The Cyborg Metaphor

Presentation Made at The Association for Applied Psychophysiology and Biofeedback Annual Meeting, March 2000

Good afternoon.

Today I'm going to be speaking about the cyborg metaphor.

Are any of you out there bona fide cyborgs? When we think of cyborgs, its usually about the Borg in Star Trek, the Terminator and Robocops.

Let's rethink that.

The cyborg has become a social reality. It's a life form that merges human and machine - a hybrid of mechanism and organism. I'm a cyborg - I wear a machine called contact lenses so I can see you today. I take synthesized nutrition called vitamins because I never have time to eat right. And I rely on human-designed chemicals to keep my blood pressure under control.

What about you? Most of us already fit the qualifications of a cyborg. George Landow, at Brown University, estimates that at least one in every ten of us are fully endowed cyborgs -- people living with machines such as pacemakers, artificial joints, drug implant systems, implanted corneal lenses - the list increases daily. These are the people that celebrate technologies that dramatically improve their daily physical lives - enabling them to do things that only a few years ago would have been impossible.

But that's only part of the picture. Most cyborgs have merged with machines for specific social, psychological, occupational, or behavioral purposes. How many of you use biofeedback machines, for example? What about surgeons that use lasers, airplane mechanics that use augmented reality, pilots that use flight simulators, clinicians that use virtual reality therapy? And don't forget the millions of people around the world who go into a machine to experience reality in cyberspace - where they live, love, lie, and play in a computer-created world.

In essence, we're altering our physical or psychological processes to regulate everything from medication, body rhythms, social interaction, emotional states - the list is only limited by technology.

I call it the cyborg metaphor.

A metaphor is a way to describe a relationship between elements that incorporates imagination, linguistic flourish, and real life. It a method of knowing - a way to create new meaning, establish new similarities, and as a result, define a new insight or perception into human experience. The cyborg metaphor addresses the essence of high-technology life, defining complexity without excessive oversimplification, establishing a pattern that explains the human relationship to machines. The cyborg metaphor assumes that humans will strive to master their environment, both inside and outside their bodies, through the use of technology.

Yet it has this feel of science fiction. Cyborgs are about traveling the galaxy, building robocops, and bionic men and women. But when we look closer at the assumptions of a cyborg metaphor, it actually describes some very basic evolutionary designs.

The human species is an information-processing life form that must use intellect rather than teeth, claws, or brute strength to survive. One of the most basic, distinguishing features of humans back in the stone age, was their ability to create tools. Through tools they could survive the wilderness as well as manipulate it to suit their needs. The first stone tools gave humans the environmental edge - a better chance to survive. They were key to the qualitative separation between ourselves and non-information processing animals who had no option but to coexist with a harsh and unrelenting natural world.

We didn't have the incisors of a saber-toothed tiger to attack our prey, so we invented spears.

We didn't have the coat of a woolly mammoth to protect us from cold, so we invented tools to make fire.

We didn't have the hump of a camel to store our water, so we developed containers.

Tools encouraged the growth of abstract thought, opening to door to new technologies. Once you construct a spear, someone will always come along and figure out how to improve it. The environment became a space that could be challenged and even conquered to improve the quality of human life.

In other words, we were designed to create and utilize technology. Technology was first, and always, the accumulation of knowledge for the purpose of fashioning tools, practicing arts and skills, extracting or collecting materials, modifying and improving processes. As an information-processing life form, we gather and integrate data - constantly creating, using, and improving our technologies.

It's the essence of Hartmann's concept of adaptation - we create to adapt and then adapt once again to our creations.

So embedded deep within the cyborg metaphor is the necessary belief that humans are better with machines. We use our technology to help us live longer, live better, and live in a world of our own invention.

However, we're inevitably faced with contradiction. As we follow our design to create more and more technology, increasingly replacing our human parts with machines, do we become increasingly less human?

Machines have already done much to delay our biological deaths by substituting "parts" from pacemakers to medications. Is there a machine in the future that can completely replace body parts so that we'll become immortal? Is that ultimately the goal of human technology? To be completely removed from nature? Never forced to acknowledge or experience death?

We can speculate endlessly on why we have such a powerful drive to constantly improve and redefine our technology. Perhaps it's a way to deny our biological destiny - move us further and further from the acknowledgment that as biological machines, we will eventually fail - and die. Technology nurtures the fantasy of immortality - our favorite movie legends "live" long after their deaths in the technology of film; our words, printed in a book or screen, can far outlast our bodies; our airplanes take us beyond the confines of gravity; our rockets take us beyond the confines of our planet. Freud said it well, when he asked the question:

Is it not for us to confess that in our civilized attitude toward death we are once more living psychologically beyond our means, and must reform and give truth its due?

