Eran Rolnik published “Freud in Jerusalem” (Éditions de l’Antilope), about the reception of psychoanalysis in the early years of Zionism.

Part 1 Is psychological language in the media a spread of psychoanalysis or a distortion?

ER: ““Psychoanalysis became culturally influential precisely when its concepts began to be simplified.”

It is both, but mostly a distortion. The widespread use of terms like trauma, narcissism, projection, splitting or gaslighting certainly shows how deeply psychological and psychoanalytic language has entered public culture. In that sense, one could say psychoanalysis has won an extraordinary cultural victory. Yet it is often a hollow victory. These concepts circulate detached from the discipline of listening, the texture of theory, and the ethical restraint that gave them meaning in the first place.

In the media, psychological language often becomes a tool of instant classification. Instead of opening complexity, it closes it. Instead of inviting interpretation, it offers moral labeling. Instead of deepening thought, it can become a substitute for thought. A concept like trauma, for instance, is now used to describe everything from catastrophe to ordinary disappointment, and that inflation risks trivializing both psychic suffering and history. Clinically there is always the danger that the patient will use his trauma to bypass both responsibility and the need for reparation and mitigation of the internal bad object.

Psychoanalysis, by contrast, is slow, conflictual and anti-simplifying. It does not give us comforting names for things so that we can move on. It asks what psychic work is being evaded by the very rush to name. So yes, there is a diffusion of psychoanalytic vocabulary in the media. But much of what spreads is a simplified shadow of psychoanalysis, not the thing itself. How do AI and digital life challenge psychoanalytic theory?

ER: ““Digital life changes our experience of memory, intimacy and identity.”

AI and digital life challenge psychoanalysis because they reshape the very conditions under which subjectivity is formed and sustained. Psychoanalysis........

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