Study Group — Technology and Mental Health

You unlock your phone before you even decide to. Your watch tracks your sleep, algorithms anticipate your interests, and artificial intelligence is beginning to take part in your choices.

Technology has ceased to be merely an external tool. It has become part of the very environment in which we think, desire, work, and relate to one another.

This study group investigates how that transformation reshapes human subjectivity: desire, the symptom, our bonds, identity, and the very experience of being a subject.

The post-ontological condition

What I call here a post-ontological condition is a situation in which the traditional separation between the human and technology is no longer enough to make sense of our experience. For a long time it was possible to ask “what is a human being?” with technology on the outside, like an instrument in hand. Today the boundary between the human and the machinic, between the real and the virtual, between the normal and the pathological, has grown blurred — and the question comes to be asked from within.

From the striking of two stones to artificial intelligence, technology was never merely a tool: it has always transformed us from within — the body, our habits, our bonds, the very idea of who we are. What is new is the intensity and the invisibility of the process. We have smartphones, smartwatches, social accounts, AI assistants — and we live convinced that we are in control of it all. Yet the algorithms that organize our days have seeped in so quietly that we barely notice: we take part in the world of data in a way that is, in large measure, unconscious.

Why study this

In this condition, subjectivity is reshaped by a silent normalization: data science looks for the unusual, and the non-normative must be named in order to be controlled — from the smartwatch alert to the rise in attention-deficit diagnoses among children. What does this do to desire, to the symptom, to listening?

There is also a paradox that psychoanalysis knows how to read. An ambivalent relationship that recalls a kind of “digital Stockholm syndrome”: we can criticize the technologies that capture us and, at the same time, feel fascination and dependence on them. As authors in developmental psychology and attachment theory discuss, contemporary technology exploits deep human mechanisms of recognition, attention, and bonding — the name, the gaze, the sense of being seen as an individual.

This is not about celebrating or demonizing technology, but about understanding what it reveals, what it conceals, and how it reshapes our affects, our identity, and our inner experience. And about asking, with rigor and without haste: how can we preserve and reinvent what is human in a world increasingly organized by machines?

Quem coordena

The group grows out of an uncommon intersection: decades of clinical practice of analytic orientation and a professional trajectory devoted to technology and innovation, including training at MIT. This double listening — that of the consulting room and that of technical systems — makes it possible to think technology from within, without naive enchantment or simplistic rejection, always starting from the subject and its consequences.

Format

• Weekly online meetings (2 hours).
• Small group, with readings agreed upon in advance for each session
• Each meeting includes a clinical vignettea situation in which technology appears in the subject’s experience or in the therapeutic space<
• Open to psychologists, psychoanalysts, students, and professionals from related fields
• Fee: R$ 150 per meeting

Reading axes

1. From the campfire to the algorithm. Technology as a force that has always constituted us — and why the post-ontological condition breaks with the idea of technology as a mere external tool.
2. The unconscious and data. Taking part in the digital world without realizing it: automatism, the capture of attention, and what escapes consciousness.
3. The normalization of the subject. When data defines the normal and the pathological — diagnoses, performance, and the production of new standards of what it is to be “human.”
4. Digital Stockholm syndrome. The paradoxical relationship with technology: dependence, seduction, and the ambivalent attachment to what conditions us. Readings on recognition and bonding, including Peter Fonagy.
5. The machine that answers. AI as interlocutor: transference, confidence, and what the machine lacks — body, emotion, history, suffering.
6. The human beyond calculation: literature, memory, and finitude. What the machine does not live and what literature knows — not as illustration, but as a form of knowledge.

Group in formation

This group will open as the first cohort takes shape. Leave your interest to receive information about dates, program, and terms of participation.