Confessions from the Couch

For a year and a half I wrote a character named Celeste in a cyberdrama called The Couch, a semi-serious soap opera for the Web, created by myself and seven other writers. We played and wrote fictionalized versions of ourselves as eight New Yorkers in group therapy. The content consisted of texts and photographs from therapy sessions, private diaries and side episodes. We wrote for almost a year together before we went public on the Web as www.thecouch.com, so we launched the project with a hefty backlog. Then we put up new material every day for 26 weeks, roughly the first half of 1997. We received over 10,000 visitors a day at our peak, and lively regulars participated in our interactive component (which is still active although the rest of the site is on pause; the entire site is still visible and visitable, but there is no new material). At first I thought this writing experience would be wildly different from the writing I'd done as an art historian and scholar, in Cut with the Kitchen Knife (1993), my book on Hannah Hoch's 1920s photomontages, or even from my contemporary articles on photography and design. Stylistically, it was. But there were also continuities. One continuing thread, I see now in retrospect, was my interest in montage and the ambiguities of identity it could represent. Hoch's photomontages, and even more so John Heartfield's, for all their ambiguity, do involve the reader in an evolutionary process of forming meaning. Still, it's a somewhat passive role for the reader. In electronic media today though, whether someone is downloading images and manipulating them with Photoshop or just surfing the Web and chatting, a more active role is possible in forming and experiencing montage and montage identities. So, writing for The Couch for me was like an Alice in Wonderland drop from the surface of montage to the layers underneath, from observing 1920s montages and their historical ripples to creating a montage identity in flux and in dialogue with other producers. In particular, I made some discoveries about issues on the Web, about leading a semifictionalized life of ambiguous identity formation, neither completely fluid nor completely mimetic - a montage. Persona, in a Jungian sense, is the personality an individual presents to the world, a set of attitudes adopted by an individual to fit himself or herself for a social role or roles. The idea of multiplicity is important here: every social person is a collection of roles. Subsequently, authenticity is disputed - questions abound regarding whether or how these social attitudes are connected to the inner self, drives, desires, needs, identity. Do these masks alienate us from our feelings and needs or do they pragmatically help to feed them? For me one of the most useful questions is do we have self-awareness about how we use these masks? I don't see a pure self as somehow operating independently from socially derived persona, rather I see these layers of identity as interdependent, although psychologically I think it's helpful to have some kind of working map. Even in Jung's schematic thinking, the can be described as a kind of compromise between an individual and society as to what a man should appear to be, as Victor Brome notes in lung: Man and Myth (1981). Therapy, and not only Jungian therapy, enters in here, as does popular culture, and in the case of The Couch, popular culture infected in form and content by psychotherapies. However different, many therapies deal with the relationships between what we present of ourselves and what we feel. I'm not looking for only therapeutic motivations in exploring personae, but at play and transformation in the creative representation of personae on the Web. I'm interested in personae as they function in representation more than in therapeutic healing. The word persona cannot be defined only in terms of therapies and popular culture. There is an economics to its functions as well, and the cultural and the economic functions overlap

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