Joey the Mechanical Boy is a story of a schizophrenic child in the late 1950’s who believed that he was a machine. His story provides an insight to his emotional development in a mechanized society. Joey was admitted under the care of Bruno Bettelheim in the Sonia Shankman Orthogenic School at the University of Chicago. Bettelheim investigated how Joey became a human machine and discovered that during his infancy, his parents emotionally detached themselves from him; his mother never played with him or cuddled him. She touched him only when necessary, he was kept on a rigid feeding schedule. As he grew up and began to speak, Joey was convinced that machines were better than people.

In this essay, I will be discussing four main questions.

1.     To what extent did the industrial age make people anxious about machines? In this section, I will be discussing how technology has developed after World War Two and the effects it had on people during that time. I will link this historical context as a factor to what made Joey a Mechanical Boy.

2.     In the second section, I will discuss whether the advancement in technology affects the emotional development of a child such as Joey. Here I will explain the ways that machinery affects our daily lives and affects us as human beings. I will also discuss whether machines dehumanize us, such as the extreme case of Joey.

3.     In the third section, I will be discussing the relationship between automatons and Joey and whether Joey can be considered an automaton. This will lead to a discussion on what defines a human being and the reasons why Joey believes machines to be better than humans.

4.     The last section, I will focus on Dr. Bruno Bettlehiem and his psychoanalysis on Joey. How did Bettlehiem try  to “humanize” Joey in order to convince him that he was human and not a machine?

Bibliography:

Bettelheim, Bruno. “Joey: A ‘Mechanical Boy’” in Scientific American, March 1959,
116-127.

Thompson, Stephen. “Joey the Mechanical Boy”, November 2010,
85-97.

Long, Bill. “Bruno Bettelheim and “Joey”, July 2007.

Electro-matic: Ian Andrews film and video
retrospective, Dlux, Sydney Film Festival, June 2001.

The Judy’s. “Joey the Mechanical Boy”.  Moo. Wasted Talent Records,1985.

Freud, S. 2003. The Uncanny. (1917). London: Penguin Classics.