MIT Professor Sherry Turkle: Being the Outsider
Matty Kerr is co-creator with John Brancaccio of The Working Experience. He is also a filmmaker and published author. Listen to our podcast on iTunes and Spotify and visit our website: theworkingexperience.com for videos, merchandise and more. You can also find us on Facebook, Linked In, Instagram, and Twitter.
“Hey everyone, welcome to this episode of The Working Experience Podcast. My guest today is Professor Sherry Turkle. Professor Turkle is the Abbey Rockefeller Mauze Professor of Social Studies of Science and Technology at MIT and the founding director of the MIT Initiative on Technology and Self. She is also a licensed clinical psychologist, Ms. Magazine Woman of the Year and author of six books, among them The Empathy Diaries, which I just finished and really enjoyed.
Welcome Professor Turkle.”
This is how I began my interview with MIT Professor Sherry Turkle. As the founding director of the MIT Initiative on Technology and Self, Professor Turkle studies the effects of technology, social media etc. on us as individuals. I had heard her interviewed by Terry Gross on NPR’s fresh air about her book, The Empathy Diaries and had been so engaged by her story that after the hearing the interview, I immediately bought a copy. What caught my attention at first was when she mentioned that her family, a working class Jewish family of Brooklyn, had a bungalow out at Rockaway Beach. I had lived in Brooklyn for nearly twenty years and had been to Rockaway on several occasions. I live outside of Boston now and that reference brought back many happy memories, the view as the A train crossed the bridge to the beaches, the jetties and the surf. Funny how those small, seemingly unrelated connections can pique an interest into a larger story.
In the early 1950’s her mother abruptly divorced her father and, aside from a few visits in her early childhood, she had virtually no contact with him. She learned later that, in exchange for
giving up his rights as her father, her mother would not require him to pay child support. After nineteen years, she wanted to find him and reestablish some kind of relationship, writing letters to people with his name that she had found in the phone book and then hiring a private detective. She did find him eventually and establish a relationship of sorts.
After reading the book, I sent Professor Turkle an email and asked if she would be a guest on The Working Experience Podcast and she graciously accepted my invitation. We set up a date and time and, via Zoom, had a wonderful conversation about her book and about her work as a professor, writer, and psychoanalyst.
What draws us to our work? Why do people become driven to achieve certain goals? I know little about psychoanalysis but I am interested in learning about people’s motivations, why we do the things we do, what makes us tick. This is what Professor Turkle does.
I asked her, “So, do you think people who are drawn to filmmaking, professional sports, I mean whatever it is, teaching, I mean is there something that you can identify in their background that was a catalyst for that, something they draw upon?”
“Yes,” she answered, “I do. Now, it’s not usually a dramatic moment; it’s not an “aha”! It’s not necessarily like it’s a smoking gun. But there is a pattern of concern, there is a pattern of disappointment, there is a pattern of seeing this is as a path out of something, to escape something.”
Her motivation for pursuing a career in academics as well as a therapist stem from her experiences as with her own family and the situation with her father. For years, she had carried a lot of anger towards her mother for the way she handled the situation. No one outside of the family was to know that her parents were divorced, none of her friends at school or teachers or anyone else. Her mother would not even tell her why they got divorced. For legal reasons, she went by one last name in public but used a different one at home. This creates a lot of confusion in a child, who had no idea why she was barely allowed to see her father in the first place. This was one of the reasons that she went into her field.
“In my life, I was told my mother had been married and divorced and I was the product of her first marriage. And when she remarried she told me not to use my name. My name was Sherry Zimmerman, which was the name of my biological father and she didn’t want anyone to know about her first marriage. I was keeping this secret and that went on through my teenage years. That I would write a certain name at school and then hide my papers under lock and key so that my half-brother and half-sister would not know that I wasn’t a true Turkle. And that experience of being…illegal, of being a story parallel to the real story made me realize that in many families and in many situations there is another story next to the official story and that was great training for a junior anthropologist to learn that next to the official story there is often another story.”
“You describe it in your book…that you were one name at home and another at school and nary the twain shall meet.”
“That’s right.” She told me. “And the few times I slipped, it was devastating for my mother, for my relationship with my mother, it was a crisis in my family.”
“Do you think this was a bridge into, I mean, I am not very experienced with psychoanalysis but I get the impression that a lot of it is trying to dig into these layers and understand people’s motivations. Do you think that…trying to understand your own motivations led to that?”
“Oh yes. Because what is the effect on me? Everybody has something.”
Sometimes one is born the outsider. Sometimes one has to make oneself the outsider to see the truth. Professor Turkle calls this “decountryfying”, getting out of a situation in order to see it clearly. When she started at Radcliffe Cliff College, there were no tenured female professors. The female students were not allowed to use Harvard’s undergraduate library to check out books or even study there. The only restroom for women was in the basement of the church. No one thought to question the situation; all of these things were invisible in the 1960’s because that was the norm and there were no other frames of reference. It was only after Professor Turkle spent some years studying psychoanalysis in Paris that she was able to come back to Radcliffe and see how wrong these “norms” were, how unfair.
The title of Professor Sherry Turkle’s book is The Empathy Diaries. Professor Turkle wants her book to help open a path for people who feel on the margins, who are outsiders. She started her life as an outsider because of the secret she had to keep. Her closest friends could not know the truth. Because she did not legally have the same last name as her step-brother and sister, even they could not know the truth. She was an outsider in her own family. But she learned that this could be an advantage. If you are an outsider you can see things that others cannot. And that perspective allows you to ask questions that others do not even think to ask. In order to gain empathy we need to communicate; we need to ask questions and have conversations to get to the truth. So much of what we take for granted as being true is not. Or, it is not the whole story. As Sherry Turkle would put it, there is a parallel story. This comes out in process, whether we think about that consciously or not. It comes from asking questions, listening, having conversations. It comes from being an outsider and seeing the world through a different lens and not accepting the staus quo. Why are there no tenured female professors at Harvard? Sometimes the light bulb pops on and the truth is revealed. But more often than not, it is a slow and painful process. And sometimes the truth does not come out. But we still need to ask.
Sherry’s mother had divorced her father because he was performing experiments on her. He was somewhat of a self-styled psychoanalyst in the tradition of BF Skinner; when Turkle was one or two years old, he would leave Turkle alone in a room for hours or not talk to her or withhold affection to see what her reaction was. Her mother came home in the middle of one of these “sessions” and took Turkle and walked out.
Turkle did not learn about this until after her mother had died. She had carried a lot of anger and bitterness towards her mother and treated her terribly sometimes because of it. Her mother just would not talk about it. It was only later, after her mother had passed away and Professor Turkle spoke at length about the situation with a rabbi that she came to understand that, in her religious community at the time, her mother may have been worried that young Sherry would have been stigmatized by the situation, that her mother was trying to protect her from shame. Her mother just did not understand the effect that this would have on Sherry. She had not developed the empathy.
I said, perhaps a bit flippantly, that no one knows how to have a conversation like that, what the guide post is. I asked it in the tone of a rhetorical question, like no one has the answer. But Professor. Turkle had the answer.
“I know the guide post: you have the conversation. I am very clear on the guidepost.”
“But she didn’t have those tools.” I replied.
“No she didn’t have those tools. I think that is a very big message of the book. To develop those tools. Parents, children, grandparents, teachers, clergymen, lend me your ears, and develop those tools.”
We need to make the effort to connect with people, have the conversation, ask the questions, listen to the answers; we need to have empathy for each other.
Because we all have something.
