Free Public Roundtable to Explore How Digital Life Is Reshaping Human Psyche

STOCKBRIDGE — What happens to intimacy, presence, and the human mind when our most meaningful relationships play out on screens? That question takes center stage at a free public roundtable on Saturday, May 9 from 10:30 a.m. to noon, hosted by the Erikson Institute of the Austen Riggs Center in Stockbridge.

“Dislocated Presences: Technology, the Psyche, and the Meaning of Virtual Space” will bring together scholars and clinicians from psychoanalysis, literary theory, and psychology to examine how digital technologies are transforming psychic life — and what it means to be present, connected, or contained in a world increasingly mediated by screens. Attendance is free and open to the public, with both in-person and virtual options available.

Panelists include Ben Kafka, Leora Trub, and Christian Thorne, moderated by Austen Riggs Psychology Fellow Hannah Schmitt. Together they will explore how teletherapy, online rituals, and screen-mediated relationships challenge and extend classic psychoanalytic ideas — among them transitional space, the container-contained, and the skin ego — and what these concepts can offer us as we navigate an increasingly disembodied world.

The roundtable is the final installment of “Rooted & Displaced: Interdisciplinary Perspectives on the Meaning of Place,” an international series co-presented by the Sigmund Freud Museum, the Freud Foundation US, and the Erikson Institute of the Austen Riggs Center. The series has brought together voices from across disciplines to explore how place — its presence and its loss — shapes identity, memory, and mental life.

Registration is required for both in-person and virtual attendance. The event is free and open to mental health professionals, scholars, students, and interested members of the public throughout the region and beyond. Click here to register.