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Andrea Marzi has done an excellent job in his writing—in the introduction and in his contributed chapter—and as editor of this groundbreaking book. Psychoanalysis, Identity, and the Internet: Explorations into Cyberspace explores the interface between psychoanalysis and cyberspace. The book's thought-provoking text (introduction and seven chapters) was written by well-known psychoanalysts: Giuseppina Antinucci, Antonino Ferro, Marcus Johns, Marco Longo, Valeria Egidi Morpurgo, David Rosenfeld, Michele G. Sforza, and Riccardo Sorrenti.
The book contains theoretical and clinical chapters; the clinical chapters provide an informed illustration of key concepts set forth in the theoretical chapters. It was written by psychoanalysts for psychoanalysts and other mental health clinicians who in their clinical work increasingly encounter patients with “Internet addictions,” but it may also be of interest to anyone curious about this newest paradigm of virtuality, cyberspace.
Cyberspace is a dimensionless space without magnitude or velocity, consisting of cognitive and imaginative representations made possible by more than a half century of interrelated technological innovations. During the past forty years, the great innovations in cyberspace have been the computer and associated applications including the internet, artificial
intelligence, virtual reality, and, I would add, robotics: technologies that are intertwined and have experienced tremendous expansion.
Alan Turing, one of the founding fathers of cyberspace, proposed the Turing test in 1950.† He referred to this test as the “imitation game.” The Turing test is a cognitive version of an automaton. Automata, dating back to ancient Greece and China, were precursor mechanical devices that imitated persons or animals engaged in specific activities. The Turing test was specifically designed to determine whether a person could distinguish between communication with another person and communication with a computer.
The Turing