You do not currently have permission to view the full text for this document. Please sign in to an account with an active subscription or contact support.
Psychoanalysis, Identity, and the Internet is a collection of eight essays, mostly by Italian analysts. With a foreword by Antonino Ferro, it is edited and comprehensively introduced by Andrea Marzi. The book, translated from the Italian, addresses the various ways in which the internet and its applications affect intrapsychic, interpsychic, and relational life to the extent that these realities create, shape, regulate, and characterize identity. Marzi has divided the book into three sections. Part I, Cyberspace, Cybernetics, and Society, provides definitions and a history of the rise of the internet and cyberspace, and of subsequent actual and virtual derivative uses. Part II, Identity in Cyberspace, addresses the issue of identity from a psychoanalytic perspective and the potential role of the internet, thus seemingly the most direct synthesis of the title's nominal triplet. Part III, Virtual Space and Clinical Psychoanalysis, provides three clinical illustrations.
Marzi introduces the contributors' postmodern, Bionian and Kleinian inflected perspective, from which they understand both the potential benefits and the pathological influence of the internet. The book reflects the authors' collective exploration and practice of postmodern psychoanalysis, a perspective inclusive of philosophical, ethical, societal, and group aspects of the psychoanalytic understanding of identity and inter- and intrapsychic dynamics. Additionally, the contributors' healthy skepticism regarding the range and bounds of intersubjectivity and multidimensional psychic and material realities and continua, inclusive of the interplay between individual and social experience, makes this collection unusually suited to psychoanalytic examination of the internet phenomenon.