TECHNOLOGY AND TECHNOLOGY. DIFFICULT DIALOGUE OR INTEGRABLE TENSION?

Abstract

This article aims to reflect on technological advancement (e.g., online games, Facebook, ChatGPT, etc.), its achievements, innovations, and social consequences, and contrasts this by asking what happens when these advances enter the realm of psychoanalytic practice. That is, when electronic games, devices, and technological resources challenge our traditional technical resources.

The analytical focus is on the characteristics of games based on technological foundations and play/playing as understood and technically used in psychotherapeutic practice.

Two vignettes (a 5-year-old boy and a 16-year-old adolescent) illustrate the diverse uses applied in each case with the emergence of games and/or technology in sessions.

It concludes with the recommendation that transforming the problem of technology into something processable and accessible to our technical, mobile, and unfinished resources may also require some intervention at the social and educational levels to alert and illuminate what, from those spheres, may potentially be promoting work contrary to a healthy subjectivation.