Health News

The Internet and Pop Psychology

Sept. 15, 2000 (New York) -- Instead of posters of rock stars and movie actors, today's children and adolescents may opt to hang pictures of Microsoft chairman Bill Gates or Jeff Bezos, the founder and CEO of Amazon.com, on their walls.

The Internet, along with the icons of the new economy such as Gates and Bezos, have infiltrated about every aspect of society, from child development and corporate culture to the practice of psychiatry, says Kerry J. Sulkowicz, MD, a faculty member of New York University's Psychoanalytic Institute.

"Some parents used to want their children to grow up to be doctors and lawyers. Now they want them to grow up to be entrepreneurs and captains of industry," he says at a lecture at St. Vincent's Hospital and Medical Center here in New York City. "Business leaders are overtaking sports stars and movie stairs as heroic figures and idols in popular culture."

"We can easily idealize such electronic luminaries as Bill Gates and Jeff Bezos as omnipotent visionaries, partly as a defense against our envy of them, but also out of our wish to fuse with them and acquire their power and seeming invulnerability," says Sulkowicz, who is also the president of The Boswell Group, LLC, a management consulting firm in New York City.

"The Internet has changed just about everything, even though it's only been with us for less than a decade. Its form evolves nearly daily, but it has already so infused our culture that it has become a metaphor for much that is fast, new, exciting, progressive, even dangerous in our society." He says the anonymity and facelessness of the Internet "give rise to an unprecedented society-wide disinhibition. ... People say things to each other that they might, in the past, have said only to their ... psychiatrist."

For example, when it comes to the practice of psychiatry, how a patient uses the Internet and for what can reveal a great deal about his or her psychology, Sulkowicz tells WebMD.

"If a patient told me or I observed that that they had difficulty with intimacy, yet they were able to engage in intense passionate exchanges via e-mail or with someone they met in a chat room, I may want to know what's different. Why does it feel safer to be so open on an email and so difficult to be open when sitting in a room with a spouse?" says Sulkowicz, also a clinical associate professor of psychiatry at New York University School of Medicine

Even with its exponential growth, the Internet will never replace face-to-face therapy, he says. It may help with patient recruitment, but if a doctor treated a patient via the Internet, they would miss out on so much, such as nonverbal cues like body language.