Turkle, S. (2015) | References | Narcissus and the Child

What This Research Found

Sherry Turkle's Reclaiming Conversation represents five additional years of research following her influential Alone Together, focusing specifically on what she identifies as the most significant casualty of the digital age: face-to-face conversation. Through hundreds of interviews with children, teenagers, young adults, families, and professionals, Turkle documents a systematic cultural retreat from the demanding, unpredictable, vulnerable work of talking with each other in real time.

Conversation is the foundation of human development. Turkle argues that conversation is not merely one communication method among many but the fundamental practice through which humans develop the capacities that make us fully human. Through conversation, children learn to read facial expressions, interpret emotional cues, and develop empathy. Through conversation with ourselves (solitude), we develop self-knowledge and the stable sense of identity that allows us to be present with others. Through conversation with friends, we practise the vulnerability and reciprocity that genuine connection requires. Conversation is the crucible in which we become ourselves.

The flight from conversation is measurable. Turkle cites research showing a 40 percent decline in empathy among college students between 1979 and 2009, with the steepest decline occurring after 2000 as digital communication became dominant. She documents how teenagers increasingly prefer texting to phone calls, phone calls to face-to-face meetings, and how "phubbing" (snubbing someone present to attend to your phone) has become normalised despite research showing it damages relationships and increases depression. The preference for mediated communication is not random; it reflects a systematic retreat from the vulnerability that genuine conversation requires.

Four domains of conversation under threat. Turkle organises her analysis around four domains where conversation is essential:

Solitude is conversation with oneself, the capacity for self-reflection where identity consolidates and self-knowledge develops. Digital technology has eliminated solitude by filling every moment with stimulation. We no longer wait without checking phones, sit without scrolling, experience boredom without reaching for distraction. Without solitude, we cannot know who we are; we can only perform selves we have never had space to discover.

Family is where children learn emotional intelligence through the constant feedback loop of face-to-face interaction with caregivers. Yet Turkle documents families where devices dominate dinner tables, where children compete with screens for parental attention, where the conversational apprenticeship essential for emotional development is systematically interrupted. Children raised in these environments may not develop the capacity to read faces, tolerate the pace of real-time interaction, or experience the secure attachment that develops through consistent conversational presence.

Friendship is where empathy is practised and where we learn to be present for another person without agenda. Turkle documents how friendships increasingly occur through platforms designed to maximise engagement rather than depth, how the fear of missing out keeps friends scrolling rather than talking, how the controlled distance of digital communication replaces the vulnerable closeness that genuine friendship requires.

Work is where innovation requires the kind of spontaneous, unstructured conversation that generates new ideas. Turkle documents how email and messaging create the illusion of collaboration while actually preventing it, replacing genuine dialogue with sequential monologues, optimising for efficiency rather than the creative friction that produces breakthrough thinking.

The empathy decline is not mysterious. Turkle connects the documented decline in empathy directly to the reduction in face-to-face conversation. Empathy develops through practice: reading facial expressions, responding to emotional cues in real time, tolerating the discomfort of another's pain. These capacities do not emerge automatically; they require the kind of exercise that only face-to-face conversation provides. When conversation is replaced by text, when faces are replaced by screens, when discomfort can always be escaped by looking at a phone, the neural pathways that enable empathy do not develop as they should. The empathy deficit is not a character flaw but a predictable consequence of conversational deprivation.

Solitude and conversation are not opposites. Turkle makes a counterintuitive argument: the capacity for genuine conversation with others depends on the capacity for solitude. Without time alone with our thoughts, we never consolidate a stable sense of self. We bring only performances to conversation, not authentic persons. The flight from conversation and the flight from solitude are connected: we fear both because both require tolerating discomfort, uncertainty, the uncontrolled nature of our own minds and others' responses. Yet both are essential for psychological health and genuine human connection.

Technology companies design for conversation's opposite. Turkle documents how platforms are designed specifically to prevent the conditions conversation requires. Notifications interrupt sustained attention. Infinite scroll prevents natural endpoints. Variable reward schedules create compulsive checking. These are not accidents but features, designed by experts in behavioural psychology to maximise "engagement," which is to say, to maximise time on platform at the expense of time in conversation. The platforms profit from the erosion of conversation because conversation happens off-platform.

