Virtual Space, Identity and Psychoanalysis: A New World or a Dreadful Voyage?1

On the Internet every day we seek information, buy something, play video games, chat, work, and so on. What is the nature of the space we surf in and through? Is it virtual or real? What is the actual relation between virtual reality we inhabit more or less in a video game, or a film, or a common experience on the Internet and the psychic reality that is one of the main foci of psychoanalysis? What about the corporeality, the time and space that we are accustomed to considering as the milestones of subjective experience? What happens to real relationships among people? Actually, just as psychoanalysis reads the multifaceted nature of virtual reality, the reverse transpires, and cyberspace affects and influences seminal reflections about psychoanalysis itself and the virtual space of the mind.

It is, in fact, undeniable that the digital world, which produces interactions and disseminates information in a way that was unthinkable only a few decades ago, poses questions and problems for the scientific and humanistic disciplines, including ethics and psychoanalysis. It asks us to look into the issues of reality and truth, a theme that reverberates problematically for psychoanalysis and from which it can receive stimuli and, perhaps, clarification. It asks us to look into the bond that links materiality, immateriality, and virtuality, understood as space and/or potentiality. It poses questions imbued with emotion about the subject of permanence and transience, of memory and its survival. It poses questions about the conservation and, conversely, the obliteration of testimony, catalogued and documented on the Internet but at risk of disappearing, given its intrinsic fragility at times not governable by personal choices.

Undoubtedly, it is of seminal importance that the peculiar characteristics of the encounter with the particular state of mind of Internet-addicted patients be explored, attempting to show in detail the path of the therapy, psychotherapeutic or analytic, and the relationship between the analyst and the net surfer, a castaway in virtual reality. But it is of even more relevance that we expand our reflections on a number of trends that seem absolutely unavoidable for psychoanalysis.

First of all, psychoanalysis needs to develop an enquiry into the nature of virtual reality, the world of informatics and the new media. In addition, a psychoanalytic enquiry which tackles the psychopathological levels of addiction, starting from the potential of risk inherent in immersion in cyberspace, is needed. Beyond this, we should develop a reflection, starting from cyberspace and using it as a perspective about psychoanalysis itself and the “virtual spaces” in the mind, their possible existence and meaning, their role within the setting, the consequences in the analytic field, and the

distinctive characteristics of the analyst's meeting with an “Internet-addicted” mind. Consequently, it would be of great importance to develop a comparison between virtual space, dream space, and some crucial concepts in psychoanalytical theorizing, (such as, for example, Bion's elements which can fill a space with a quality which can induce psychosis, or Winnicott's transitional space, and various autistic mechanisms). These are some of the most fruitful directions in which we can proceed if we want to increase the quality of our reflection on the complex world of digital technology.

Furthermore, this is why I tried to give a contribution on this subject, writing and editing a book (Marzi, , 2016) with also some national and international essays. Psychoanalysis cannot avoid such a crucial challenge.

Psychoanalysis and the Digital World

It would be a mistake to think that the issues inherent in cyberspace and virtual reality have been neglected in the psychoanalytic field. In the span of the past twenty years, and at an increasing pace during the past decade, the psychoanalytic literature has been enriched with numerous contributions, from various viewpoints and under various forms, within the sphere of the International Psychoanalytic Association and in other spheres relating to psychoanalysis. Among others, in witness to this is the monograph published by the Psychoanalytic Review, “Special Issue on the Internet” , and the Sixth British–Italian Dialogue with the title “Dream space and virtual space in the analytic process”.

Growing attention, therefore, is being given to an argument that does not cease to arouse varied, sometimes extreme, feelings that range from enthusiastic approaches about cyberspace and virtual reality, to outright condemnation, demonization and anxiety-ridden scenarios. However, these points of view underwent a shift during the first decade of the twenty-first century.

In the IPA panel of 2001, “The impact of new technologies and new realities in psychoanalysis” edited by E. N. Jasso , there was a certain convergence of contrary and negative positions regarding the new media forms, and many authors insisted that there was a risky and negative relationship between the eruption of the digital era and the present-day world, a digital space where the power of individual and group narcissism is rampant, where people, and above all, children are exposed to the transformation of human beings into consumers, consumed in their turn by increasingly intense sensory stimuli. In such a situation psychoanalysis would tend to lose its role, not being compatible with this pounding current of “liquidity”. According to some authors, this would also result in dangerous implications for young minds in formation, which would be clouded by a passivity that does not help the capacity to think.

