Alessandra Lemma, 'The Fate of the Body in Virtual Space'

In this paper the author gives an overview of some of the challenges facing psychoanalytic clinicians working in times of techno-culture. More specifically she argues that in our clinical work we can observe how technological advances and the dominant values of contemporary culture make it possible and acceptable to alter and extend the body and its functions in actuality and in virtual space. This can contribute to a split between the body and the self, leading to a very particular twenty-first century version of embodied subjectivity that encourages a neglect of the body’s unconscious meaning for the individual. Problems arise, from a psychological point of view, when we are no longer thinking in terms of the virtual as augmentation to the so-called real but more along the lines of the virtual as alternative to the real. However the author also discusses a clinical case to illustrate how the use of cyberspace can also be used to support psychic ‘development’ as much as it can be used to foreclose experience. This has technical implications in terms of how the analyst interprets the patient’s use of new technologies to meet the prerogatives of the internal world and of development.