Book Announcement by Richard Frankel (USA) and Victor J. Krebs (Peru)
This new title from Routledge is a psychoanalytic and philosophical exploration of how the digital is transforming our perception of the world and our understanding of ourselves. Drawing on examples from everyday life, myth and popular culture, Human Virtuality and Digital Life: Philosophical and Psychoanalytic Investigations argues that virtual reality is only the latest instantiation of the phenomenon of the virtual, which is intrinsic to human being.
Richard Frankel and Victor J. Krebs illuminate what is at stake in our understanding of the relationship between the virtual and the real, showing how our present technologies both enhance and diminish our psychological lives. The authors claim that technology is a pharmakon – at the same time both a remedy and a poison – and in their writing exemplify a method that overcomes the polarization that compels us to regard it either as a liberating force or a dangerous threat in human life. The digital revolution challenges us to reckon with the implications of what is being called our posthuman condition, leaving behind our modern conception of the world as constituted by atemporal essences and reconceiving it instead as one of processes and change. In a postscript, the authors consider the sudden plunge into the virtual effected by the 2020 global pandemic.
This book will appeal not only to psychotherapists, psychoanalysts, and philosophers, but anyone interested in the ways virtuality and the digital are transforming our contemporary lives.
Richard Frankel, Ph.D. is a faculty member and supervisor at The Massachusetts Institute for Psychoanalysis. He is a teaching associate and supervisor in psychiatry at Harvard Medical School. He has a private practice in Belmont, MA. His book, The Adolescent Psyche, is being reprinted this fall as part of the Routledge Classic Edition Series.
Victor J. Krebs, Ph.D. is Professor of Philosophy at the Pontifical Catholic University of Perú and philosophical curator at VJK curaduria filosofica. He is the author of Of Soul and Art: Reflections on the Image, Culture and Memory (1998), The Recovery of Sense: Wittgenstein, Philosophy and the Transcendent (2008), and The Pornographic Imagination: Against Skepticism in Culture (2014). He is also editor (with William Day) of Seeing Wittgenstein Anew (Cambridge University Press, 2010) and a regular contributor to the Sunday supplement of El Comercio in Peru.
Richard Frankel
Belmont, Massachusetts, USA
Email Richard Frankel
Victor J. Krebs
Lima, Peru
Email Victor Krebs
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