Online and on-the-Couch Virtuality

By an artful weaving of scholarship, diverse video clips, and a real-time projected Twitter ¹ feed that provided ongoing audience reactions to the panel’s unfolding, Phillip Freeman, with the help of fellow panelists Stephen Hartman, Glen Gabbard, and Vera Camden created a highly engaging educational, experiential, and consciousness-raising experience about that complex and highly diverse aggregate of phenomena subsumed under the term virtual reality. Given the panel’s great breadth, the number of intriguing ideas and observations that were introduced, and the clinical relevance of the papers, this report can present but a few of the many significant ideas that were conveyed.

Following her introduction of the panelists, moderator Vera Camden framed the afternoon’s discussion by noting the extraordinary speed with which technological advances have created a new world, the world of cyberspace, a world that has significant effects on the nature of human subjectivity. Camden referenced Katherine Hayles’s recent work on the “posthuman” (2012), which stresses that human interdependence with technology and the cyberworld has had an inevitable formative effect on human psychology, perhaps generating a new kind of consciousness: “when my computer goes down,” she writes, “or my Internet connection fails, I feel lost, disoriented, unable to work—in fact, I feel as if my hands have been amputated (perhaps recalling Marshall McLuhan’s claim that ‘media function as prostheses’)” (p. 2). Camden suggested that this “new consciousness” heralds the emergence of a new kind of subjectivity, a subjectivity created by our ever increasing interdependence with the cyberworld. She suggested that the effects of cyberspace on developing human subjectivity should be studied psychoanalytically, just as biological, environmental, and relational effects on emergent human subjectivity have been studied. Camden closed her introduction by posing a question: How can psychoanalysts respond flexibly to this newly emerging world of cyberspace and its effects on how minds are organized?

Phillip Freeman opened his paper by noting the rapid emergence of an array of technologies including cyberspace, intelligent machines and robots, virtual reality and gaming, prosthetic substitutions, and cloning. The emergence of these technologies and their effects on people’s minds has drawn the attention of psychoanalysts and social commentators, who too often, Freeman observed, have restricted themselves to a narrow range of questions. Most have focused on the “Is it good or is it bad?” question. He noted that proponents of these technologies argue that they “offer opportunities for exploration of experiences that would otherwise be precluded, by either psychological or material limitations. In the virtual world . . . limitations can be accommodated, losses undone, wishes realized, sometimes as a trial balloon for real experiences, sometimes as a sustained and sustaining substitution of experience for reality.” Freeman went on to note that critics of these technologies tend to focus on the “virtual” in “virtual reality,” in particular on the “substitution of the virtual for the real.” These “opponents of the new technologies do not see opportunities, compensations, and liberation. [Instead they] see inauthenticity, perversion, the avoidance of mourning, a mirage of the infinite imagination made material, and the substitution of autistic aloneness for community.”

Freeman then took the audience on a tour of the virtual world. He wore multiple hats: intrepid anthropological fieldworker; raconteur; seasoned tour guide; open-minded and always curious clinical psychoanalyst, well versed in the history of psychoanalytic thought. He described his journey into Second Life, “an online virtual community in which individuals from around the world participate in a wide variety of graphically elaborated environments by way of their cartoon representations known as avatars.” Freeman entered Second Life curious as to whether there exists a Second Life psychoanalyst. After allowing himself to be psychologically tethered (by virtual chains?) to the “real” by his wife, Freeman undertook his quest and, without much difficulty, located a Second Life analyst, a self-described Lacanian happily ensconced in an idyllic setting on the northern coast of California. This analyst commented that he hoped to develop a practice providing low-fee psychoanalysis to interested avatars. Along with expressing ironic anxieties about such practical matters as licensing and practicing across state lines, this analyst said his main problem was that “his avatar patients kept ‘getting real’ on him.” They kept dropping their Second Life personas and introducing details, often traumatic details, from “their lives in real life.” These “analysands” were “to some extent,” Freeman noted, “only pretending to pretend. Once their criteria for exposure were met, once they were anonymous, partially present, and capable of immediate flight, the pretense of pretense could be dropped and they could get real in an unreal context.” When this Second Life analyst asked Freeman to consult with him on some of the issues he faced as an avatar psychoanalyst, Freeman declined, stating “that [he] was not sure that [he] would know what he was doing as an avatar psychoanalyst. [The Second Life psychoanalyst] said that he felt that way sometimes too.”

Freeman reflected further on some of the ironies encountered during his exploration of Second Life. “Given this opportunity to be anything they might imagine, [many of these individuals] chose to spend their time in bars and coffee shops and dance halls chatting in a manner indistinguishable from what you might typically expect to hear in those settings.” When he asked people about these choices, he “took from their answers that they enjoyed a chance in Second Life to be themselves but to get it right, to be themselves only better, to have a sense that they were living their lives by choice and without a sense of failure or shame. Perhaps, in this instance,” he observed, “the illusion of control is more exciting than the content of the specifically realized fantasy.”

