Depth Psychology and the Digital Age
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How can we re-boot our understanding of the psychological and soulful aspects of technology in order to adopt a new way of being in a digital world?
Publication Info: Depth Psychology and the Digital Age, edited by Bonnie Bright. Published November 2016 by Depth Insights. $14.99 Kindle, 331 pages; $17.99, Paperback 280 pages
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by Bonnie Bright
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SHORT DESCRIPTION (233 words)
Google “the digital age” and you’ll discover it is rather broadly defined as “the present time”—when most information is available in digital form, as compared to the era before the rise of computers in the 1970s. Depth psychology is the study of the soul, first and foremost associated with uncovering and exploring the unconscious. This diverse and compelling collection of depth psychological insights reveals the archetypal aspects at work on all of us in the depths of the digital age.
For one of the founders of modern depth psychology, Carl Gustav Jung, who was born in 1875 and died in 1961, the “digital age” remained in potentia, but even more than half a century ago, he had significant concerns about the challenges of a growing mind/matter split and the excessive focus of western cultures in particular on science, technology, and rational thinking at the expense of more soulful, reflective way of being. Jung warned that this trend toward “modernity” could be detrimental unless modernity could be adequately acknowledged and dealt with from a psychological view.
What is asked for is that we re-boot our understanding of the psychological and soulful aspects of technology in order to adopt a new way of being in a digital world. The contents of this volume are profoundly archetypal, proffering a chance to re-invent our relationship to the digital age and re-infuse it with meaning and soul.
LONG DESCRIPTION (630 words)
Google “the digital age” and you’ll discover it is rather broadly defined as “the present time”—when most information is available in digital form, as compared to the era before the rise of computers in the 1970s. Depth psychology is the study of the soul, first and foremost associated with uncovering and exploring the unconscious. The Greek word psyche means “butterfly,” and is linked to the Greek anemos, meaning “wind” or “breath,” as well as “soul” and “spirit”—all concepts that seem distinctly unrelated to technology, yet this diverse and compelling collection of depth psychological insights quickly reveals the archetypal aspects at work on all of us in the depths of the digital age.
For one of the founders of modern depth psychology, Carl Gustav Jung, who was born in 1875 and died in 1961, the “digital age” remained in potentia, but even more than half a century ago, he had significant concerns about the challenges of a growing mind/matter split and the excessive focus of western cultures in particular on science, technology, and rational thinking. Jung believed this trend toward “modernity” emerged at the expense of more soulful, reflective, poetic ways of being and issued a strong caution against our increasing reliance on machines and technology. He warned of severe consequences that might ultimately propel our civilization toward collapse, unless modernity could be adequately acknowledged and dealt with from a psychological view.
The rapid growth of technology in recent decades, combined with what is arguably a decided lack of psychological context around it, has contributed intensively to concerns for some regarding the speed and quantity of information we and our capacity to navigate such a tsunami of data. Technology has profoundly amplified the speed and efficiency at which we accomplish certain tasks, but at the same time has served to expedite the very pace of our lives, leaving us with little time for reflection and reconnection with things of the soul.
Technology alone will never be that thing that enlivens us, enforces our sense of soul in a fast-moving world, and roots us in something which is inherently already there. With the proliferation of digital advances in an increasingly globalized culture, we tend to take “technologies” lightly, without giving them their proper ritual due. In earth-based cultures, “technologies of the sacred” have always encompassed ceremonies, invocations, and rites that created containers in which something very special could occur.
Shamanism was only practiced within the proper context by individuals who were designated and prepared to enter sacred space. Over time as the ritual has been lost, the container has also crumbled, and technology is no longer wielded in sacred space but rather is used haphazardly by virtually all members of our society. What is asked for is that we re-boot our understanding of the psychological and soulful aspects of technology in order to adopt a new way of being in a digital world.
Social media, video gaming, virtual reality, digital media, screen time, mobile devices, electronic music, “smart” technology, and electronic waste are all imperatives in our current culture, and will continue to be future realities for decades, if not centuries, to come. While the digital age will always produce consternation, scintillation, and debate, no matter the pace of growth or decline, the essays and themes that appear in this collection are timeless, tapping into underlying ideas that can offer context and meaning for generations to come.
