51 pages • 1 hour read
Sherry TurkleThe Empathy Diaries: A Memoir
Nonfiction | Autobiography / Memoir | Adult | Published in 2021A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Part 2, Chapters 12-14Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Part 2: “1968-1975”
Part 2, Chapter 12 Summary: “Chère-cheur”
In 1973, Turkle travels back to France to conduct interviews with hundreds of French psychoanalysts for her research on the Lacanian village for her dissertation. She attends seminars at Lacan’s Freudian School and other schools that have split off from it. Turkle believes the interviews are successful because she is distanced from the subject as an American outsider. She is even invited to interview Lacan himself, who speaks to her warmly, eager to convey his ideas to an American audience.
Turkle is drawn to Lacanian thought through her personal experience of the idea of “les non-dupes errent” or “those who are not duped in error,” a play on words “le nom du père” or “[t]he name of the father” (210, 211). Lacan argues that the way a mother interacts with the father’s name constructs the meaning of the father for the child. Turkle makes sense of her feelings of insecurity, isolation, and loss of identity through her mother’s refusal to speak her biological father’s name.
From her studies of Lacan and his following in France, Turkle extracts three key takeaways for her own research. The first is that a liminal space is essential to new constructs of the self, as new ideas gain shape when old ideas lose their power. The second is that people have symbolic status in the order of a class system and are constructed through language and law. There is no way to escape the social constraints in which a person is formed. Turkle considers this her most Lacanian belief. She notes that in college, her protesting of the Vietnam War led her to psychoanalysis, as her personal and political interests merged. Finally, the splitting of Lacan’s followers and Lacan is connected to the issues within psychoanalysis itself. Lacan encourages his followers to think for themselves, but only within the limits of his own theories.
Part 2, Chapter 13 Summary: “The Perfect Shortcake”
Back in Boston in 1974, Turkle starts writing her thesis. She wants to become a psychoanalyst and study at the Boston Psychoanalytic Society and Institute. However, as a non-medical student, she is required to sign a waiver that states she will only practice analysis for research purposes, which she feels is dishonest to the patients who want treatment. Influenced by Lacanian thought, Turkle feels that signing the waiver would affect her practice of analysis. Ultimately, Turkle completes the coursework for analysis but never takes on clinical patients. In 1975, she takes a job as an assistant professor at MIT to “define a new field” in the social studies of technology and science (224).
That same year, Turkle’s grandmother is diagnosed with pancreatic cancer. When her grandfather hears the diagnosis, he becomes angry and refuses to pay for a home nurse. Aunt Mildred is ashamed of his reaction. She moves back from California, and together she and Turkle provide at-home care for her grandmother until she is admitted to hospice and dies that December. Her aunt’s heartfelt gratitude for her support and friendship during her mother’s illness reminds Turkle of the friendship she never had with her own mother, for which she grieves.
Part 2, Chapter 14 Summary: “Knots”
Lacan contacts Turkle to request that she set up an MIT visit for him to lecture and meet American intellectuals. At dinner with a group of psychoanalysts, Lacan discusses the silencing effect of being institutionalized and the problems of psychoanalysis in a clinical setting. Lacan’s personal visits with prominent academics cause friction, and professor Noam Chomsky judges Lacan to be a “charlatan.” At a lunch meeting with Papert, a mathematician, the waitstaff offend Lacan by demanding that he wear a tie in the dining room, and he storms out of the restaurant. Lacan gives a lecture to a group of scientists on the topic of topological Borromean knots, a mathematical concept. He asserts their link to self-reflection, and the scientists are bemused and angry.
Turkle admits to her Aunt Mildred that she has recurring nightmares about her childhood visits with Charlie in which they are being followed. Mildred reveals that they had hired a private detective to monitor the visits.
In 1976 at MIT, Turkle experiences a new transitional shift in technological thinking. People begin to speak about the mind as if it were a computer and feelings as “codes.” When Turkle begins interviewing people about computers, she discovers that people are beginning to wonder if the human mind works like a machine.
Part 2, Chapters 12-14 Analysis
In Chapter 12, Turkle explores the relationship between her professional choices and personal ethos, highlighting the interplay between her academic mindset and identity. Turkle is influenced by the Lacanian theories she studies, which confirm for her the importance of studying the development of the self in connection to society.
Lacan views language as shaping the psyche. This offers Turkle a new perspective of her relationship to her parents. Lacan’s theory of “les noms du père” argues that “[t]he dynamics of the ‘name of the father’ operate even if there is an absent father. The mother holds the meaning of the father’s name for the child in how she talks to the child about the father” (210). Turkle writes that her isolation and fear of connection are linked to her mother’s refusal to fill in the details of her father’s identity. Her mother interacted with her father’s name in a way that indicted and mystified it, leaving Turkle to feel unmoored and unsafe.
Turkle again links her personal revelations with her professional ones, highlighting the impact her studies of technology have had on her personal morality and relationships. She examines Self-Discovery Through “Evocative Objects,” interacting with idea-objects to create a memoir and account of personal identity.
Turkle examines her relationship to honesty as an adult. She confronts a moral dilemma when signing the waiver stating that she will only practice analysis for research purposes, feeling that it is dishonest to her patients who want treatment. She attributes her decision to not treat patients to her exposure to Lacanian thought. Turkle’s intolerance for dishonesty as a professional demonstrates her shift in identity from her mother’s world, in which her mother lied often for appearances and her own ends. The waiver is a concrete example of The Need for Empathy in Science, as Turkle’s empathy for her patients’ pain makes her feel that the waiver is immoral.
Turkle highlights her shifting identity through her interaction with her mother’s memory, an object she returns to view in new ways. When her grandmother dies, Turkle connects with her longing for her mother’s friendship, which she was unable to have while her mother was alive. She interacts in a new way with her mother’s use of her father’s name, realizing that her mother “had decided that [she] would be a Turkle, not a Zimmerman. [Turkle] tried to fulfill her desire. But, like her, [Turkle] was also a Bonowitz, before all that struggle began (232). Turkle’s focus on being caught between two family names transforms into being caught between three, giving her a new way of thinking about herself. The intersection of Turkle’s academic and personal analysis allows her new insights as she moves between them.
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