In 2010, at the time of the Chicago IPA Congress, the perspective changed, and authors placed greater attention on a variety of aspects existing within the “cyber” world, presenting more flexible viewpoints. Many of the authors showed that they were fully aware that the irruption of the digital world into the analytic process inevitably has repercussions in the aspects of privacy and intimacy inherent in analytic practice, raising questions for the ethical dimension as well as for the traditional authority of the analyst. In addition, it is also necessary to consider that technique frees us from certain limitations, but at the same time nails us to new forms of acquiescence.

Bonaminio and Gabbard, for example (in the Chicago panel, 2010), suggest again the figure of an analyst who knows how to observe himself closely when faced with the impact that these new technologies have on the analyst and on psychoanalytic techniques. Bonaminio points out that such a technology, while generating the risk of greater fragmentation, can provide an opportunity, for the adolescent, to gain a greater sense of reality in the perception of himself as belonging to a group (in the social networks, for example). It is therefore time to put behind us the phase of moralizing oppositions, of apocalyptic disapproval on one hand, and a complete faith in the innovative potential of the new technologies on the other, and on the contrary to try to search for a more realistic position, using the Internet as a helpful vantage point from which to revisit and compare psychoanalytic models and even to develop some new ones. We have the opportunity to investigate, among various subjects, whether the digital world, with its particular characteristics, may have an influence on our attitude toward symbolisation and on the theme of the construction of identity, and whether cyberspace interweaves with significant cross-references to the sense of analytic space, and to what extent it might do so.

Psychoanalysis and Virtual Reality

It is undoubtedly difficult to define the concept of “virtual”. If we try to approach it from a psychoanalytic standpoint, virtuality might suggest something about the “mind” (as the object of our analytic work), in that both share the same character of place/non-place, having a base that is physical and material (the brain and the nervous system, or the structure of the hardware), and both are also dematerialised. Since it is not a truly existing space in a physically material sense, or one that is concretely visible and so perceptible to the human sensory faculties, virtual space seems to blatantly repropose the Kantian–Bionian concept

of the impossibility of knowing the thing itself, that is, something that one can conceive of but not perceive. We grasp the manifestations derived from it, the symbolic images that are revealed, in this case, through the operations of the hardware and then the software up through the perception of our eyes and nervous system.

Indeed, it is possible to think that the mental space and the virtual space of cyberspace evoke each other (in a form of similarity or reciprocal allusion). The genetic referrability of the expression cyberspace (the computer place where virtual reality, the “virtual space”, resides) to an invention of literary imagination4 and, therefore, to a special aspect of human creativity further links these concepts with a Winnicottian perspective, the central concept of potential space. This is the subject's creative place that opens up a multi-faceted dialogue with a virtual space of connections and divergences. This occupies a paradoxical third place (potential space) that overlaps with them, sharing their natures but also remaining distinct from them: we could think of it as the middle kingdom. This way of seeing brings into play diverse psychoanalytic models, which, nevertheless, can be found to be in agreement with respect to certain aspects, if thought of in this dimension.

As many authors in the analytic sphere point out, there is absolutely no doubt that the new technologies have an impact on the subject. The aspects of the self, both intrapsychic and interpsychic (therefore, intersubjective) relations, are influenced and subjected to possible changes. This pertains to adults, but even more to children and adolescents because it is becoming increasingly clear that the digital world has an impact, in different ways and in different degrees, on the capacity not only to form mental representations, but also on the aptitude for symbolization. As outlined above, we might go on to ask ourselves what the Internet has produced and will be able to produce within psychoanalysis and, at the same time, what psychoanalysis will be able to do with the Internet.

We can underline again that virtual reality and cyberspace do not correspond with one another, but they share a common space: we might say that VR is the language spoken in cyberspace. What is cyberspace made of? Of VR, we might say, and it certainly is, even if it is not only that: we might imagine this relationship with cyberspace as a container in which the content, according to what has been said so far, is represented by virtual objects, by VR precisely.

