With Amy Levy, Psy.D. & Todd Essig, Ph.D.
In her paper, “The Phone as a Subject,” Dr. Levy contests the commonly held assumptions that the smartphone is an object, susceptible to healthy or pathological employment and comparable to other objects used to ameliorate the pain of reality. Instead, she will argue that the phone is a subject we interact with in a bi-directional, intersubjective field.

The author leans upon Jessica Benjamin’s 1995 work on the shift in the language of “object” to “subject” as one that brings recognition of the “other.” When we recognize the smartphone and machine-learning artificial intelligence (AI) as “other,” we can better understand their effects on our minds.

To encourage us in psychoanalysis to begin envisioning and conceptualizing the psychological course that humanity is heading on given this profound new relationship, Dr. Levy will discuss the work of New York Times best-selling author and historian Yuval Noah Harari (2017) and offer a Bionian conceptualization of the phone’s impact on human mentation.