Reclaiming conversation is possible. Unlike Alone Together, which focused primarily on diagnosis, Reclaiming Conversation emphasises prescription. Turkle advocates for "sacred spaces," times and places protected from digital intrusion where conversation can flourish. She documents families who have reclaimed dinner tables, schools that have banned phones from classrooms, workplaces that have created device-free meeting spaces. These interventions work: when devices are removed, conversation returns, and with it the benefits, including deeper relationships, better learning, and more creative collaboration, that conversation provides.

How This Research Is Used in the Book

Turkle's research appears prominently in Narcissus and the Child, particularly in Chapter 13: The Great Accelerant, where her work illuminates how digital technology amplifies narcissistic dynamics at societal scale. The book draws on her concept of the "tethered self" to describe identity so dependent on digital presence that disconnection feels catastrophic:

"Dr Sherry Turkle describes the 'tethered self'---identity so intertwined with digital presence that disconnection feels like death. Seventy-three per cent of students experienced significant anxiety when unable to check their phones for just 15 minutes."

The book uses Turkle's research to explain the broader cultural context in which narcissistic patterns flourish:

"Turkle's research documents the consequences: diminished capacity for solitude and relationships that are wider but shallower."

Her work on the capacity for solitude becomes central to the book's discussion of identity development and recovery:

"The healthy self builds its palace gradually through lived experience and genuine connection. This requires what Turkle calls 'the capacity for solitude'---the ability to gather yourself before reaching outward, to know who you are before asking others to validate your existence."

The book positions Turkle's research alongside Jean Twenge's longitudinal data on adolescent mental health decline and Shoshana Zuboff's analysis of surveillance capitalism to provide a comprehensive picture of how digital technology is reshaping human psychology at civilisational scale.

Why This Matters for Survivors

If you have survived narcissistic abuse, Turkle's research on conversation reveals a dimension of damage often invisible: the systematic destruction of genuine dialogue that characterised your relationship with the narcissist.

The narcissist does not converse; they perform. What Turkle identifies as essential to conversation, the back-and-forth exchange where both parties listen, respond, and are changed by the encounter, is precisely what the narcissist cannot tolerate. The narcissist monologues, interrogates, manipulates, or performs, but never genuinely converses. They cannot tolerate the vulnerability of real-time, uncontrolled interaction where authentic responses might emerge. Your attempts at genuine dialogue were met with deflection, derailment, or punishment. You learned that honest exchange was impossible, that trying to be heard was futile.

Your conversational capacities were damaged. Living with someone who cannot converse teaches maladaptive patterns. You may have learned to remain silent to avoid triggering rage. You may have developed the habit of monitoring the narcissist's reactions rather than processing your own responses. You may have lost confidence in your own perceptions, making authentic expression feel dangerous. These adaptations, survival strategies under abuse, become obstacles to conversation after you escape. Turkle's framework helps you understand what needs healing: not just escape from the abuser but restoration of the conversational capacities abuse damaged.

Digital platforms continue what the narcissist started. The controlled distance of digital communication, the ability to craft and revise before sending, the avoidance of real-time vulnerability, may feel safer than face-to-face conversation. After surviving abuse, the unpredictability of genuine presence can feel threatening. But Turkle's research shows that what feels safer is actually preventing the healing you need. Recovery requires rebuilding tolerance for the vulnerability that genuine conversation demands, precisely what digital communication allows you to avoid.

Understanding genuine conversation illuminates what you lacked. Turkle describes conversation as requiring presence, patience, tolerance for uncertainty, willingness to be changed by the other person. Reading this description, you may recognise what was absent from your relationship with the narcissist. They were not present but performing. They had no patience for your needs. They could not tolerate uncertainty or relinquish control. They were certainly not willing to be changed by you. This recognition validates your experience: what you sensed was missing was genuinely missing. Your longing for real connection was not neediness but accurate perception of emptiness.