Moreover, it is possible to think that the mental space and the virtual space of cyberspace evoke each other (in a form of similarity or reciprocal allusion), since both are imagined as being endowed with a volume suited to welcoming specific contents of every nature: aspects, states of mind, fantasies, or numberless dematerialised objects.

Patients' communications about their experiences in cyberspace, implicating the diverse senses and sensoriality in all its forms — perception of colours, sounds, images, words — enable working through within the analytic experience, thanks to the closeness of the dimensionality experienced and lived in these two spaces. In the analytic session, this material creates a pabulum from which unknown emotions — that can be given or re-given meaning — can spring, bound to a new construction of meaning.

In such a setting, we might postulate that the virtual condition brings an important contribution to the thinking process in analysis on acknowledging that full, satisfying, and genuine immersion can be realised only when the relational quality develops three-dimensionally, allowing contact to be achieved in each of the two worlds, virtual space and mental space, while maintaining that “correct distance” acceptable to the sense of one's own boundaries.

So, virtual space succeeds in being mental space (and vice versa, we might conjecture), when it is correlated with shared experiential zones (of exchange, of superimposition) if the subject succeeds in living this space as a place where “drafts of analytic thought” (Hautmann, 1999, p. 76) are possible, using cyberspace (“dreaming it”) as a constant and flourishing source of thoughts.

Three-dimensionality, understood in the sense now suggested, makes it possible to effect analytic operations, with regard to space and to the (virtual) objects that exist in it. In these cases, the subject can connect up dispersed or, in any case, unorganised elements, proto informatic elements, I propose to call them, giving to them a form of life, experiences, original elaborations (even artistic ones), and adventures of the mind that are not imbued with omnipotence or destructive narcissism. These elements connect, instead of breaking up into fragments. They are emotional–affective products that are, in this way, endowed with meaning, with elaborative progress, reciprocal exchange, and a sense of limits.

The person who exchanges emotional–affective communications with the cyber world can draw on the symbolisation and constant production of what we might also call a “film of thought” (Hautmann, 1999), a forerunner of further developments. Here, what the subject detects in the digital world (which can be thought of as an accumulation of pre-symbolic or symbolic elements) can really trigger a “relational flow”, the fruit of projective and introjective exchanges, aimed at the construction of new elements of thought, endowed with meaning.

Gianni is Back

We are perfectly aware that the creative “virtuality” of the potential space not infrequently does not succeed in becoming dynamic, instead imploding into the concrete or even into something very close for example to the annihilating infinity of Bion's hallucinosis. Therefore, it can also be a space in which aspects of the subject's internal world can be experienced as concretely manipulable, resulting in considerable confusion between the internal and external worlds.

This immense and indefinite virtual space can be imagined, or used, for the acting out by subjects who, unable to use their own inner mental space, try their hand at exporting it to the outside, into virtual reality or cyberspace in short, using it as an extroversion of their self and from within oneself, and also as an attempt at trying to see their own psychic space in this way, to touch it with their hands.

Authors who have investigated the “new psychopathologies” have pointed out how, and how much, the various subjects can themselves broaden the virtual space of cyberspace with an essentially one-way projective flow. In particular, all the clinical cases described more or less bear witness to this trend, and offer a fascinating panorama that is profoundly stimulating for analytic thought.

Clinical reflection on a patient whom I will call Gianni, with whom I had an important analytic experience, allows me to propose and highlight also the opposite possibility, one that is decidedly unusual: the return from cyberspace of what can be thought of as a world of objects that had been evacuated there.

Gianni, a thirty-year-old chemist, suffered from an episode of marked depression during the period of his final high-school exams. This occurred again some years later, at the time he was getting his degree. His family includes a brother and a sister, and his parents, who are both still alive. Gianni tells me how, together, they have often had to take care of his mother, prey to repeated episodes of depression that arose after a road accident in which she was hit by a car as she was walking along.

A year before coming to me, Gianni had been working abroad, where some colleagues had involved him in an experience with prostitutes. He had not taken part in any “kinky sex”, but in any case part of him “had said I shouldn't”, but he had not managed not to.

Since then, he had begun to feel increasingly worse. At home, he had even tried to commit suicide, putting a plastic bag over his head. Saved by his girlfriend, he had spent a few days in hospital, during which time “I had lost every notion of time and space; I felt like an idiot.”

