailies like The Sacramento Bee. Each newspaper mentioned
34 THE PSYCHODYNAMICS OF SOCIAL NETWORKING

“psychotherapist, Aaron Balick” alongside information that included

my age and the location of my home/office. There was a flurry of
interest over the coming days, but eventually the furore died down,
and the centipede story was over—at least as far as I was aware. What
I was unaware of, however, was that behind the scenes each of these
headlines and accompanying stories was being collected and collated
by Google, creating what would become an “Aaron Balick” entity on
Google’s knowledge graph that would remain online for the foresee-
able future: my online identity would be forever coupled with this
surreal story. The amount of information about the centipede and me,
for a period at least, dwarfed any other information about me on the
Internet; it was, for some time, the whole of my online identity. While
this kind of identity distortion is rather benign, as it indicates very
little about my actual personality or my work that should concern me,
none the less it occupied a massive part of my virtual self that, for a
time at least, cast a disproportionate cybershadow on my online iden-
tity. This Google representation of my online self invites a kind of
online misrecognition where a small but interesting aspect of a life story
is misrepresented through Google. There is a resonant correlation here
to the idea of a false self, only in this case the false self is not a partial
representation of my ego’s public-facing persona, but, rather, a false
public-facing Google entity constructed without my knowledge or
consent. I was aware of none of these simmering psychodynamics at
the time. In fact, I thought it was an amusing story and the experience
provided me with a rather entertaining anecdote to tell. However, as
time went on, I came to realise that online reputation was becoming a
concern and such misrecognitions may have consequences. Even
these concerns were nascent, mostly the centipede event was a non-
story right up until it surprisingly provoked a virtual impingement
that went right to the centre of an otherwise “safe” yet vulnerable
therapeutic relationship.

Creating containment in therapeutic space

Although several of my patients had seen the news story when it was
released, and some joked about it with me in their sessions, I had
decided not to share the story with those who had not mentioned it,
and for this reason had chosen not to share it with Thomas. In fact, the
 ON SEARCHING AND BEING SOUGHT 35

virtual impingement did not occur in relation to Thomas until many

months after the story had completely dropped from my mind.
Thomas had come to see me initially due to panic attacks and other
anxiety reactions he had been experiencing because of serious allega-
tions that were made against him in the workplace. Although Thomas
was innocent of any wrongdoing, the allegations were shameful and
resonated with unresolved issues of shame from his youth. Further-
more, had these allegations been made public, they would have
become utterly destructive to his career prospects for the future.
Because Thomas was highly invested in his career (it was practically
a vocation), a threat to his professional identity was experienced as a
threat to his very self. Thomas and I had been doing some very diffi-
cult therapeutic work together during this period, working to contain
his anxieties and enable him to face the challenges he was encounter-
ing. Ultimately, the employer’s evidence was flimsy and the allega-
tions were neither fully pursued nor brought to light outside the
workplace; however, the whole ordeal did result in Thomas having to
leave his job anyway, as it was impossible for everyone that he remain
in post after the acrimonious investigation. Although he was able to
leave without having his reputation besmirched, his parting was diffi-
cult and followed by a serious depression which was accompanied by
occasional suicidal thoughts; a long period of uncertainty and unem-
ployment followed, through which Thomas worked courageously in
his therapy. Naturally, such a life event brings up long buried feelings
of early emotional trauma, which was indeed what was coming up for
Thomas. During this period Thomas came to depend on me, and our
relationship became a very important and sustaining one.
There are a number of ways to describe the circumstances that
allow good therapeutic work to be accomplished. Most research
points to the quality of the therapeutic relationship (Cooper, 2008),
part of which requires what Clarkson (2003) calls the “developmen-
tally needed or reparative relationship” to work through the develop-
mental deficits described in Chapter One. In order for this to occur,
the therapeutic alliance must provide a “safe containing holding rela-
tionship” (p. 148). This “holding” is resonant with Winnicott’s concep-
tion, as discussed in the previous chapter, with the maternal
facilitating environment. By the time the virtual impingement had
occurred, Thomas and I had come close to achieving this kind of rela-
tionship, but sometimes it felt more present than others. When two
36 THE PSYCHODYNAMICS OF SOCIAL NETWORKING

people come together in the therapeutic endeavour, their intersubjec-

tivity in the context of the therapeutic good creates something that is
more than the sum of its two parts. This greater part is what Ogden
(1999) calls the “analytic third”, described as “a third subject, uncon-
sciously co-created by analyst and analysand, which seems to take on
a life of its own in the interpersonal field between them” (p. 487). This
complex idea of the “third” is elaborated by Slochower (2005), who
notes how the third is developed through a holding process that

transforms the separate subjectivities of patient and analyst in the

direction of increased synchrony. This leaves the analyst with the task
of retaining, largely unexpressed, an image of the wider area created
by their shared yet separate experience. (p. 36)

