Psychotechnical Becomings

Alessandra Lemma is Visiting Professor in the Psychoanalysis Unit at University College London, UK, Consultant at the Anna Freud Centre, and Visiting Professor, Centro Winnicott, Italy. She is the recipient of several awards, including the Sigourney Award (2022), the Scharff Award (2025), and the Bernard Rattigan Award for Psychoanalysis and Diversity (2025), and is a Fellow of the British Psychoanalytic Society.

'Alessandra Lemma offers a groundbreaking psychoanalytic account of how digital technologies and artificial intelligence are transforming psychic development, embodiment, and relational life. Moving with intellectual rigor and clinical precision between theory, culture, and case material, Lemma reframes the analytic encounter within a technologically mediated world. Psychotechnical Becomings is a profoundly intelligent and deeply humane book, a courageous contribution to contemporary psychoanalysis—interdisciplinary, ethically attuned, and clinically indispensable.'Vittorio Lingiardi, Professor, Psychiatrist, and Psychoanalyst, Sapienza University of Rome, 2023 Sigourney Award Recipient'The evolution of humankind has been much influenced by technological advances, and though some have brought major societal changes we can still read and identify with the thoughts, feelings, and behaviours described in the classical Greek and Roman texts. However, something qualitatively different may be happening with the emergence of artificial intelligence. I urge you to let Alessandra Lemma take you on a voyage of exploration and discovery as exciting and frightening as those taken in earlier times by adventurers heading out into unknown and turbulent oceans or trudging through uncharted deserts and jungles, for as you read her riveting account you will begin to realize how this time not only our societies but the internal world of our children and grandchildren is being radically changed.' Professor, the Lord Alderdice, FRCPsych, House of Lords, London, UK'This is a groundbreaking book. Alessandra Lemma approaches the impact of AI, chatbots, and social media more generally from a base in clinical work, with meticulous accounts of the to and fro between herself and her patients. At the same time, she draws on a wide and scholarly range of reference. She traces the impact of life online on vulnerable adolescents, showing that it can sometimes be essential in holding them together as well as potentially short-circuiting essential aspects of development. A dazzling tour de force.'Maria Rhode, Emeritus Professor of Child Psychotherapy at the Tavistock & Portman NHS Foundation Trust, and Child Analyst of the British Psychoanalytical Society'This book offers an urgent antidote to the collective illusion confounding today’s clinicians working with patients entangled in the digital vortex. Drawing on her pioneering psychoanalytic practice, Alessandra Lemma provides an integrative framework for understanding contemporary forms of psychic suffering. With striking clarity, she explores how the digital colonizes the core of therapeutic communication. By tracing the evolving textures of transference and selfhood shaped by generative technologies, Lemma compels us to reflect on the unprecedented psychotechnical transformations of our time. A lucid, pressing, and profoundly relevant contribution to clinical thought today.' Martin Debbané, Professor of Psychopathology, Research Department of Clinical, Educational and Health Psychology, UCL, and Faculty of Psychology and Educational Sciences, University of Geneva, Switzerland'There are few contemporary psychoanalysts who have approached the transformations of digital life with the clarity, courage, and intellectual generosity of Alessandra Lemma. Psychotechnical Becomings is a landmark work — not only for its subject but for the discipline itself. Lemma has once again brought psychoanalysis to where it most needs to be: in thoughtful, ethically grounded conversation with the changing conditions of being human. In doing so, she reminds us that psychoanalysis, at its best, is not a doctrine but a living practice of interpretation — one that must remain open to the world’s new forms of psychic suffering.'Peter Fonagy, CBE, Professor, Head of the Division of Psychology and Language Sciences, University College London, and National Clinical Advisor on Children’s Mental Health, NHS England

• Introduction: Beyond Content: When the Medium Stages Becoming Part I. Algorithms, Desire, and the Reconfigured Self 1. Rethinking Subjectivity and Development in the Digital Age 2. Dialogues on the Digital Psyche 3. From Scrolling Through to Working Through: Adolescence, Algorithms, and the Search for Coherence 4. At the Meniscus of Self-Understanding: Rethinking the Examined Life in an Age of Artificial Intelligence 5. The Mediation of Desire 6. On Not Having It All: The Fetishisation of Trans Women in Online Pornography Part II. Screen to Skin: From Defensive Fictions to Embodied Presence 7. The Truth in Lying 8. Mediated Presence: Bodies and Screens in the Analytic Space 9. The Digital Superego: Embodiment Under the Algorithmic Gaze 10. From Prosthesis to Presence 11. Mourning, Melancholia, and Machines Conclusion: Psychoanalysis at the Interface