Ernest Becker argued that one of the greatest psychological influences on human thought and behavior is the terror of death. The cyborg metaphor softens the blow. Machines aren't biological - they don't "die" in human terms. Consequently, to be a cyborg implies the ability to delay, deny or avoid death.

And much of modern cyborg technology - whether medical or psychological, achieves that in some very basic way. Instead of dealing with biological failure, we implement technology. I can't see - so I pop in my contact lenses and the world is clear (and safer). You're depressed - so you use the chemical technology, Prozac, to make you feel better - and less threatened. Technology enable our hearts to beat longer, our blood to flow faster, our bodies to battle bacterial invaders. Our latest technology aims to control the organic mechanisms, enabling us to clone, genetically engineer living materials, correct or redirect nature to suit our needs.

And now, in our world of computers, the internet, and multimedia our technology is redefining reality.

Which brings us down to the basic, psychological unit of human reality: the self.

The cyborg metaphor ultimately redefines the self. As we move between human and machine, the self must shift and adapt to its new, technologically defined position. The self is no longer a purely psychological entity emerging from a physical construction. It's a relationship between human and machine, a design in technology that increasingly dominates who we are, what we do, and how we feel.

It's all around us. We're paced by computers on our wrists that keep constant track of the passage of time, by machines that propel us to and from structures where light, temperature, transportation and security are maintained by computers tucked in a back room; and perhaps most significant - by realities created WITHIN machines. As a species, we have fake hips and kneecaps installed when our own wear out, we rely on pacemakers when our hearts run down, live, love and lie with machines that partner with our selves in cyberspace - each day our machines become more intrinsic parts of our selves.

The cyborg metaphor has become an intrinsic part of who we are today. It creates basic, essential changes in the human concept of self. Consider how much has changed with today's cyborg metaphor.

In the past, we lived, we died. In cyberspace you live. You die. And then you recreate a new persona. You play a video game with multiple "lives", easily bloodied, killed, and resurrected.

Take it one step further. You live or exist only through the intervention of the machine. Turn on the computer and go online, you're alive. Turn off the computer, and you cease to exist. All of the social relationships, the chats, the clubs, the rich communication is killed when the "off" switch is flipped. In the virtual reality of cyberspace, the cyborg metaphor predominates.

I compute therefore I am.

In the past, gender was also defined by physical properties.

In cyberspace, what makes a man or a woman? What is the difference between a man playing a woman and a woman - or a woman playing a man and a man? What is the definition of hetereosexuality or homosexuality when physical attributes don't have to come into play? Can you have real gender without bodies?

How about age? You can be fifteen or fifty, twenty or seventy. Age is not defined by years - it becomes a choice.

In the classic internet cartoon, a dog is sitting in front of a computer staring at the screen. The caption reads, "on the Internet, no one knows you're a dog."

In truth, on the internet, no one knows you're a dog, a man or a woman, your age, your name, where or how you live . . .the list goes on. A recent MSNBC survey found that 60% of people lie about their age online. It's no surprise. They lie because they can get away with it.

So where does that leave the stable, centered sense of self?

Today, living in an age of postmodernism, operating within a cyborg metaphor, the self becomes plural and decentralized - it breaks into multiple identities and roles, constructing a flexible reality that involves superficial manipulations in time, space and ideology. There is a conscious dissociation of self - an adaptive maneuver to enable individuals to experiment with identity, dwell in multiple environments, utilize different names, personalities, personal information, and personas without confirmation or validation. The illusion of anonymity protects an individual, compelling him or her to create flexible, multiple realities. Not only do we find ourselves in a virtual environment, but also in a virtual self that simulates bits and pieces of conscious and unconscious fantasy.

Technology has brought us to a "final frontier" where multiplicity is clarified, accepted and acted out within acceptable parameters of dissociation. As Sherry Turkle so aptly describes it, we cycle through many selves, moving from virtual community to community, mixing and matching roles, surfing the internet as if it were a social laboratory filled with experiments that construct and reconstruct the self.

