Eros in the Age of Advanced Technology featuring Danielle Knafo, Ph.D.

Please join us, in person, at the Burlington Hilton for a day of discussion with Danielle Knafo, Ph.D.

The first lecture, “Fifty Shades of Upgrade: The Existential Escapades of Sex-Tech,” will emphasize the ways sex and technology have always partnered for pleasure, novelty, transcendence, and perversion. The tech enterprise is rooted in original anxiety about limitation and how it might be transcended. Tools and machines help us with our battle against threat while making possible new modes of pleasure. The internet and associated technologies (AI) have enabled the creation of an alternative adult world of sex dolls and sex robots, cybersex, teledidonics, sexting, catfishing, internet porn, sexbots, and more in the widespread deployment of omnipotent fantasy. This first presentation will explore the intimate connection between sex and technology, discuss the massive sea change in the new sexual landscape, and offer several clinical vignettes, including one of a man who loved a synthetic doll, to illustrate this connection.

The second lecture, titled “The Sexual Illusionist,” will explore how every therapy is a love relationship of a sort and that the analytic work can be viewed as an act of love. But how is this accomplished in the case of perversions, since they are essentially the antithesis of love and intimacy? Among the greatest challenges such patients present for the analyst are how to humanize those who dehumanize and how to teach them to love. This lecture presents the case of Cain, a man who learned to love in his analysis, but whose very love resulted in the need to flee.

See the attached brochure for more details including the day's schedule.