Reclaiming conversation is reclaiming yourself. The practices Turkle recommends, including creating sacred spaces, tolerating solitude, putting down devices to be fully present, align precisely with trauma recovery work. When you create device-free space, you create space where the invaded self can emerge. When you practise solitude, you rebuild the capacity for self-knowledge that hypervigilance prevented. When you tolerate the discomfort of unmediated conversation, you practise the vulnerability that genuine connection requires. Turkle's prescription for reclaiming conversation is also a prescription for reclaiming yourself.

The Erosion of Empathy

Central to Turkle's analysis is the documented decline in empathy and its connection to reduced face-to-face conversation.

Empathy requires practice. Turkle emphasises that empathy is not automatic but developed through exercise. Reading facial expressions, interpreting tone of voice, responding appropriately to emotional cues: these capacities grow stronger with use and atrophy with neglect. Face-to-face conversation provides constant practice in empathic response. When conversation is replaced by text, when faces are replaced by emojis, when the discomfort of another's pain can be escaped by looking at a screen, the neural pathways that enable empathy do not develop fully or begin to deteriorate.

The 40 percent decline is measurable. Turkle cites research by Sara Konrath at the University of Michigan showing that college students in 2009 scored 40 percent lower on empathy measures than students in 1979, with the steepest decline occurring after 2000. This is not perception but measurement: standardised assessments of perspective-taking and empathic concern show significant decline precisely as digital communication became dominant.

The mechanism is conversational deprivation. Turkle connects this decline specifically to the reduction in face-to-face conversation. When students text rather than talk, when family meals occur with phones on the table, when friends scroll rather than engage, the conversational practice that develops empathy is systematically reduced. The empathy decline is not mysterious; it is the predictable consequence of a culture that has abandoned the practice through which empathy develops.

For survivors, empathy's decline has particular resonance. You lived with someone whose empathy was impaired or absent. The narcissist's inability to feel with you, to understand your perspective, to be moved by your pain, was central to your suffering. Turkle's research reveals that this empathy deficit, which felt so aberrant in your abuser, is becoming increasingly common as conversation gives way to mediated communication. Understanding empathy as practised skill rather than fixed trait helps survivors recognise both what was missing in their abuser and what they can develop in themselves.

Solitude and the Capacity for Presence

Turkle makes a counterintuitive argument that has profound implications for survivors: genuine connection with others requires the capacity for solitude.

Solitude is conversation with oneself. In solitude, we process experience, integrate memory, discover what we actually think and feel apart from others' expectations. This self-knowledge is not self-absorption but the foundation for genuine meeting. Without knowing ourselves, we can only bring performances to relationship. Without stable identity consolidated in solitude, we are merely reactive, shaped by whoever we are with rather than bringing a consistent self to each encounter.

Digital technology has eliminated solitude. The smartphone ensures that no moment remains unfilled. Waiting, commuting, waking, falling asleep: every pause can be filled with stimulation. Users describe checking phones "automatically," without conscious decision, filling any moment that might become solitary. Turkle documents children who have never experienced boredom, teenagers who cannot tolerate being alone with their thoughts, young adults who reach for devices at the first hint of uncomfortable feeling. The capacity for solitude, essential for self-knowledge, is not developing in the digital generation.

The narcissist invaded your solitude. For survivors, Turkle's analysis of solitude carries additional weight. Narcissistic abuse often involves systematic invasion of private space. The narcissist demanded constant attention, monitored your inner life, left no room for a self apart from serving their needs. You may not have experienced true solitude for years. Recovery requires reclaiming what was stolen: the right to an inner life that belongs only to you, space to know yourself without external intrusion.

But digital platforms continue the invasion. After escaping the narcissist, devices offer a new invasion. The constant pull of notifications, the compulsion to check, the way screens fill every moment that might become reflective: these continue what the narcissist started. Healing requires defending solitude against both the abuser's legacy and technology's design. Creating sacred spaces, times and places where devices are not permitted, is essential for the kind of self-recovery that narcissistic abuse demands.