The authors in this anthology proffer a chance to redeem ourselves, to re-invent our relationship to the digital age and re-infuse these sacred tools with meaning and soul. The details of our technologies may morph, but the contents of this volume are profoundly archetypal, offering patterns upon which we may predicate our own relationship to the depths and breadths of the digital age.
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 TABLE OF CONTENTS
Introduction
Bonnie Bright
Going Somewhere: Implications of Electronically Inflated Psychological Acceleration
Steven P. Wood
Jung and the Posthumans
Glen Slater
Allegory of the E-Cave
Craig Chalquist
Online Social Networking: The Digital Face of Relational Psychodynamics
Aaron Balick
Terminal Talk: Reflections on Thinking and Saying in the Digital World
Robert D. Romanyshyn
Electronic Dance Music and the Indomitable Imagination
Jason Butler
Paintbrush Ramblings
Andrés Ocazionez
Virtual Hyperrealities: Redefining the Real World for the Hungry Imagination Through Digital Media
Priscilla Hobbs
Be the Story, Change the Story: Engaging Gender-based Archetypes in Online Science Fiction and Fantasy Fandom
Lola McCrary
A Jungian Alice in Social Media Land: Some Reflections on Solastalgia, Kinship Libido, and Tribes Formed on Facebook
Sharon Heath
Interplay: Bridging Dynamic Systems through Video Game Narrative
Elizabeth Shepherd
Mythic Ringtones: Hello Hermes! We’ve Come to Talk with You Again
Diane P. Coffey
Reincarnative Gaming: The Hard Death and The Intransient Self
John Brendan Loghry
The Great Internet Daydream Machine
Jason Sugg
Finding the Connection: Depth Psychology and Social Media
Donna May
Through the Looking Glass: Reflections and
Adventures in Social Media
Eva Rider
Madness and the Map
Drew Foley
Century of the Selfie: Culture and Context in the Era of Electronic Waste
Bonnie Bright
Poetry
The Universe is Only This Big
Brian Michael Tracy
Elevator Football
Dennis Patrick Slattery
Excerpts from Authors
Technology alone will never be that thing that enlivens us, enforces our sense of soul in a fast-moving world, and roots us in something which is inherently already there. We must re-boot our understanding of the psychological and soulful aspects of technology in order to adopt a new way of being in a digital world.
— Bonnie Bright, Ph.D.
In previous times, myth functioned as a bridge to our deeper psychic layers, linking them to the mysteries of our vitality....The computer also multi-tasks as a psychological metaphor and it can be used as a psychic retreat. Depending upon our needs and utility, this latest technology can function as a thoughtful refuge of remembering or a hiding place of forgetting.
—Steve Wood, Ph.D.
Unlimited information and worldwide connection evoke images of expansive knowledge and broader understanding. At the same time streams of factoids and sound bites obscure deep or complex comprehension... I recently stood in front of Van Gogh’s “Starry Night” at the MoMA in New York City and watched smart phones readily displace perception and memory. Many people walked away without beholding the painting at all; the experience had been effectively stored in the phone—digitized.
—Glen Slater, Ph.D.
Jung once commented that the function of the archetypes is to reconnect us with the root condition….I find myself thinking of those with whom I regularly communicate wall-to-wall as my Facebook tribe, one of millions of tribes singing songs of the dark times back and forth across the Internet and, in the process, constellating little sparks of conscious light.
—Sharon Heath, Ph.D.
We are called to imagine a tomorrow that is not just the repetition of today but a tomorrow that re-collects what was and carries it forward into what might be, a creative engagement with time;, a gathering up and carrying forward of a living history. How do we think, say and teach in the digital world?
—Robert Romanyshyn, Ph.D.
Social media offers each of us a blank page from which to begin again....The possibilities range from a sales opportunity to a soul’s opportunity. Depending on our intention, either and both are possible, and woe to the one who cannot discriminate between the two!
—Eva Rider, M.A.
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"The upheaval of our world and the upheaval of our consciousness are one and the same.”
—C.G. Jung,
Modern Man in Search of a Soul,
p. 215
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