When he comes to me he is clearly in a state of agitation, depressed and with persecutory peaks. He stammers and his legs twitch con - stantly; he is frenetic and full of anxiety.

Nevertheless, along with wanting relief from his great suffering, he also really wants to understand and to work with me, which I feel is genuine and sincere. So we begin an analysis that, after an initial period, settles down to three sessions a week.

At first, I follow him closely, functioning transferentially as a mother who tries to pro pose energy and holding, as opposed to the death of the emotional experience. In fact, at times, he becomes almost disorientated, his thought fragmented and detached, incoherent and illogical.

My voice seems to me at times to be a sound from within that holds steady and attempts to offer equilibrium.

It becomes increasingly clear how important it is to work with Gianni by bringing to centre stage a robust countertransferential listening, even more so than with other patients, because he is unable to pick up the game of relaunching verbal exchange.

When I intervene, he sometimes feels hostility; yet I “mysteriously” sense that he is a person with sufficient energy to be able to enter into this experience and continue it.

After several months, a phase of greater elaboration begins. He also begins to say that “he is thinking about indefinite things”, and I feel that this might hint at the drafting of an idea.

Gradually, persecutory and threatening dreams appear: dreams with evil beings that are transformed into young children, then into sweaters, which he has to burn, or into threads wound up like electric wires, balls of wires, piled up in his garage. In others, a giant larva and a butterfly emerge from behind a skirtingboard; he manages to kill them: they were the source of the strange sensations that he had felt after his brother had given him books containing pseudo religious images. Or he dreams that he is spitting out golden crucifixes. He manages to get the better of this, but it is difficult and he is very afraid. A man takes his hands, which peel, and then he sees his feet crawling with ants. At the same time, feelings of jealousy towards his brother emerge very clearly.

It is difficult to understand what is persecuting him because his anxiety reveals very little, whereas he often attempts a personal “do-it-yourself” working through in an effort to find com - pensation and eliminate opportunities for new crises. He also brings dreams in which he is with many others and he has to reach a graveyard.

I cannot quite understand what is being prepared inside him and between us, but I perceive that these movements are harbingers of something that has to reveal itself in the analytic relationship.

At this point, one day he recounts this dream:

Alone at home I'm watching a film on my PC. The characters were behaving like those in the museum dream, in the dangerous game… The film was also interacting with me. The characters were

coming into the room, they were doing things and I was frightened. I had to watch this film again so that these people would not do certain things [felt by him to be negative]. Watching it again, I manage to catch some details that allow me to finish watching it without problems, that is, preventing the characters from coming into the room…

He then speaks of peeing as an act equal to eliminating toxins, and then that he does not know if he can succeed in handling these char-acters or whether, instead, he does not feel like facing them, and so he directs them again in their film …

This dream takes up the events in the “museum dream” of a few sessions previously, in which a game to be played in a museum was dominated by the presence of some aspects and characters that could become “diabolical”.

I tell him that I believe an important point is that he is frightened by the dream, because the characters come so close, they come right in with us here, as I have mentioned on many occasions, but he is afraid that they are diabolical; he must keep them at bay, impose some limits. I feel that this time he is moving to a decidedly deeper, and also riskier — for him — level where there are aspects that he feels are very dangerous. So it is necessary to keep them at bay: if they are too close they are uncomfortable, frightening. If he puts them back in the film, it is as though he is trying to make them more something of the imagination, thus avoiding their becoming concrete, which is terrifying for him.

From that moment on, the form/dream of the computer with char-acters that come out of it is repeated many times, in various declensions of the story. So, the characters from the screen have to be welcomed into the room, and these, from one time to the next, bring hate, competitive-ness, jealousy, rivalry, and dysmorphic–phobic anxieties. Dreams occur containing the gravestones of husband, wife, and son from which skeletons emerge, mother-like “good people” who are the subject of a television programme, fathers who first smash shop windows with terrible blows and then try to shoot him, although he is protected by “a friend”, or there is the grandmother who prevents him from turning off the television, “otherwise the whole circuit won't work”. There is something heavy and morbidly psychotic in this material; however, he tells me that he feels growing trust that it will not be thrown away if he reveals it all here.