Solitude enables rather than prevents connection. Turkle's paradox is that solitude is necessary for genuine connection. Only when you can be comfortably alone, when you know who you are apart from others' validation, can you bring an authentic self to relationship. Without solitude, relationships are performances between unknown selves, impressive perhaps but ultimately hollow. The capacity for solitude that the narcissist destroyed and that digital platforms prevent is precisely what recovery requires.

Conversation in Family Life

Turkle devotes significant attention to how the flight from conversation is affecting family life and children's development.

Children learn empathy through conversational practice. The back-and-forth of face-to-face interaction with caregivers provides constant practice in reading faces, interpreting emotions, and responding appropriately. This conversational apprenticeship is how emotional intelligence develops. When devices interrupt this practice, when children must compete with screens for parental attention, the developmental process is compromised. Turkle documents children who struggle with eye contact, who cannot read facial expressions accurately, who prefer the controlled distance of screens to the unpredictable closeness of face-to-face interaction.

Devices on tables signal divided attention. Research Turkle cites shows that the mere presence of a phone, even face-down and silent, reduces the quality of conversation. Both parties sense that attention is not fully present, that any moment might be interrupted. The device signals that something might be more important than the person in front of you. For children, this constant signal of potential abandonment has attachment implications. They learn they cannot hold parental attention, that devices will always compete.

Family meals as endangered sacred space. Turkle advocates for device-free meals as essential for family conversation. The dinner table, she argues, is where children learn the art of conversation: how to take turns, how to listen, how to introduce topics and respond to others' interests. When phones dominate the table, this apprenticeship does not occur. Children raised with screens at meals may not develop the conversational capacities that intimacy requires.

For survivor parents, the stakes are higher. If you are raising children while recovering from narcissistic abuse, Turkle's research on family conversation carries particular urgency. You are working to provide what you never received: consistent, attuned presence that develops a child's sense of self. Your own history may make sustained presence difficult; the hypervigilance and dissociation of trauma can interfere with the full attention conversation requires. And devices offer escape when presence feels too demanding. Yet your children need exactly what you needed: a parent who can be fully there, who can converse without distraction, who signals through sustained attention that they matter. Protecting family conversation is both your healing and their foundation.

Friendship and the Practice of Empathy

Turkle examines how digital communication is transforming friendship, often for the worse.

Friendship requires practised vulnerability. Genuine friendship, Turkle argues, involves the gradual development of trust through repeated conversational exchange. We learn to be present for another person, to listen without planning our response, to tolerate the discomfort of their pain without fixing or fleeing. This capacity develops only through practice. Digital communication allows us to perform friendship without practising it, to feel connected without being present, to maintain many contacts without developing the capacity for depth.

Social media creates breadth without depth. Platforms encourage accumulating "friends" and "followers," but these connections lack the substance that genuine friendship provides. We know the curated performances of many people while being genuinely known by few or none. The wide, shallow network replaces the small circle of intimate friends whose conversational presence developed our capacity for connection. Turkle documents young people with hundreds of social media contacts who report deep loneliness, who have never experienced the kind of friendship where you can be fully yourself.

FOMO keeps us scrolling rather than present. The fear of missing out, the constant awareness that something might be happening elsewhere, keeps us checking screens rather than attending to whoever is present. We are physically with friends but mentally scrolling. The person in front of us receives only partial attention because the entire network might be doing something more interesting. This divided presence prevents the kind of sustained attention that friendship deepens.

For survivors, friendship may feel risky. After narcissistic abuse, the vulnerability that friendship requires may feel dangerous. You learned that closeness leads to exploitation, that revealing yourself invites attack. Digital communication can feel safer: you can control your presentation, delay your response, escape when you need to. But Turkle's research shows that what feels safer prevents the healing friendship can provide. Recovery includes developing the capacity for the vulnerability that genuine friendship requires, risking the uncontrolled presence of face-to-face conversation where you cannot manage your image.

Conversation and Creativity

Turkle extends her analysis to the workplace, documenting how the flight from conversation is damaging creativity and innovation.

