Psychoanalysis and Virtual Reality1

The Chair, Irene Cairo, opened the panel with some reflections related to the technical assumptions available to new generations. Her proposal for this panel was not only stirred by a personal experience but also influenced by her reading of the panelists' writings. They have all been long aware of the fact that new technology has forced psychoanalysts to reassess many of their views. Irene Cairo referred to Glen Gabbard's paper on Cyberpassion (Gabbard, 2001), which presaged how communication through the Internet would challenge many technical precepts. Julio Moreno was introduced through his book Being Human (Moreno, 2000), which tackles the concept of conflict and the traditional views of reality as being limited to material and psychic reality, now having to encompass virtual reality. Finally, Vincenzo Bonaminio presented his ideas on the way adolescents challenge the essential conservatism of the classical analytic stance.

Bonaminio's contribution was primarily focused on the significant effects on psychoanalysis of children and adolescents' new ways of communicating. This would be further illustrated by a 30 year-old clinical case considered to be the forerunner of the digital era. With a quote from a film,2 Bonaminio vividly described the analyst's position in the face of the new patients' suffering from ‘disturbances in their own subjectivity, in their possibility of being’. He chose to discuss adolescence because it functions as a cultural link between generations. Adolescents give analysts the chance to see how overwhelming and ‘ungraspable’ changes are in ways of thinking, of representing inner and external reality-how incipient and simultaneously abortive these may be. Adolescent discourse highlights the discontent of contemporary culture, together with the discontent of the analyst who has to face them. The impact of the unrepresented on the psychic fabric falls outside the ego's orbit; influencing and altering its structure. The outcome is absence or re