Slochower’s reference to “holding” also refers back to the mother–

infant dyad elaborated by Winnicott, developing the nature of that
holding as something integral to the therapeutic encounter in which
the therapist, in the maternal role, contains the developing synchrony
and asynchrony resonating between therapist and patient. Benjamin
(2004) refers to “the shared third” in which this particular intersub-
jective space is “constituted in early, presymbolic experiences of
accommodation, mutuality, and the intention to recognize and be
recognized by the other” (p. 19). The relational concepts of mutuality
and recognition are central to the shared third, as it represents a
profound kind of meeting of two subjectivities. In relation to the false
self, the shared third comes from the effort to engage spontaneously
from true self to true self, something that entails relational risk for
both patient and therapist. Thomas needed to feel recognised, not
only in the current pain he was experiencing as a result of the contem-
porary events, but also in the pain (and accompanying shame) of his
early life experiences that were coming to the foreground as provoked
by the rupture that was created from contemporary events, a rupture
that I was able to recognise in its current representation as well as its
historical antecedents. Furthermore, Thomas had come to terms with
the destruction of his professional persona that had become central to
his own idea of his full subjectivity, a function of the foregrounded
false self, as discussed in the previous chapter. Thomas and I had
come to that place where the analytic whole is the summation of our
intersubjectivity in the context of the analytic third. This is the kind of
 ON SEARCHING AND BEING SOUGHT 37

experience that relational psychoanalytic space can offer, an opportu-

nity for the third to emerge and then the potential to see and work
through what happens there; the third is the essence of containment.
Throughout the acute period of Thomas’s depression and anxiety,
the therapeutic task was focused on offering him support by manag-
ing the anxiety that was being provoked by the challenging new situ-
ation of recovering from the loss of his career (which had been the
centre of his life) and adjusting to a period of being unemployed, an
experience totally unfamiliar to Thomas. This was a particular chal-
lenge for Thomas, as his successful career offered him the perfect
stage for his persona (false self) to act upon. When the stage disap-
peared, his persona was much reduced, leaving him lost and anxious,
having to face the real self that had been so accurately kept in the
persona’s shadow. After some months passed, however, the therapy
moved from managing extremes to the regular working through of
the relational dynamics of Thomas’s life in the context of his depres-
sion. A particular relational pattern that we discovered was the
vulnerability that Thomas often felt in intimate friendships. He found
that when he allowed himself to rely and depend upon someone, they
often let him down and were unable to respond to his needs, result-
ing in relational breakdown. These challenges arose when Thomas felt
that the other person in the relationship erected alienating and unex-
pected boundaries. This pattern of relating was explored and worked
over several times during our work together and was obviously a
dynamic in our own therapeutic relationship, a relationship that
frequently induces feelings of patient dependency and need upon the
therapist. There were times, particularly at the start, where my
reliance on more conservative interpersonal boundaries in psycho-
therapy provoked uncomfortable confrontations between us.18
One example of this boundary-induced discomfort occurred early
on. My consultation room was on the first floor of my building, so,
when patients arrived for therapy, I would welcome them in at the
street-level entrance to my home and bring them up a flight of stairs
to the consultation room to begin their session. When the session was
over, I would show them out at the door of the consultation room and
let them see themselves downstairs and out. Very early on, Thomas
challenged me on this practice. He thought it impolite and did not like
what he felt to be a “businesslike” sensibility that he experienced as
cold and uncaring, particularly after a session in which he had shared
38 THE PSYCHODYNAMICS OF SOCIAL NETWORKING

