Aneurysm sealing

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Understanding digital relationships with smartphones: A psychoanalytic perspective

With the latest data informing us that 78% of UK adults now own a smartphone and that most young people report accessing digital media through a smartphone themselves it is evident that the smartphone as a digital device has become a ubiquitous everyday object. With the rate of growth of digital technologies, it is difficult to research the impact of smartphones on our way of relating to ourselves and others without a constant feeling of playing catch-up. The author uses a mixed methodology design to gain a better understanding of the nature of the human-smartphone relationship which might allow us to think more about what underpins our relationship with digital media rather than how we use it at any given point in time. This paper reviews the literature from both non-psychoanalytic and psychoanalytic perspectives to explore the more unconscious aspects of the relationship that are being actively engaged. The author then undertakes a short autoethnographic study of his own relationship with his smartphone and conducts a focus group of training child psychotherapist to gather personal experience of the human-smartphone relationship and the implications of how the presence of the smartphone in the consulting room impacts upon the practice of child and adolescent psychoanalytic psychotherapy. Findings suggest that all smartphone users, children and adults, are being encouraged to develop an unconscious intimate attachment with the smartphone which is reflective of the mother-infant relationship and it proposes that the smartphone is experienced as a digital pseudo-breast which is designed to not be given up