Tordo, Frédéric

The psyche of the connected and transformed body, between containing capacity and augmentation - 2019.


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With Freud, and then Anzieu, we have learnt that a psychic function develops by attaching itself to a bodily function, whose functioning it transposes on to the psychic level. This text explores a complementary hypothesis in the era of the hypermodern body: psychic functions find support in technology and its functions, which they transcribe in the psyche. The function of containing capacity/augmentation is presented: the technology which espouses the surface of the body, or with which the subject is simply connected, is matched by the containing function of a part of the ego – which I call the cyborg-ego. This implies an extensions of the ego’s boundaries, and thus of the psychic surface. A clinical vignette serves to illustrate this function and the way that it artificially patches over a psychopathology of the containing function.