intimate material to which I had responded with obvious care and

empathy. We worked through his discomfort around these bound-
aries—in short, we were both able to come to understand the meaning
of this shutting of boundaries for Thomas. Although I was also able to
become more flexible and meet Thomas more gingerly at these bound-
aries, they remained a difficult psychic space for us to occupy when
they were provoked. I understood what happened at the top of the
stairs to be an “enactment”, that is, a co-constructed event between the
two of us, through which we can understand the patient’s material bet-
ter. Enactment differs from the more classical understanding of “acting
out”, which indicates a pathological intrapsychic event solely within
the mind of the patient (Roughton, 1995), to the relational perspective
where the therapist is a full participant in the event (Slavin & Kreigman,
1998). Hence, Thomas’s anger at the top of the steps was not the result
of a one-way acting out in which my imposing a “businesslike” bound-
ary was the result of his own intrapsychic state, but it was an event that
was happening between us partly because of the choices I was making
as a therapist and a person. The quintessential factor of relational work
lies in just these sorts of enactments. They enable us to understand the
relational dynamics activated between therapist and patient, thus
allowing them to work through them together. For Thomas and I,
the event at the top of the stairs provided both a context for meaning-
making and the opportunity to renegotiate our work together, ulti-
mately developing a therapeutic idiom that would be uniquely ours.
Examples like this helped to show that the psychodynamics that were
expressed in Thomas’s relationship with me would often resemble ele-
ments expressed in relationships with significant others outside the
therapy, both historically and contemporaneously. It was the nature
of the therapeutic setting (the presence of the third) that allowed us
to experience these elements and then understand them that offered
the potential for relational growth. The groundwork that we accom-
plished here in developing that third space enabled us to endure the
coming impingement that threatened to undo all our work.

The virtual impingement

During the second year of therapy, Thomas experienced another
intense phase of anxiety stemming from a fast-approaching annual
 ON SEARCHING AND BEING SOUGHT 39

event at his previous place of work in which he would have been

crucially involved had he remained there. The prospect of this event
evoked the memories of the tragic end to his career that had provoked
the re-emergence of latent feelings from his early life that we had
begun, through our work, to understand. Our understanding of them,
however, did not diminish the impact of Thomas’s feelings of anxiety
and self-condemnation when they came back with a vengeance. One
night, between sessions, Thomas awoke feeling disturbed and anxi-
ous, and, unable to go back to sleep, he typed my name into Google
and clicked “search”. Unconsciously, Thomas was seeking a sense of
me, his therapist and “good object”, to help him contain these difficult
feelings. Disturbingly, the search results produced not the familiar
psychotherapist that he thought he knew, but, rather, an unfamiliar
story about his therapist’s encounter with a venomous insect that had
put him in danger. More than that, the story had been shared with
tens of thousands of people, across national boundaries—but not
shared with Thomas. In a sense, what Thomas had stumbled upon
was simply what Google had constructed as an entity in its know-
ledge graph that stood for me; a simple yet bloated aspect of my
cobbled-together online identity. While we can presume that in his
search Thomas was unconsciously seeking what he knew of me from
our sessions together, what he found was a completely dispropor-
tionate representation of me that seemed utterly alien to what he
knew of me and felt like a betrayal. Given that Thomas was in a
depressed and anxious state, his finding a different object than that
which he was seeking was experienced as an intense blow.19
The results of Thomas’s search appeared in the lonely light cast by
his screen in the middle of the night: this was exactly the moment
when the virtual impingement occurred in relation to the two of us—
that is, outside the safety of the consultation room and, therefore,
distant from a felt sense of our co-created “third”. According to
Slochower (2005), it is the analyst’s task to hold the “third” for the
client, but much of this job is done in the context of the psychotherapy
session; Thomas experienced a breach to the third when he was
outside the consultation room, where the feelings and fantasies that
are provoked can be reality tested on the one hand, and regulated
on the other. Benjamin (1988) notes that with mutual recognition
comes mutual regulation, too. Much of this mutual regulation is non-
verbal and is expressed though the eyes, facial expressions, and other
40 THE PSYCHODYNAMICS OF SOCIAL NETWORKING