Innovation requires unstructured conversation. Genuine creativity, Turkle argues, emerges from the kind of spontaneous, open-ended conversation that digital communication cannot provide. Ideas develop through back-and-forth exchange, through the unexpected connections that occur when people are fully present with each other. Email and messaging create the illusion of collaboration while actually preventing it: sequential monologues replace genuine dialogue, efficiency metrics crowd out the "wasted" time where breakthrough thinking occurs.

Open office plans backfired because they eliminated conversation. The trend toward open offices was supposed to increase collaboration by putting people together. Instead, it decreased face-to-face conversation as workers used headphones and messaging to create private space in public environments. The lesson: physical proximity does not produce conversation. Conversation requires psychological safety, protected time, and freedom from the constant interruption that both open offices and digital devices impose.

The narcissist's control prevents creative conversation. For survivors who experienced narcissism in work contexts, Turkle's analysis illuminates the damage. Narcissistic leaders cannot tolerate the open-ended conversation where ideas evolve unpredictably. Their need for control means shutting down the exploratory dialogue where creativity emerges. The narcissistic workplace, where contributions are stolen and subordinates' ideas are suppressed, is antithetical to the conversational collaboration that innovation requires. Recovery may include finding or creating work environments where genuine conversation is possible.

Clinical Implications

For psychiatrists, psychologists, and trauma-informed healthcare providers, Turkle's research offers essential context for treating survivors of narcissistic abuse in the digital age.

Assess conversational capacity as part of recovery evaluation. Turkle's research demonstrates that conversational capacities, including the ability to be present, to tolerate unstructured exchange, to reveal and respond authentically, may have been damaged by both narcissistic abuse and digital technology. Assessment should include questions about preferred communication modes, comfort with face-to-face interaction, tolerance for conversational silence, and ability to engage without device checking. Survivors may need explicit support rebuilding capacities that abuse and technology have eroded.

Recognise the therapeutic relationship as conversational practice. In a culture fleeing from conversation, the therapeutic relationship offers something increasingly rare: sustained, attentive, face-to-face presence. The clinician who maintains eye contact, who does not check devices, who tolerates silence without rushing to fill it, provides experiential contrast to both narcissistic abuse and digital pseudo-connection. For patients whose experience has been characterised by manipulation and distraction, this conversational presence may be the most important element of treatment.

Support the creation of sacred spaces. Turkle advocates for times and places protected from digital intrusion. Clinicians can help patients identify what sacred spaces might look like in their lives: device-free meals, screen-free evenings, protected conversation time with family or friends. For survivors whose abusers invaded all private space, creating sacred spaces serves both technological and trauma recovery.

Address solitude capacity explicitly. The capacity for solitude may be doubly damaged in survivors: first by the abuser who invaded their inner life, second by digital platforms designed to prevent solitude. Therapeutic work might explicitly address developing this capacity, including tolerance for being alone without distraction, comfort with one's own thoughts and feelings, and ability to sit with discomfort rather than reaching for the screen.

Understand device compulsion as potentially trauma-related. For some survivors, constant connectivity may represent a trauma-adaptive strategy: staying connected to avoid the feelings that emerge in solitude, seeking validation to counter the worthlessness the abuser installed, maintaining hypervigilant monitoring as generalisation of survival strategies developed under abuse. Understanding these patterns as trauma responses opens therapeutic avenues for addressing underlying wounds.

The Technology-Narcissism Parallel

Throughout Reclaiming Conversation, Turkle documents patterns in digital communication that parallel narcissistic relating, though she does not explicitly draw this connection.

Performance replaces presence. The narcissist is always performing rather than being present. Digital communication enables this for everyone: we craft and curate rather than responding authentically, manage our image rather than revealing ourselves, perform connection rather than experiencing it. What was pathological in the narcissist has become culturally normal.

Control substitutes for vulnerability. The narcissist requires control because vulnerability feels impossible. Digital communication offers similar control: you can compose and revise, delay response, avoid real-time reactions you cannot manage. The controlled distance that characterised your relationship with the narcissist is now the default mode of communication for an entire culture.

