On the internet everyday we seek information, buy something, play video games, chat, work and more. 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 we are accustomed to considering as the milestones of subjective experience? What happens to real relationships among people? We must consider that many important psychoanalytic theories may provide adequate means to try to understand the nature of the new subjects that appear in the present world in the internet and cyberspace era.
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 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.
Psychoanalysis needs to develop an inquiry into the nature of virtual reality….and the virtual spaces of the mind…and dreamspace….
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 even more relevant for us to expand our reflections on a number of trends that seem absolutely unavoidable for psychoanalysis.
First of all, psychoanalysis needs to develop an inquiry into the nature of virtual reality, the world of informatics and the new media. In addition, a psychoanalytic inquiry that 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 Bion's β elements that can fill a space with a quality that can induce psychosis, the mirror/screen derived from Lacan's theories, the “psychic retreats” postulated by John Steiner, Winnicott's transitional space, and various autistic mechanisms. These are some of the most fruitful directions for us to proceed if we want to increase the quality of our reflection on the complex world of digital technology.
It would be a mistake to think the issues inherent in cyberspace and virtual reality have been neglected in the psychoanalytic field. Over the past 20 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 Psychoanalytical Association (IPA) and in other spheres relating to psychoanalysis. One example of this is the monograph published by the Psychoanalytic Review, “Special Issue on the Internet” , and the Sixth British–Italian Dialogue entitled “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 ranging from approaches that trace “the magnificent, progressive destiny” (to use Giacomo Leopardi's words from “Broom,” Canti 2010) of 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 21st century.
In the 2001 IPA panel, “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 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 foster 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 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.
It is 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 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 symbolization 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.
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 dematerialized. 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 one can conceive of but not perceive. We grasp the manifestations derived from it, the symbolic images revealed through the operations of the hardware and then the software through the perception of our eyes and nervous system.
Indeed, it is possible to think the mental space and the virtual space of cyberspace evoke each other (in a form of similarity or reciprocal allusion). The genetic referability of the expression “cyberspace” (the computer place where virtual reality, the “virtual space,” resides) to an invention of literary imagination and, therefore, to a special aspect of human creativity, further links these concepts with a Winnicottian perspective, the central concept of potential space. (The term cyberspace appears for the first time in the mid-1980s as a merger of the terms cybernetics and space. It was coined by William Gibson, the most representative author of cyberpunk, to indicate an imaginary reality that is generated and lives in computer networks). This is the subject's creative place that opens up a multifaceted dialogue of connections and divergences with virtual space. This occupies a paradoxical third place (potential space) that overlaps with them, sharing their natures but also remaining distinct from them: 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.
The digital world has an impact…on the capacity to form mental representations and the aptitude for symbolization.
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 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.
On the other hand, many authors, considering the psychopathological aspects of encountering the digital world, insist on the subject's entry into a virtual reality that has many meanings, but which attracts and then absorbs the possibility of a fruitful dialogue with it (and with oneself in it) through deeply regressive and defensive pathways. In this scenario, the creative “virtuality” of the potential space does not succeed in becoming dynamic, instead imploding into the concrete or even into something very close 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.
It goes without saying, in order to remain objective, a psychoanalytic inquiry into the virtual world cannot remain glued to positions that, a priori, condemn such a world as a source of split and schizoid experiences. Furthermore, patients' communications about their experiences in cyberspace, implicating the diverse senses and sensibility in all its forms—perceptions of colors, sounds, images, and words—enable working through within the analytic experience, as a consequence of 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, since they are introduced into the relational flow, in the dimension of a new construction of meaning.