On the 21st-Century Necessity of the UnconsciousThis essay shared Section V's 2006 Morton A. Schillinger Prize
By Todd Essig, Ph.D.
Although some current versions of the posthuman point to the antihuman and the apocalyptic, we can craft others that will be conducive to the long-range survival of humans and the other life-forms, biological and artifical, with whom we share the planet and ourselves.
(Hayles, 1999, p. 291)
In 1953, at the birth of the information age during the interdisciplinary "Macy Conferences," Warren McCulloch, the noted neuropsychiatrist and researcher, and Lawrence Kubie, the noted psychoanalyst, had a fight. Fifty or so years later, during a treatment that radically changed course when digital communications devices entered a patient's life, I had a similar fight, albeit with myself. A closer look at these two clashes between psychoanalysis and the information age, which this essay endeavors to provide, shows how issues first contested in that infrequently cited episode of intellectual history were also present many years later in my own internal struggles as I worked through a 21st-century clinical challenge. Taken together, these similar issues speak directly to the necessity of the unconscious.
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