Clearly, a new psychology is emerging. New patterns of interaction, new definitions of self, time, and multiplicity, and new communities are restructuring. What was once considered pathology is now normal and accepted behavior in cyberspace. As we adapt our technology to new and exciting treatments in psychotherapy, we need to remember that it encompasses far more than our machines. The patients that walk into our offices, clinics, and agencies are increasingly different - postmodern citizens trained to think and behave in cycling, multiple definitions - moving in superficial environments designed by computerGods who control where, how, and with whom we relate in virtual spaces. Many of our traditional modalities will work best only when and if we adapt them to the cyborg metaphor.

All of this becomes a critical part of psychotherapy.

After all, what do we do when a cyborg arrives for treatment?

First, we face a person who most likely uses computers in his or her work. Whether sitting behind a screen, using video conferencing, or computerized applications, most workers today use computers as partners, associates, or assistants in their jobs. Then they go home to friends, colleagues, and families where computers are household members - from big screen TVs to AOL to tools in the kitchen. Our patients make friends, communicate, make plans, and play in computerized worlds.

For example - I'm here only through the intervention of computers. Each step in the arrangement of this presentation was made through computers. I "met" my colleagues here online - long before I met them here, today, in this symposium. Time and geographical distance had no bearing - I knew my colleague from Israel far better than my neighbor in New York.

I collected much of my research online and discussed many of these issues in professional internet communities and through email. My proposal was written on Microsoft Word and shared with my colleagues through email provided by my cable modem. I made my plane reservations online and got specifics about this hotel on their website.

I also took advantage of my trip here in Denver to email a friend and colleague and make dinner plans. I've been a friend with him for years online but it was only the second time we met face-to-face -- although he contributed an entire chapter in one of my books. And last, but far from least, I arranged to spend a day with a cousin I only see every few years.

Perhaps the most significant point is that no one is surprised about how I arrived here today. Most or all of you probably operate in the same way.

That's the key to all this. We're all cyborgs. And as cyborgs, computer-assisted psychotherapy is as important as the couch once was to psychoanalysts. These are the experiences and relationships we hear about every day in our offices. Kids go home and instead of hanging out on street corners, they go to chat rooms. Young people meet significant others online - they court, they date, and they eventually meet offline. Many cyber relationships lead to marriage. One matchmaking service, American Singles, boasts over 700,000 postings online.

But this isn't the sole domain of the young. There are sites for senior citizens looking to meet partners - as well as every specific interest, orientation, or preference. And of course, the friendships, professional affiliations, business contacts are all part of our cyborgian existence.

Of course, this leads to a whole host of new disorders - everything from compulsive overuse to cyberinfidelities. The bottom line is that the internet - and all our cyberspaces - are computerized simulations of our lives off-line. If we, as clinicians, don't use computers, the internet, multimedia, and virtual reality in psychotherapy we ignore a very large part of our patients' lives.

How does it work? First, we need to acknowledge the cyborg metaphor. And redefine our work.

Multiple, flexible, and recycling selves need flexible, multi-modality therapists. What works for a specific patient is far more important than adhering to a single approach. A postmodern psychotherapist needs to move freely within the parameters of the cyborg metaphor.

For example, I call myself a family therapist because it's a systems approach. I customize treatment to the patient - not the other way around. I'll use anything from behavioral to psychodynamic techniques - as long as it suits the content. There are many potential pitfalls, as with any multi-tasking application. I run the risk of becoming a therapeutic jack-of-all-trades and expert in none.

So I bring in an "associate" if it suits the context. That's my computer. It's set up to perform a wide range of tasks.

With kids, I do classic play therapy - on AOL, the internet, or carefully selected software. We do things like explore social behavior using chats; self esteem in constructing a home page; learning basic skills while designing cities, theme parks, or families in Sim Software.

I break through adolescent resistance by going on the computer and surfing - admiring internet skills, exploring favorite pages, peeking (with invitation) into personal web pages.

I've taken families who are totally unable to communicate and brought the computer in as an objective mediator. They may play games, do projects, and discuss sites. Kids thrive under parent's awe over their internet skills. Parents learn more about their kids' worlds. And suddenly they're relating to one another in a safe, cyberspace world. Just one step away to generalizing behavior in an off-line home.

It's not just the computer that "speaks" to our cyborg patients - technology is their language. Use it and it work.

I've taken silent, withdrawn young girls into eager conversations by pulling out my pager and comparing colors. I connected successfully with a mildly autistic teenager by marching through electronic stores and staring, wide-eyed, at the "stuff." I've helped adults, who feel isolated, return to the "swing of things" through internet surfing and socializing.

The key is in understanding and using the cyborg metaphor. It's not inherently good or bad.

It's who we are.

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