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 8-11Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Part 2: “1968-1975”
Part 2, Chapter 8 Summary: “Newspapers and Vinegar”
Turkle moves to France in the wake of the May 1968 student-worker revolution, in which a series of student protests inspires country-wide workers’ strikes and leads to a change of government. Turkle plans to study the link between the revolt and its Marxist theoretical underpinnings. She arranges to attend Sciences Po, an independent university well-known for its history, politics, and sociology subjects. In her studies, she learns a French style of composition, divided into three parts. She adapts it to her personal learning style, which involves trial and error rather than a linear process. In her later academic work, she identifies this approach as “bricolage” or “tinkering,” noting that it is a style used by both women and children in computer coding.
In Europe, Turkle seeks to broaden her mindset beyond that of her family of origin, whose experience of wartime and persecution led them to mistrust Germans and boycott German products. Turkle visits Germany to connect with young Germans and understand their perspective of the war. She finds them more willing to discuss their part in the Holocaust than the French, who often deny or defend the past.
Turkle attends many political discussions with intellectual speakers, “debating the Vietnam War, the capitalist system, psychoanalysis and the Left, the end of Gaullism, the next steps after May” (158). Turkle develops a more confident version of herself, “French-speaking Sherry” (162), which informs her understanding of online personalities in her later research of cyberspace and social media. She dreams of a life as a serious academic woman and buys a stylish travel bag that symbolizes her identity abroad, with important papers to carry.
Part 2, Chapter 9 Summary: “Things for Thinking”
In 1969, Turkle returns to Radcliffe to write her thesis, which is based on her experiences of France and the events of the May revolt. She studies the influence of intellectuals’ theories of the events of May and finds their responses predictable based on their prior writings. Her thesis advisor, the social historian Benjamin Moore, encourages her to always work toward a great story if the research supports the hypothesis. Turkle applies this “test” to her future research and encourages her students to pursue subjects they are passionate about.
In the process of writing her thesis, Turkle becomes interested in the way the events of May changed how people saw themselves. She wants to study how people change their minds and construct their identities through time. She reflects on a personal moment in which she threw away her old clothes because they no longer fit with the identity she was cultivating.
To understand these shifts, she will need to bring together psychological and sociological outlooks. Although the founder of psychoanalysis, Sigmund Freud, and psychoanalytic thinking are academically out of vogue, Turkle is interested in applying Freud’s analysis from The Interpretation of Dreams (1899) to the way that people think about themselves. The delineation of departments at Harvard at the time is a barrier to Turkle’s interdisciplinary approach. The anthropologist Victor Turner invites Turkle to pursue graduate work at the University of Chicago in a program called The Committee on Social Thought, which studies the dissolution of boundaries between people experiencing structural change.
Part 2, Chapter 10 Summary: “Great Books”
The program at the University of Chicago requires Turkle to choose 25 “great books” to analyze over a period of three years, ultimately writing a dissertation on them. Turkle is thrilled by the opportunity to read what she considers “authentic” texts, unlike the review book education she had received in high school. She reviews her understanding of the May protests according to her advisor Turner’s theory of communitas, or unstructured communities that arise when people experience a social or cultural transition that disrupts their social status. This explains the festive celebrations that occurred spontaneously during the protests, as people were more open with each other, sharing their feelings and hope of liberation.
With her Chicago friend Merilyn, Turkle discusses the way that objects and people from youth shape identity, particularly if they are lost or deceased. This helps Turkle better understand her mother’s lies, which she understands to be caused by “the fear of remembering something about herself she didn’t want to face” (191). Turkle feels that her work as an ethnographer will be enhanced by studying psychology and attending personal psychotherapy. She decides to leave Chicago to study sociology and psychology at Harvard, pursuing a path to what she calls “the intimate ethnography of contemporary life” (194).
Part 2, Chapter 11 Summary: “The Lacanian Village”
In 1971, Turkle continues to refine her dissertation topic regarding the events of the May protests. She studies the work of the psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan. His ideas about the importance of a father’s name for a child’s identity resonate with her personal experience of having a secret father and two names. Some of her friends who had been involved in the protests are starting psychoanalytic treatment in the Lacanian method, considering it a “continuation of their political lives” (196). Turkle is struck by the differences in American and French views of psychoanalysis, as Americans consider it a reduction of the political to personal distress.
Turkle’s new Harvard thesis advisor is George Homans, chairman of the sociology department. His approach to sociology is to start a study with observations of people’s behavior, rather than theoretical abstractions. His work on the English village inspires her to write her thesis on the Lacanian village, or Lacan and his followers. By 1973, the French analytic world is divided into four schools, all created from schisms between Lacan and former students. Turkle prepares to undertake fieldwork in France, focusing on the questions “What was behind this infatuation with Freud? What was Lacan’s role in the story? Why had things taken off after May?” (198).
While she completes her graduate coursework, Turkle works as an academic for sociologist David Riesman’s undergraduate course on American society. His theory of American identity as other-directed, or based on external validation, influences Turkle’s future theories of social media, in which people construct selves for followers. She instructs students to begin life-history interviews by asking the interviewee about evocative childhood objects that reveal core aspects of their identities.
Part 2, Chapters 8-11 Analysis
In these chapters, Turkle begins to delve deeper into theoretical ideas. She expands on her process of Self-Discovery Through “Evocative Objects,” arguing that the ideas she is presenting are objects that provoke self-inquiry: “Ideas become what the anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss called ‘objects to think with’” (152).
Turkle describes the arguments of intellectuals as a way of examining her own research path and personal experiences. She quotes anthropologists, philosophers, and psychologists throughout the memoir, creating a “bricolage” or a collage-style collection of ideas to interpret events. Her weaving of the academic and personal is an exercise in “[thinking] about thinking” (187), which is the subject of her professional research. She connects her experience with “bricolage” to her research subjects in computing, noting that female programmers in male-dominated engineering fields often use this “tinkering” style to program, breaking from the established “top-down” approach (166).
Turkle explores her Plurality of Identity as she mourns her mother’s death in France, reconstructing herself in a foreign culture as an academic woman. She analyzes her split into “French-speaking Sherry,” highlighting the Lacanian idea that language shapes identity. Turkle conveys her sense of disassociation by speaking about herself in third person: “When I had my down moments—English-speaking Sherry was prone to them—French-speaking Sherry seemed able to summon new resources” (162). She attributes her invention of a braver, more resilient version of herself to her ability to think about herself in a new language.
Turkle continues to examine Self-Discovery Through “Evocative Objects” and identity shifts through changes in thinking. She argues that people relate to lost objects like they do to people who die or leave. People internalize the object or person to keep them from disappearing: “That’s what happens in mourning: What we lose comes within and takes on new life” (180). Turkle emphasizes the significance of mourning in shaping her own identity through numerous life losses: her father’s absence, her mother’s death, her grandmother’s death, and her divorce from Papert. She develops the connection between her understanding of personal loss to her professional research in technology. She explains that people are changed by technology when it transforms the way they live and work, creating a liminal space, just as the death of a loved one alters a person’s sense of themselves in relation to others.
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