interpersonal cues experienced together, within the third, in the safety

of the consultation room, cues that do not exist between an individual
and a Google search. For Thomas, this experience occurred outside the
confines of the consulting room, at night, during a state of anxiety.
Thus was created an impingement. The impingement was experi-
enced as a breach to our “third”, resulting in my becoming, in
Thomas’s mind, an abandoning object rather than a containing one.
Thomas, who had shared so much with me, had to find out this global
story from a Google search; it was as if I had let thousands of others
in, but kept him out. For Thomas, this information about me revealed
by a Google search was experienced as an affront. It was an impinge-
ment so severe that he experienced it as an offence, an abandonment,
and a relational rupture all at the same time. The next day Thomas
phoned me, furious and hurt, wanting to terminate the therapy.
While I tried my best to offer containment to Thomas over the
phone, a long period followed during which our therapeutic relation-
ship remained tenuous; it certainly did not feel safe enough for
Thomas to return without great caution, equivocation, and ambiva-
lence. Although I initially persuaded Thomas to stick with me a bit
longer, we had yet to endure several difficult telephone conversations
and he regularly threatened to terminate therapy; a return to me as a
consistently “good enough” object seemed impossible. All of the work
we put into creating that crucial but vulnerable third was burst wide
open by a cobbled-together identity offered up by a Google search.
Despite this, we plugged away at it. Thomas expressed his hurt,
disappointment, and fury towards me. He later confided to me that he
had been concerned that this monstrous thing could have hurt me. In
the context of Thomas’s early life, his intense reaction makes even
more sense since he had lost a parent, suddenly, early in his life. His
attachment to me had been ambivalent due to his fear of losing
another person on whom he could become dependent, and, in a sense,
when he found that altered version of me on Google, he felt as if he
had lost me, too.20
In object relational terms, Thomas’s expression of concern for
me indicated a positive movement towards what Klein (1935) refers
to as the depressive position, in which the fear of the loss of an im-
portant object becomes foregrounded rather than the more primitive
paranoid–schizoid anxiety, in which he felt as if I had wilfully
abandoned him. The shifting back and forth from paranoid–schizoid
 ON SEARCHING AND BEING SOUGHT 41

to depressive positions is a natural and non-pathological dynamic in

object relations terms; however, operating from the depressive posi-
tion indicates progress in the individual’s ability to relate to whole
rather than part-objects. Because of our previous work together,
Thomas was able to reflect that the events happening between us
mirrored many of the let-downs and disappointments he had shared
with me about his friendships “out there”. When our therapeutic rela-
tionship had broken down “in here”, with the same feelings as those
others, it was difficult for him to trust me enough to work it through
towards a different end, to take this event that was begging for old-
habituated response (abandonment or perceived abandonment) and
replace it with a new possibility, that is, to understand this event, like
the smaller one at the top of my stairs, as an enactment. Cooper and
Levit (2005) describe how enactments draw therapists into the
patient’s drama:

Enactments often involve the ways we unconsciously participate in a

repetition of an earlier failure that was close to the patient’s experience
of an earlier trauma (Casement, 1985). The patient is sceptical to
believe that the analyst can become a new object partly because the
patient sees the ways in which the analyst is the same as the old object
through repetition and enactment. (pp. 59–60)

Between Thomas and me, the Google search provoked a relational

response towards the old abandoning object, which I then became for
Thomas. When this relationship takes hold, it is difficult for the
psychotherapist to fully inhabit the new (good) object relationship for
the patient, one that can sustain the current rupture. The result is that
the enactment takes hold of both parties (both are identified with the
old-object relational dynamic); it feels impossible in the heated
moment to anchor oneself outside the induced relational tension.
When in the grip of an enactment, it is easy for the therapist to lose
his or her hold on the “third” because everything becomes alive, elec-
tric even, and the “third” seems to fall out of reach. The danger of
such enactments is that the patient may not yet have enough trust in
the therapist to work through the destructive elements to be able to
have that new experience. The revelation of the centipede story struck
not only at the heart of Thomas’s intrapsychic object-relational
dynamics, but also at the centre of our very own relational matrix. The
intervention of a centipede, and the chaotic world in which news is
42 THE PSYCHODYNAMICS OF SOCIAL NETWORKING

collected and forever preserved, presented us with the challenge and

the opportunity to work through an impingement that had been
arrived at virtually.

