3 :: NEW TECHNOLOGIES,
NEW MOBILITIES
considerable levels of guilt over being away from the family so regularly. She also
seems aware of the disquieting scenario of loss more generally. But Sandra’s reflexive
level of self-awareness also seems to falter in this connection. She feels not on ‘solid
ground’ when it comes to understanding the countless hours she spends organizing
their electronic photo library, or editing family videos. Because she does not quite
understand the emotional prompts for these activities, she says that she feels worried.Post-Freudian developments in psychoanalytic theory, we contend, are especially
helpful for grasping the state of mind that Sandra has entered through her ongoing,
relentless technological explorations. Although psycho analysis is sometimes
portrayed as anti-sociological in its examination of the imaginative, unconscious
forms of self-identity, it nevertheless provides a sophisticated conceptual means
for exploring the self’s relationship to cultural meanings and society more generally.^20
This applies, not only to social relationships, but also the self’s relations with
non-human objects (such as digital technologies).^21 Given the emphasis in this
chapter on the theme of emotional containment in the context of mobile lives, the
conceptualization of anxiety developed by the psychoanalytic tradition known as
Kleinian and post-Kleinian theory is especially relevant. Kleinian psychoanalysis is
fundamentally concerned with the emotional logics of primitive anxiety – both in the
life of the young infant, and also throughout the life-course. Kleinianism stresses that
the infant’s early sense of anxiety comes from a primary destructiveness, or fear that
envy and rage may result in injury to loved objects – principally the mother or primary
caretaker. Anxiety in this perspective ‘eats away’ at the core of the self, and
consequently Kleinian theory devotes great attention to the interpersonal forms in
and through which anxiety may be ameliorated, contained and transformed. For it is
only through the containment of anxiety, or so argue Kleinians, that basic trust in self
and others can be developed and nourished.The post-Kleinian contribution of psychoanalyst Wilfred Bion is especially important,
given the attention he paid to the emotional processes by which normal anxiety can
spill over into neurotic anxiety. Again, the theme of containment looms large. Bion
emphasized the complex emotional processes through which an individual generates
new experience as genuinely new.^22 Human experience, according to Bion, has to be
understood in relation to the overall processing of emotion that an individual develops
across time, rather than as something that impacts upon people only in a generalized
manner. For Bion, experience generated with others has the capacity to unlock
previously unknown, unthought or unpredicted aspects of emotional life. Reflective
engagement with others – facilitative of the containment and transformation of
unconscious anxiety – is essential to experiencing the world as new as well as to(^20) See Paul Ricoeur, Freud and philosophy
(New Haven, CT: Yale University Press,
1970). See also Anthony Elliott,
Psychoanalytic theory: an introduction
(Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2002).
(^21) See Anthony Elliott, Social theory since
Freud (London and New York: Routledge,
2004).
(^22) Wilfred Bion, Learning from experience
(London: Heinemann, 1962).