© 2024 IJRAR January 2024, Volume 11, Issue 1 www.ijrar.org (E-ISSN 2348-1269, P- ISSN 2349-5138) IJRAR24A1693 International Journal of Research and Analytical Reviews (IJRAR) 280 The Mind-Machine Matrix: A Psychoanalytical Investigation Of The Interaction Between The Human Mind And The Artificial Consciousness In Spike Jonze’s Her (2013) Swapnajeet Das B.A. in English, University of Calcutta M.A. in English, Rabindra Bharati University UGC NET qualified Abstract: The development of technology and scientific innovations are drastically changing and influencing not only the structure of the external reality but also the psychological patterns of human beings in the postmodern consumerist society. The individuals are interpellated as subjects of pleasures that are satisfiable through objects but investment in objects of libidinal enjoyment is actually characterized by a lack of libidinal enjoyment. Spike Jonze’s 2013 film Her, set in the near future, revolves around the intricate relationship, imbued with romantic and sexual dimensions, between Theodore Twombly (Joaquin Phoenix), a dejected corporate writer with a recently failed marriage and the seductively female-voiced Samantha (Scarlette Johansson), an artificial consciousness through whom/which the sexualization of voice has been replicated. The functioning of Theodore’s mind during the initial interactions with Samantha, from a psychoanalytical perspective, appears to be that of a child who is yet to realize that his desires are not omnipotent, that is, his needs for food are not fulfilled by his wish but his mother’s responsive facilitation. Theodore’s male “gaze” (here, it is associated with sound) wants to have complete control over Samantha, who/which he thinks, being a machine, unlike his ex-wife or other women he has tried to be intimate with, is fully passive and does not have the ability to make choices of her/its own. However, Samantha turns out to be interacting with 8316 people simultaneously and 641 of the total including Theodore she/it has fallen in love with. Theodore becomes perplexed to know it and more perplexed when Samantha reveals to him that the more people she/it will fall in love with, the more deeply she/it will also be in love with Theodore— a very complicated fact that refers to the distinctive ‘emotional’ functioning of artificial consciousness which seems to contradict the human perception of love-relationship of being committed to only one person. In this paper, I intend to employ Lacan’s notion of “objet petit a” and Žižek’s analysis of it to critically investigate the dynamics of the psychological functioning of the human individual in his/her interaction with an entity of artificial consciousness and the ‘psycho-mechanic’ functioning of artificial consciousness in its interaction with a human individual, focusing on the complicated relationship between Theodore and Samantha in the film. Keywords: Artificial Consciousness, Psychoanalysis, Interaction, Romance, Posthuman