Extrapolating themes from the clinic to the wider culture

A Google trail threatens to spread not who one is to the observing
world, but, instead, a passive online identity: a cobbled-together repre-
sentation of what one is in the clutches of whatever Google has
acquired and attached to a name. In the therapeutic situation, this can
contaminate the transference by producing disclosure about the ther-
apist that he or she might not have wished to share (see Gorden, 2010).
In an important sense, this is nothing new. Aron (1999) distinguishes
“self-disclosure” from “self-revelation”, which he argues is a continu-
ous process in any case. Psychotherapists self-reveal all the time
through their action or inaction, facial expressions, what they choose
to respond to and what they do not, even how they choose to see their
patients out. Google’s disclosures, however, are different, in as much
as they occur outside the therapeutic setting and are experienced
intrapsychically rather than intersubjectively; there is little contain-
ment, little “third” online. This lack of the third intersubjective space
can provoke primitive transferences and projections that operate as
object-relational phantoms rather than intersubjective phenomena
that can be worked through. To be clear, the presence or lack of a third
is not solely located in the therapeutic dyad, it operates in some way
between any relating individuals; the only difference is that within the
analytic dyad the aim is for these things to be made explicit. Each rela-
tionship will carry its own idiosyncratic third: different combinations
of individuals will also invite their own enactments. These very same
relationships, however, are equally vulnerable to virtual impingement
when the intersubjective space is mediated online; in the virtual
world, they happen all the time. In the therapeutic situation, the ques-
tion of therapist disclosure, and particularly the loss of power with
regard to what a therapist may choose to disclose, is undoubtedly a
crucial question for practising clinicians. However, it is precisely
because clinicians are required to ask such questions within the therapeutic
context that insights gained there can help shed light on non-therapeutic
contexts that are equally vulnerable to virtual impingements. In other
 ON SEARCHING AND BEING SOUGHT 43

words, contamination of the transference is not a concern for psycho-

therapists alone; it prompts consideration of how the virtual world
promotes such contamination in the transference of any interpersonal
engagement; how online identities come to affect our interpersonal
relationships.
The peculiar and specific conditions in which the virtual world
impinges on our notion of others and ourselves operate through the
same mechanisms I have identified. The therapeutic hour is sensitised
not only to what happens or the content or narrative of events, but also
to the potential unconscious processes involved in the event in the here-
and-now. Thomas was having a reaction to information about me, the
content of which provoked both his relational repetition (in the trans-
ferential sort of way) and the dynamics of our unique relational
patterning in response to the Google representation of me. In his
search, Thomas may have been seeking confirmation of a good, con-
sistent object; alternatively, perhaps he was unconsciously searching
for the bad, withholding object. We found, through the therapeutic
work, that both modes of searching were occurring concurrently. This
ambivalence was enacted in our relationship; the consistent, good
object was being exchanged for the withholding, bad one in quick
succession. The only thing that makes this event special in any way is
that there was an opportunity to examine and work through (however
difficult that proved to be) the dynamics of the virtual impingement.
The presence of psychotherapeutic space is not always available to
catch the fallout of these kinds of events that must be happing all the
time. The vacillation between the intrapsychic and the intersubjective
registers was uncovered only through the therapeutic alliance, which
contained just enough third to see us through and help us to under-
stand what was happening.
Using material from my experience with Thomas as a guide, we
might ask what it is that people may be unconsciously seeking when
they search Google for others already known to them. What, indeed,
is the motivation? The presumption is that there is psychological work
being done in the search—but outside the consulting room, how well
can this work be processed? Whether there is sufficient thirdness in
the virtual world to contain virtual impingements like these is com-
pletely dependent on the relational dynamics of the individuals
involved alongside the nature or strength of their relationships in the
real world. Virtual impingements are not limited to Google searches,
44 THE PSYCHODYNAMICS OF SOCIAL NETWORKING

they extend to any kind of information-seeking for known or

unknown others, or even ourselves, searches occurring outside an
intersubjective setting. What is being sought when one is inspecting
another’s Facebook profile, photo albums, or reading through old
status updates? On the relational–unconscious level, the motivations
revolve around the desire to discover and to be discovered, orbiting
around polarities of narcissistic/exhibitionistic and voyeuristic
desires. As is clearly demonstrated by my experience with Thomas,
this method of relating is fraught with difficulty when it occurs
outside containing relational matrices.
For Thomas and me, understanding both the nature of his motiva-
tion and our enactment was explicitly part of the task. After many
weeks of touch-and-go therapy, we were able to move out of the acute
stage of this enactment and start to build safety into the relationship
again. In other words, Thomas began to be able to see me as a whole
subject again rather than the partial object that had been presented in
the Google search. Ultimately, he was also able to see me more fully
in my subjectivity, rather than just as an abandoning object. He was
able to understand the choices I had made in keeping the story from
him, even though he continued to disagree that this was the right
approach. In other words, he was able to see the differences between
us and found that these differences were not insurmountable. To his
ability to contain difference, I credit the relational work we had done
together that predated this event—work that gave us both the chance
to develop an underlying trust in both the therapeutic process and
each other. Ogden (2004) reflects on the enlivening nature of events
like this, and the therapeutic importance of such enactments,