Attention flows one direction. The narcissist demands attention without reciprocating. Social media creates similar dynamics: we post seeking attention, we scroll consuming others' bids for attention, but genuine reciprocal exchange is rare. The one-way flow of narcissistic supply has been industrialised.

Relationships become instrumental. The narcissist views relationships as sources of supply rather than genuine connection. Digital platforms quantify relationships through followers and likes, training users to view connections as metrics to be optimised. The instrumentalisation of relationship that characterised your abuse is now the design principle of platforms billions use.

For survivors, recognition of these parallels validates your perception. If digital communication feels hollow, if social media leaves you empty, if you sense that something essential is missing from mediated connection, you are not being difficult or technophobic. You are recognising patterns you learned to identify through painful experience. Your nervous system, trained to detect emotional absence behind performed presence, may be perceiving accurately what others miss.

Practical Pathways for Reclaiming Conversation

Turkle offers concrete recommendations that align with trauma recovery work.

Create device-free zones and times. Designate spaces where devices are not permitted: the dinner table, the bedroom, the first hour of the day. These sacred spaces create room for conversation and solitude to occur. For survivors, they also create room for the self that was invaded by the narcissist to emerge without digital continuation of that invasion.

Practise unitasking. When in conversation, be in conversation. Put the phone away, turn off notifications, give full attention. This practice is difficult precisely because we have trained ourselves otherwise. But the discomfort of unitasking is the discomfort of genuine presence, the muscle that needs strengthening.

Tolerate conversational silence. Rather than filling every pause with phone-checking, allow silence to exist. Silence is where thought occurs, where connection deepens, where the pressure of constant performance can ease. Learning to tolerate silence, in conversation and in solitude, is learning to tolerate the presence of self.

Make eye contact. Turkle emphasises the importance of face-to-face contact for developing and maintaining empathy. Looking at someone, rather than at a screen, engages the neural systems that enable emotional connection. For survivors whose abusers may have used eye contact as dominance, this practice may need to be reclaimed gradually, in safe relationships.

Have device-free conversations with children. If you are raising children, protect their conversational development by providing regular, sustained, device-free conversation. This is the apprenticeship through which emotional intelligence develops. It is also the opposite of what the narcissist provided: consistent, attuned presence rather than distraction and exploitation.

Choose conversation over convenience. When possible, choose phone calls over text, face-to-face meetings over video calls, presence over efficiency. These choices cost more in time but yield more in connection. For survivors reclaiming relationship after abuse, these choices are investments in the capacity for genuine connection.

The Stakes of the Choice

Turkle frames reclaiming conversation as a choice with civilisational stakes.

Empathy is the foundation of democracy. Democratic citizenship requires the capacity to take another's perspective, to consider views different from your own, to find common ground through dialogue. The empathy decline Turkle documents threatens this capacity. When we cannot feel with those different from ourselves, when we cannot engage in genuine conversation across difference, the common ground democracy requires cannot be found. The flight from conversation is also a flight from the capacities democracy needs.

Conversation is how we become human. The capacities that make us fully human, including empathy, self-knowledge, creativity, genuine connection, all develop through conversation. A culture that abandons conversation is a culture that stunts human development. We become less than we could be, less than we need to be.

The choice is still available. Despite the powerful forces pushing us away from conversation, the platforms designed to capture attention, the cultural normalisation of device dependency, the difficulty of presence in a world of distraction, Turkle insists the choice remains. We can create sacred spaces. We can choose presence over performance. We can practise the vulnerability that genuine conversation requires. These choices are difficult precisely because they go against the cultural grain. But they remain possible.

For survivors, the choice is also recovery. The same capacities Turkle identifies as essential for human flourishing, the same capacities digital culture is eroding, are the capacities narcissistic abuse damaged in you. Reclaiming conversation is reclaiming what was stolen: the ability to be present, to be known, to know another, to exist authentically rather than performing. The cultural work Turkle calls for and the personal work of recovery are the same work.

Reclaiming Conversation: The Power of Talk in a Digital Age

APA Citation