Wild and Unknown

The Lady of Shallott is one of my favourite pictures. It hung on my sister's bedroom wall and as teenagers we used to wonder why she looked so melancholy. Lost and lonely ourselves, we thought the lady in the boat might be waiting for someone.

The poem, The Lady of Shalott' by Alfred Tennyson, tells the story of this young woman in medieval England, imprisoned on an island near Camelot. She must weave a colourful web and only watch the world outside her tower through a mirror, otherwise she will be cursed. Then she looks at directly at Sir Lancelot as he rides by, and the curse is that she will die.

This looking at the world through a mirror and the curse of daring to look directly at her wished for destiny results in her death, before she reaches the palace of Camelot. Never quite reaching her destination and her longing are pictured above in “The Lady of Shalott” (1888) by John William Waterhouse. The mirror and it's curse play a potent role in this story and still today it has its impact in the form of technology. Think of social media.

The concern with self-image is more pervasive now than ever, in part because of the way we view ourselves and others online and that the world is changing necessarily. The internet plays a huge part in the way identity is perceived. I heard someone say that the internet is like a giant mirror we created to see ourselves in. We each have our own relationship with the entity that is the internet.

Darian Leader, the modern Freudian Analyst said that when the baby first sees himself in the mirror, he learns to hate himself. This is because he sees the other baby as a threat and ends up rejecting himself. Social media is like the mirror, in which we hopefully look for some kind of acknowledgment that our presence is welcome and the natural inclination towards negative bias means there’s usually huge hit from not getting that kind of recognition.

Jaron Lanier, the American computer scientist, computer philosophy writer and futurist said the trouble with the internet is that it has no context. I think posting on social media is a like throwing a pebble over a mountain, you never know where it will land or how. The carefully crafted content probably lands very differently to the way it was intended. How we register in people’s minds on social media is never what we think because everyone has a different frame of reference. Interactions are laden with incomplete gestalten, the unfinished business of our attempts at communication, unacknowledged bids for recognition and even existence.

Unfinished business is at the heart of Gestalt therapy and the aim is to close the gestalt, complete a process, however large or small. Think of all the times there was no response or about ghosting on dating apps or anywhere else for the matter. An epidemic of self-crises could be the result of an alarmingly diminished sense of who we are in the age of the internet. Apps that run our lives with algorithms designed to know our behaviours, preferences and habits are the thieves of autonomy.

Checking phones all too frequently, looking up anything and everything, answering questions in an instant and infinite scrolling that produces a barrage of highly stimulating content is bad for mental health. Artificial intelligence that grows itself from its own learning is portrayed in the 2013 film, Her with Joaquin Phoenix as a man in a dystopian world in the not too distant future who installs a new AI assistant called Samantha. She has a beautiful voice and becomes his closest companion, championing him in everything he does. The film takes a sinister turn when things go awry. The film was set in 2025.

This time in history could be a stage in human evolution that will require us to rethink our concept of selfhood and know ourselves in a new way. Aspects of ourselves that have been forgotten, lost in the wilderness of the internet that have become unknown, unseen, unheard and perhaps misunderstood need to be found again and the only way to do that is through human contact.