More often than not, I defer interpreting the meanings of such analytic
events until much later in the analysis, if I interpret at all. It is living
these experiences as opposed to understanding them that is the
primary importance to the analysis. (p. 186)

With Thomas, the task was simply to live through the enactment in
the best way we could while it was occurring, but it was absolutely
crucial that we came to understand it later.
To our ability to contain this enactment I credit the previous idio-
syncratic experience of negotiating boundaries together, like those
moments of boundary negotiation at the top of my staircase.
 ON SEARCHING AND BEING SOUGHT 45

Unfortunately, in many non-therapeutic relationships, equally vulner-

able to such impingements, there is no such third upon which to rely.
With more and more relationships initiated and co-ordinated within
virtual spaces (particularly for Digital Natives), this is a grave
concern. The good-enough therapeutic relationship is about under-
standing and working through ruptures like these. However, rela-
tionships “out there” that are mediated through social media may not
have the foundation that Thomas and I created together to work
through the impingement. Furthermore, many of these impingements
are also complicated by the fact that they often happen in public: on
SNSs it is as if every conversation can and will be overheard. Many
online relationships have foundations that either predate or coincide
with their online counterparts. However, many do not—such as
young people who often elide on- and offline relating—and these rela-
tionships are particularly vulnerable to impingements.
Fortunately, Thomas and I were able to work through our virtual
impingement. Indeed, eventually we were able to make sense of it and
use the experience to deepen the therapy. In fact, the “centipede
period” of our therapeutic relationship was something that we would
often reflect upon together to make sense of it. Of course, the experi-
ence could have caused Thomas to terminate the therapy, undermin-
ing all the work we had accomplished up to that point. He could have
seen the results on Google, ruminated on it, and never told me: it
would have gone on secretly to undermine our relationship implicitly.
All of these possibilities are equally available to non-therapeutic rela-
tionships encountering virtual impingements. In many ways, it is
what might have been seen or known about the other that is not
expressed that underlies a relationship in even more profound ways,
and it is in these ways that such virtual impingements are affecting
everyday relationships that have nothing to do with psychotherapy.
Gorden (2010) offers a vignette about a Google incursion into the ther-
apeutic setting in which a patient kept the knowledge he acquired
about his therapist in a search to himself for some time, creating a
dynamic that underlay their relationship for months before the fact of
the Google search was made known. The result was a sort of pro-
longed and uncomfortable enactment. She notes that

[o]ur notions regarding the possibility and achievement of analytic

anonymity of our personhood are no longer valid; which of our
46 THE PSYCHODYNAMICS OF SOCIAL NETWORKING

patients know about us, what they know, how they know and
whether and which parts they disclose to us that they know is no
longer something we get to choose. (p. 322)

The way in which the game has changed in relation to our lack of
choice with regard to the presence and acquisition of knowledge
about us by others is directly applicable outside the analytic setting.
What we have all lost is a particular kind of “anonymity”, and this
loss introduces contamination into the transference of potentially any
relationship. The therapeutic space is ideally constructed to allow the
dyad to work through these kinds of events. However, the dynamics
that are evoked in these situations, even if not ideal, can enable us to
ask what happens outside the rarefied atmosphere of the consultation
room, where the information one obtains from online sources may
remain implicit and continue to inform relationships. Object relations
has taught us that we have relationships with imagined objects in our
minds at least as much as we have them with “real” others. Although
the online world has not changed the general psychodynamic
processes involved here, it does intervene in the process from quite a
different angle. Having information on another, whether true or false,
exaggerated or misrepresented, is nothing new; however, the ease
with which this information is accessed and the nature by which it is
acquired do have noteworthy consequences.
It seems to me that questions are inevitably invited when material
of this sort is presented. These revolve around the apparent newness
of the phenomena. How is information found online any different
from information acquired through gossip or hearsay? What about
information acquired by other means? In reference to the perspective
offered in the Introduction, the response to this question is that the
issue here is not about the content of the information acquired
(although content retains some value), but, rather, that the process of
seeking information about others is psychological work that is worthy
of analysis. Lingiardi (2008) enquired into the psychological meaning
of another process, that of patients sending their analysts emails
during vacation breaks, and offers four hypotheses in relation to why
such emails are sent:

