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In this paper Steinberger reflects on the cultural meaning of the advent of cyberspace and the psychoanalytic meaning for her patients of their interactions with others in
cyberspace. While she gives the briefest of nods to the creative potential of the internet, her dominant tone is sceptical, and at times alarmist.
She begins with reference to Justin Berry, a ‘lonely teenager… [whose] story (and the public and legal attention it received) sheds light on how developmental conflict entwines with technology… The sordid world that Justin enters reflects formative struggles of self-worth and masculine identity’. Clearly this is a reference that has resonance in the US context, but not in the UK. Fortunately, I was able to Google ‘Justin Berry’ and discover on Wikipedia that as a young teenager he had developed a pornography business after being approached by older males while chatting on-line. Berry testified before a congressional committee. He now has his own website and a career as a public speaker sharing his experiences with audiences in the US and Canada.
Steinberger cites , who observed that internet contacts can foster a ‘false sense of connection and intimacy… exempting us from the real work required to build relationships’. She links this with the views of Fairbairn and Balint on the centrality of object relations in psychological development. The capacity to relate in cyberspace is inhibited by ‘the absence of voice and physical acts that customarily control affective feedback and traditional dialogue’. One of the attractions of cyberspace is that individuals are ‘set free of formal identifications’. This poses particular difficulties for adolescents who inevitably have fluid and unstable identities.
Steinberger then offers a lengthy discussion of her 25 year old patient, Susan, who meets a man through an on-line game. ‘When Susan prepares to meet the young man in the ‘real world’, she makes irrational, uncompromising demands for exclusivity— quasi-psychotic