The Poetic Timestamp of Digital Erotic Objects

Abstract

Upon describing the temporal qualities of analog and digital platforms existent during copresent and online psychotherapy, I propose that the medium of interaction influences the manner by which analog and digital erotic introjects are represented and used, lending different textures to erotic transference. The digital cyberobject is introjected as searchable rather than losable such that the transference becomes less about indexing the past in narrative than articulating novel forms of presence. The two types of introjects splice together in reveries that take a mixed analog/digital character during our efforts to formulate erotic experience.

Keywords:

• copresence
• cyberobject
• digital erotic objects
• erotic transference
• digital introject
• screen relations

Notes

¹ Skype actually tries very hard to simulate copresence. As Todd Essig (personal communication, February 19, 2017) wryly commented, Skype “can’t foster co-presence despite the best efforts of all computer science. And that failure despite trying is what makes it useful!”

² Geoff is a composite of several men whom I have met: some in the consulting room; others online; friends; and, in sum being the writer whose objects they became as I typed, me.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Stephen Hartman

Stephen Hartman, PhD, is a coeditor of Studies in Gender and Sexuality and an Associate Editor of Psychoanalytic Dialogues, as well as an editor of the Psychoanalytic Dialogues blog. He is on the faculty of the Psychoanalytic Institute of Northern California and in the relational track of the NYU Postdoctoral Program in Psychoanalysis and Psychotherapy.