“The Digital Superego: Embodiment Under the Algorithmic Gaze”
Speaker: Alessandra Lemma
Date: Friday 19th June 2025
Time: 13:30 - 15:30
Venue: Online
Cost: £40
Register your attendance here
Bio
Alessandra Lemma is a Fellow of the British Psychoanalytic Society and a Chartered Clinical and Counselling Psychologist with extensive experience as a clinician, academic, and author.
Currently Visiting Professor in the Psychoanalysis Unit, University College London, Consultant at the Anna Freud Centre, and Visiting Professor at Centro Winnicott, Rome. Formerly Head of Psychology and Professor of Psychological Therapies at the Tavistock Clinic (in conjunction with Essex University).
Recognized internationally for contributions to psychoanalysis, trauma, impact of technology on the psyche, transgender identities, and ethics. She is the recipient of the 2022 Sigourney Award, the 2025 Scharff Award for Distinguished Contributions to Psychoanalysis and the BPC’s 2025 Bernard Rattigan Award for Psychoanalysis and Diversity.
Her forthcoming books are: Psychotechnical Becomings; Psychoanalysis, Identity, Desire and Mourning in Times of AI and Digital Mediation (Routledge, 2026) and Journeying Through Psychoanalysis: Lessons from the Couch (Wiley, 2027).
Synopsis
This lecture introduces the concept of the digital superego to conceptualize how algorithmic systems reorganize adolescent embodiment.
Under the algorithmic gaze, the body becomes a monitored surface subjected to perpetual judgment, where recognition is quantified and conditional. Drawing on clinical material, it explores how interoceptive awareness - the felt sense of bodily interiority - is displaced by exteroceptive evaluation, a mode of relating to the body as an object of scrutiny.
Psychoanalytic practice, in turn, is called upon to reclaim the body as a site of uncertainty and relational encounter, resisting the algorithmic conversion of selfhood into performance.
To read beforehand:
Leskauskas, D. (2025). Encounters with totalitarian objects in the superego development of Generation Z adolescents. International Forum of Psychoanalysis, 34(1), 9–14.