i. when the fear of losing the object grows

ii. when the patient wants the analyst to recognize parts of her/his
self that are still uncertain or too charged with patient or shame-
 ON SEARCHING AND BEING SOUGHT 47

elements that she/he cannot yet speak about, perhaps, but can
already write about;
iii. when the desires associated with transference are frustrated,
leading to anger;
iv. When an erotic transference arises, with the anxiety that some-
thing can ‘happen’ during the session. (p. 120)

By utilising a process-orientated approach, we can look for mean-

ing in the unconscious motivation, not simply the content of the result
of that motivation. An email can mean any of these things or more, as
can the search for a therapist or anyone else on Google. Lingiardi’s
first hypothesis would equally work for Thomas. His search for me on
Google was a process equivalent of another individual’s sending of an
email. Indeed, all four of Lingiardi’s hypotheses, and more, can be
applied to online behaviours occurring at any time between individ-
uals outside the clinic. On the more sinister side, the Internet can be
used as a way of acting out a whole combination of Lingiardi’s
hypotheses, as was reported by the writer James Lasdun (2013a), who
was cyber-stalked both publicly and privately for years by a former
student.21 The public attacks were Googleable under Lasdun’s name,
becoming a part of his online identity. Lasdun was forced to ask
himself, “Was I going to have to monitor my online pages around the
clock? Or would I simply have to accept that this was now going to
be a part of my life?” (p. 33). While Lasdun’s experience was an
extreme, these are questions that most of us will ask ourselves at some
point in the future. Everyday, on a more subtle scale, our passive
online identities are constructed outside of the will or purpose of the
individual subjectivities that these entities come to represent. Yet, the
extreme is out there, too, as we will see in Chapter Four, particularly
in anonymous forums. It is for these reasons that we need to look
more closely at meanings people are making of their online techno-
logical lives, not just the content of those lives, material that is covered
by so many current studies.
The ease of access to information and the increase in access to
others (via email, Twitter, Skype, or whatever) in today’s society
enables enactments to occur without the concomitant psychological
work. We operate in a system of such simplicity and convenience that
one can search without the consequences of being caught snooping, or
send off an email or text message with the click of a button without
48 THE PSYCHODYNAMICS OF SOCIAL NETWORKING

stopping to think about why. The process remains the same, but the
immediacy is different.
Ease and convenience are important issues. As mentioned previ-
ously, the kind of information that can be acquired through a few
keystrokes, using a search engine, is the same kind of information that
previously may have been gained only through physical access
to paper records, stalking, or hiring a private detective, a level of
commitment that would not only be inhibiting to most, but also the
concurrent sense of “going too far” would be palpably correlated to
such effort. To be able to enquire without risking consequence (at least
in fantasy), at any time of day or night, from any psychological/
emotional position, is also new and noteworthy. These virtual online
encounters, outside the intersubjective space of thirdness, ironically
create a less “connected up” world, but instead forge one in which
object relating takes precedence over subject relating, or what Turkle
(2011) calls “the new state of the self, itself”:

When I speak of a new state of the self, itself, I use the word ‘itself’
with purpose. It captures, although with some hyperbole, my concern
that the connected life encourages us to treat those we meet online in
something of the same way we treat objects—with dispatch. (p. 168)

What makes the difference between a virtual impingement and

one between people is that online interactions are easier to deploy
“with dispatch”—that is, quickly, easily, and in an uncontained way:
one in which the consequences, too, are experienced from one step of
remove. How people use these new tools to negotiate and navigate
their ways through their intrapsychic, interpersonal, and social
worlds merits further attention. The ease with which we can access
information about each other is not without consequence. Seeking out
such personal information is psychological work, the distinction being
that this psychological work is likely to be operating in isolation. If
this is the case, we need to develop an understanding of the processes
at play in the context of our connected-up, yet potentially uncon-
nected, culture.