Paper short abstract:

This paper uses the ethnographic context of psy-technologies in Britain to examine the role and significance of third parties. It suggests a way of situating ‘the third’ in both analytical and ethnographic terms.

Paper long abstract:

The role and significance of third parties have long been debated in the field of psychotherapy, from third-party payers and scientific observers to the development of ‘the analytic third’ between the analyst and analysand. More recently, effected by the use of digital psy-technologies in the form of smartphone apps, online courses, and wearable monitoring devices, the question of third parties has resurfaced in new and important ways: are technologies mediators, intervenors or collectors? who is monitoring whom and why? how is health data used and what exactly is shared?

Drawing on anthropological research on health surveillance and self-monitoring in Britain, I reflect on both older and recent concerns about the role of ‘third parties’. Whilst a third party might claim to ameliorate, change, or even subvert the relationship between observer and observed, therapist and patient, surveillor and surveilland, it can also be seen to cement the very dyad it seeks to reconfigure. Moving historically and ethnographically from psychotherapy to digital therapy opens up an analytical vantage point from which we might detect some of the merits and problems of ‘the third’.