Psychoanalytic Ideals, New Technologies, and the Expropriations of the Corporate Self: Commentary on Paper by Stephen Hartman

Seligman admires Stephen Hartman's ability to enter and empathize with the emerging psychosocial ambience of the new social media while maintaining his focus as a psychoanalytic clinician and theorist. He then delineates how the new modes of constructing what constitutes “reality” and the aesthetics of subjectivity may mark a departure from ideals of authenticity and privacy, which are at the center of the psychoanalytic project. Finally, he worries that these shifts are linked to an overall concentration of corporate power and ownership of media and other ideological apparatuses supporting an alienated, fetishized culture of consumption and market-minded vacuity.