Imagination Foreclosed: Searching for Each Other in the Digital Age

Abstract

The digital age has normalized amateur sleuthing. Despite the fact that searching online for information about patients clashes with the analytic ideal, many of us google our patients. Dynamically speaking, what lies behind these searches? Certainly, the act of searching represents a premature foreclosure of imagination; it inevitably changes the relational matrix. It often conceals an unconscious communication that the analyst has not been able to acknowledge or examine. Internet searches can be individually or dyadically informed; in both instances, they disrupt the intimacy of the two-person relationship and our own self-experience as analysts. Even more troubling, they leave us holding secrets that breach an ethical line. This essay moves beyond the problem of boundary violations and explores how obtaining information about the other through online searches informs, enriches, and disrupts the co-created therapeutic experience.