The Imp in the iPhone

ABSTRACT

A case vignette involving contemporary communications technology—an iPhone, a computer, digital photos, and Skype—suggests that unconscious communications are not only repetitions of the patient’s ongoing experience and dynamics, but may also be prospective, expressing emerging emotional and psychological potentials that were previously unavailable to the patient. These communications may also provide direction for the treatment via the analyst’s countertransference fantasies and responses. It is also suggested that these bidirectional communications are shared between patient and analyst through an unconscious field akin to what Jung posited as a collective unconscious.

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Notes on contributors

Sherry Salman

Sherry Salman, Ph.D., L.P., is a founding member and was the first president of the Jungian Psychoanalytic Association, a nonprofit educational community that promotes the creative understanding and applications of Jungian psychology in professional, cultural, and scientific communities, and fosters the training of psychoanalysts. She now serves on the faculty there. Dr. Salman received her B.A. from Vassar College and her Ph.D. in neuropsychology from the City University of New York. She did research in psychosomatic medicine and subsequently completed her training as a Jungian analyst in 1985. She has worked as a psychoanalyst, teacher, lecturer, and author for 30 years, contributing to the education of many Jungian analysts and psychotherapists and has served as an associate editor for three professional journals. Her book, Dreams of Totality: Where We Are When There’s Nothing at the Center, explores symbol formation in regard to processes of integration and the sensibility of wholeness in contemporary culture. Dr. Salman recently represented the Jungian perspective at the first tri-state Psychoanalytic Fair hosted by Teachers College, Columbia University. She is based in New York’s Hudson Valley and New York City.