Psychotechnical Becomings: Psychoanalysis, Identity, Desire, and Mourning in the Age of AI and Digital Mediation
Book Details
- Publisher : Routledge
- Published : April 2026
- Cover : Paperback
- Pages : 270
- Category :
Psychoanalysis - Catalogue No : 98530
- ISBN 13 : 9781041217749
- ISBN 10 : 1041217749
Also by Alessandra Lemma
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Psychotechnical Becomings draws on contemporary philosophy and media theory to offer a groundbreaking reimagining of psychoanalysis for the digital age, showing how technology shapes human subjectivity across all ages.
Introducing innovative concepts such as technoplasticity, psychotechnical becoming, algorithmically mediated projective identification, digital armouring, and the digital superego, the book investigates how algorithmic architectures infiltrate unconscious processes. Through vivid clinical cases and interdisciplinary theory, the book demonstrates how psychoanalytic techniques can restore depth to a flattened psychic field, tracing how identity is shaped by algorithms, desire circulates within feedback loops, and mourning unfolds in a world where absence can be endlessly deferred. The book also addresses the ethical complexities of online therapy, asking how presence and truth can be sustained in digitally configured encounters. Readers will gain a deeper understanding of how technology amplifies both defensive mechanisms and creative adaptations, requiring clinicians to engage with patients whose psychic lives are deeply entwined with digital environments.
Drawing on Lemma's extensive clinical experience, this book is key reading for psychoanalysts, psychotherapists, and anyone wanting to understand how technology has shaped our psychic life and identity.
Reviews and Endorsements
Alessandra Lemma offers a groundbreaking psychoanalytic account of how digital technologies and artificial intelligence are transforming psychic development, embodiment, and relational life. Moving with intellectual rigor and clinical precision between theory, culture, and case material, Lemma reframes the analytic encounter within a technologically mediated world. Psychotechnical Becomings is a profoundly intelligent and deeply humane book, a courageous contribution to contemporary psychoanalysis—interdisciplinary, ethically attuned, and clinically indispensable.
Vittorio Lingiardi, Professor, Psychiatrist, and Psychoanalyst, Sapienza University of Rome, 2023 Sigourney Award Recipient
The evolution of humankind has been much influenced by technological advances, and though some have brought major societal changes we can still read and identify with the thoughts, feelings, and behaviours described in the classical Greek and Roman texts. However, something qualitatively different may be happening with the emergence of artificial intelligence. I urge you to let Alessandra Lemma take you on a voyage of exploration and discovery as exciting and frightening as those taken in earlier times by adventurers heading out into unknown and turbulent oceans or trudging through uncharted deserts and jungles, for as you read her riveting account you will begin to realize how this time not only our societies but the internal world of our children and grandchildren is being radically changed.
Professor, the Lord Alderdice, FRCPsych, House of Lords, London, UK
This is a groundbreaking book. Alessandra Lemma approaches the impact of AI, chatbots, and social media more generally from a base in clinical work, with meticulous accounts of the to and fro between herself and her patients. At the same time, she draws on a wide and scholarly range of reference. She traces the impact of life online on vulnerable adolescents, showing that it can sometimes be essential in holding them together as well as potentially short-circuiting essential aspects of development. A dazzling tour de force.
Maria Rhode, Emeritus Professor of Child Psychotherapy at the Tavistock & Portman NHS Foundation Trust, and Child Analyst of the British Psychoanalytical Society
This book offers an urgent antidote to the collective illusion confounding today’s clinicians working with patients entangled in the digital vortex. Drawing on her pioneering psychoanalytic practice, Alessandra Lemma provides an integrative framework for understanding contemporary forms of psychic suffering. With striking clarity, she explores how the digital colonizes the core of therapeutic communication. By tracing the evolving textures of transference and selfhood shaped by generative technologies, Lemma compels us to reflect on the unprecedented psychotechnical transformations of our time. A lucid, pressing, and profoundly relevant contribution to clinical thought today.
Martin Debbané, Professor of Psychopathology, Research Department of Clinical, Educational and Health Psychology, UCL, and Faculty of Psychology and Educational Sciences, University of Geneva, Switzerland
There are few contemporary psychoanalysts who have approached the transformations of digital life with the clarity, courage, and intellectual generosity of Alessandra Lemma. Psychotechnical Becomings is a landmark work — not only for its subject but for the discipline itself. Lemma has once again brought psychoanalysis to where it most needs to be: in thoughtful, ethically grounded conversation with the changing conditions of being human. In doing so, she reminds us that psychoanalysis, at its best, is not a doctrine but a living practice of interpretation — one that must remain open to the world’s new forms of psychic suffering.
Peter Fonagy, CBE, Professor, Head of the Division of Psychology and Language Sciences, University College London, and National Clinical Advisor on Children’s Mental Health, NHS England
Table of Contents
Foreword - Peter Fonagy
Introduction: Beyond Content: When the Medium Stages Becoming
Part I. Algorithms, Desire, and the Reconfigured Self
1. Rethinking Subjectivity and Development in the Digital Age
2. Dialogues on the Digital Psyche
3. From Working Through to Clicking Through: Adolescence, Algorithms and the Search for Coherence
4. At the Meniscus of Self-Understanding: Rethinking the Examined Life in an Age of Artificial Intelligence
5. The Mediation of Desire
6. On Not Having It All: The Fetishization of Trans Women in Online Pornography
Part II. Screen to Skin: From Defensive Fictions to Embodied Presence
7. The Truth in Lying
8. Mediated Presence: Bodies and Screens in the Analytic Space
9. The Digital Superego: Embodiment Under the Algorithmic Gaze
10. From Prosthesis to Presence
11. Mourning, Melancholia, and Machines
Conclusion: Psychoanalysis at the Interface
About the Author(s)
Alessandra Lemma is the Unit Director, Psychological Therapies Development Unit, Tavistock and Portman NHS Foundation Trust, and the Clinical Director of the Psychological Interventions Research Centre, University College London. She is a Fellow of the British Psychoanalytical Society. She is Visiting Professor, Psychoanalysis Unit, University College London, and Honorary Professor of Psychological Therapies at Essex University. She is the Regional Editor (London) of the International Journal of Psychoanalysis and General Editor of the New Library of Psychoanalysis book series (Routledge). She has published several books and papers on psychotherapy, psychoanalysis, the body, and trauma. Alessandra Lemma is also a Winner of the Levy-Goldfarb Award for Child Psychoanalysis.
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