The Empathy Diaries: A Memoir

The Borromean knot is a mathematical topological structure. Turkle recounts Lacan’s lecture to scientists at MIT: He argues that working on these knots could be critical in self-reflection, like practicing psychoanalysis. Lacan uses the knots as a theoretical representation of human consciousness. The four interwoven rings are connected in a way in which if one is severed, all become disconnected. Each ring represents an aspect, or order, of human analytic thought: the imaginary, the real, the symbolic, and the symptom.

Turkle defines bricolage as “soft mastery” or a “tinkering” style of computer programming that relies on trial and error. She adopts this idea from Levi-Strauss’s The Savage Mind (1962), which speaks about it as the skill of taking whatever is on hand and making something new. Turkle’s research documents this style of coding as favored by people who aren’t adult men, such as women and children learning to code.

The French word dépaysement literally translates to “change of scenery.” Turkle discovers the concept in her undergraduate anthropology courses, defining it as “literally ‘decountrifying,’ making yourself a stranger in your environment in order to see it more clearly” (87). Turkle believes she achieves clear insight as an outsider and by living through large technological changes that start out as unusual but then become naturalized.