More time passes and the “chaos” seems to take further shape and organisation: Gianni tells me these two dreams that seem to me to represent a further, significant change in the relationship in general, and also in the way that the patient and I can relate to that particular digital world that the analysis has brought to centre stage:

I tell a work colleague that I can leave straightaway, but the problem will be for him to find another like me. A young woman was helping me with the computer: “Here you have to click on this button and open the programme in this other way.” The software was the same though.

There are many aspects in Gianni's analytic profile that have struck me and led me to further thoughts and reflections about the relationship with the world of informatics. First of all, the presence of this unusual “inversion in the flow” shown by Gianni in using digital and media space in general compared to what is more common—in some way retrieving the characters projected inside that dimension—has often brought to my mind two films by David Cronenberg, Videodrome and eXistenZ.

In Videodrome, a dangerous television signal produces tumorous modifications of the brain, which cause hallucinations, among which that of seeing something come out of a screen, deforming it and transforming it into a fusion between technology and human being.

In EXistenZ, one witnesses a progressive isomorphism between external reality and virtual reality, represented here as totally immersive.

Gianni shows me the progressive overflowing of internal characters within a space that is both inside the analytic field where the relationship between us is brought to life, and outside a virtual/mental space that can no longer keep them imprisoned.

This space (which in its turn, like a Möbius strip, is at the same time and for many reasons internal and external) is evidently not the space of shared social reality, but that of the dream. These characters succeed in returning inside this dimension, allowing the conditions for the development over time of an aggregation in the form of mean-ing. These aggregations, if they were really to overflow into factual reality and become concrete and sensorially perceptible, would be pandemically hallucinatory. In this case, we would witness the path of the not-worked-through objects/characters in the opposite direction to that of normal perception, that is, in the visual retrieval of things that have first been evacuated, expelled into the space of external real-ity, as Bion, too, suggests .

Instead, in this case, the space of the dream, not daily reality and not even evacuative VR, is the first containing box; the dream space takes on the nature of container, revealer, and communi-cator of this dynamic need within the patient.

The figures which progressively present themselves to us are not, therefore, expelled, unmetabolised, but remain in the dream space, in a psychic, virtual space, understood as potential and potentially usable for subsequent elaboration. We are called on to tolerate the fact that a world felt as frightening and destructive might overflow into our space, with the risk of our being colonised by its madness. If the characters rage uncontrollably,

in place of real manifestations of presences, this may result in haemorrhage and madness, and everything would be lost and Gianni risks remaining empty and mad. On the one hand, the erupting avalanche of characters, sweeping him (and us) away, will render him forever lost in the universe of a desperate madness; on the other hand, in doing this, he will remain completely emptied of his entire self.

Getting the characters to come into the (analytic) room, therefore requires a giant leap of trust. By the way this is a condition that we can define variously in terms of psychoanalytic models: we could discuss this later, if you like.

So, the characters (and the undigested facts that give them substance) have taken on the characteristics of shattered objects, which, however, have attempted to return by passing through the video by way of dreams and the conjoined “ferrying” force of myself and the patient. They succeed in returning to demand sufficient space and time, volume and colour, with no dazzling by the blinding light of delusion and hallucination . They ask to be heard, to be present; perhaps they even want to play, like the characters in the Purple Rose of Cairo, 13 though always within a capacity for working through that only in analysis, in the field of analysis, finds energy and realization.

I believe that the space in the dream can be further thought of as the virtual/oneiric space (true intermediate space) of his mind at work with mine in the session, a genuine internal and field space in which we can semantically and mentally make the virtual coincide with the oneiric. The patient does it: the characters come out of the screen but come into the working-through dream space, where they receive a vital push that they had not had until then.

The space of the analytic field so formed, in the profound immersion of the two minds at work, provides an opposing dimension to the mad infinity into which the patient was terrified of falling.

When, after much time, he brings the dream in which he is in charge of, and works, the computer, and, therefore, is able to enter by himself in some way, another important movement becomes clear. Going into the computer is comparable to going into his own mind. At the beginning, it was necessary to get all the characters to go inside whatever could be identified variously as my mind/space of the analytic room. Now Gianni can see them and visit them better by himself, and I take on the function of giving him just a “few indications”, like a mother who is no longer asked for total constant attention and care. He is beginning to know the source code and manage it, to give to it's virtual space the potential for a more vital development, where he can hope that, as Winnicott tells us, a true experience of living, rather than simply functioning, may come to life.