One smart object – three layers of smartphone use in discovering an encapsulated patient’s inner world*

Abstract

ABSTRACT This paper explores the use of a smartphone within a therapy. It describes its use as a screen object in the service of survival-oriented infantile omnipotence, towards its use as a bridge that facilitated the structuring of internal space and the emergence of nascent capacities for relatedness and introspection. Clinical material from a ten year-long therapy with an adopted girl illustrates the presence of the smartphone on three layers of the therapeutic relationship. First, on a sensory level, the smartphone was used as an almost autistic screening object, but also as an auditory-visual envelope where therapist and patient could be immersed together. Second, on the level of patient-therapist communication and transference relations, the use of the smartphone revived infantile trauma involving the internalisation of a parental gaze that established a distorted internal and external gaze experience, which I termed ‘psychic cross-eyes’. Third, the smartphone served as a ‘third’ object that helped establish our shared observation of reality, and of the patient’s own psyche. By dwelling together, and developing a private language of ‘being-with’ ‘inside’ the phone, while gradually interpreting primitive anxieties and defences in terms of withdrawal from relatedness, we were able to add greater flexibility to the patient’s notion of relatedness, establish her binocular vision, and promote the development of the inner witness function. The paper thus explores the smartphone’s transition from a sterile, screening object, to a communicative, ‘object-seeking’ presence.