Helen Rollins
Psychoanalysis for the Fourth Industrial Revolution

The ongoing Fourth Industrial Revolution is transforming the core of our lives with digital media, artificial intelligence, automation, and ubiquitous connectivity. These technologies do not simply respond to our desires, but rather cultivate and exploit them, drawing us ever deeper into opaque control systems. They take hold of our very subjectivity.

How can we make sense of our changing self as the boundaries between the physical and the social, the public and the private blur, and virtually everything is fodder for  commodification? Interpreting these transformations requires more than a traditional analysis of economics and technology alone. 

Psychoanalysis is a philosophy of subjectivity, a tool that can elucidate the structure of our consciousness and the vicissitudes of its entanglement with our economic and technological reality. This four-part course examines the subjective, political, economic, and technological transformations as inseparable from one another. It interrogates the evolving nature of institutions, corporations, desire, authority, repression, and the social bond. 

Through a psychoanalytic approach, these seminars and discussions offer a distinctive way of thinking about these changes, attending not only to conscious beliefs, but also to unconscious fantasy, conflict, religious thinking, and enjoyment. 

In four sessions, exploring psychoanalytic understandings of art and film, artificial intelligence, capital, and faith and belief, participants will explore these themes beyond familiar partisan certainties or cultural campism. The course is designed for both those new to the ideas of psychoanalysis and to readers already familiar with thinkers such as Freud, Lacan, Hegel, Marx, and contemporary psychoanalytic and continental thought.