Other Second Life ironies included the complaint that too many avatars are building a new suburbia. Avatars are apparently hanging out in Second Life, doing not much of anything, just as they might in their actual lives. Or, as Freeman also noted, an ever increasing number of female avatars apparently cannot find male avatars interested in developing a relationship! This irony is further deepened by the fact that, according to a statistic once offered by the Linden Corporation, at least 60 percent of the women in Second Life are in fact men.

Freeman suggested that driving most forms of participation in the virtual world might be a hunger not “to cultivate an experience of reality so much as [to have] a real experience.” To underscore the primacy of this search for an experience, he offered the example of the “moe,” a “group of individuals in Japan devoted to their life-size body pillow girlfriends”; “The moe are clear regarding the primacy of experience. . . . they argue that the dolls are not real but their affection for them is and so their relationship enjoys a type of purity, they say, denied to more conventional, socially condoned, and marketed romance.” I think we can all agree with the observation that relationships with actual others are a threat to an experience of “purity” of feeling and affection.

The next stop on Freeman’s tour of the virtual was a foray into the world of robotics. He commented on how robot makers do not tend to elaborate their view of their creations with virtual qualities. They know all too well what has gone into their making, and Freeman suggested that this knowledge removes the “mystery,” making it difficult for the robot makers to have an experience of the uncanny in relation to their progeny. He showed a video clip that told the story of Paro, a robotic baby seal that has become widely used in Japan as a sort of therapeutic companion, often used in geriatric facilities. Paro has the capacity to wake up and respond in an adorably cute, cooing, blinking-eyed, baby seal kind of way to whomever addresses it. The robot’s one shortcoming is that its battery life is too brief (is there not something a bit too human about that?). Freeman noted, referencing Turkle (2012), that “the proponents of robot substitutes for absent others—including playmates, family members, teachers, and aides—[do not just see them] as adaptations to scarcity. The robot advocates Turkle interviewed, both young and old, argued that the robots are not just better than nothing or better than something. They are just better.”

Freeman moved on to explore a genre of fiction in which “recurrent themes . . . characterize . . . ‘forbidden worlds’ where thoughts and fantasies can be directly realized.” Two recurrent anxieties, he suggested, tend to emerge in stories of this genre. The first involves an existential threat created by a too easily achieved realization of one’s fantasies. Freeman noted Freud’s apt observation that the real world cannot compete with a masturbation fantasy that is accompanied by a physical climax. If all of one’s fantasies and wishes could be effortlessly actualized, why would one tolerate delay? Good-bye ego development and the advance of civilization! The anxiety here is that when lost in the bliss of a personally created and actualized fantasy, a person will somehow become dulled to the imperatives emerging in reality or, perhaps more commonly, will find that the pleasures offered by reality pale in the face of what is available in the virtual realm.

The second kind of anxiety that lurks in this genre is seen in the movie Forbidden Planet, where “the protagonists fail to recognize until it is too late that the realization of their fantasies will include the realization of their own unconscious destructive and incestuous longings. They mistake these internal dangers for external threats and die fighting their own demons.” The anxiety here is associated with loss of the capacity to distinguish fantasy from reality and with it, life from death. It is the hard edge of the “real” that inevitably conveys the frailty and limits of fantasy. Isn’t a “real” that is fully and successfully ablated by the unbridled actualization of fantasy (when the subject is not asleep) a psychosis? Freeman further illustrated this anxiety by invoking the sixth-century Daoist Zhuangzi, who “dreams that he is a butterfly dreaming that he is Zhuangzi.” Can people get so lost in the virtual world of “actualized” fantasy that their subjectivity becomes so diffused that they get “lost in the mirror”? (An adolescent once described having experienced this condition while on hallucinogens; looking at himself in the mirror, he panicked as he became unable to locate himself. Might he be located in the image that gazed anxiously back at him and that he no longer could embody?)

Freeman took a distinctly psychoanalytic perspective on the phenomena he observed. He drew attention to the tendency in current psychoanalytic discussions of “virtual reality” to forget Freud’s observations on “psychic reality,” in which Freud made the truly postmodern argument that, inevitably and unavoidably, one’s view of one’s “reality” is invariably colored and organized by one’s individual psychology and unconscious wishes and desires. It is as though an excessive and irrational dread of the “virtual” in cyberspace has led some analysts to a surprisingly concrete, philosophically naive, and essentially nonpsychoanalytic definition of the “real.” Freeman commented on the irony that some psychoanalysts have become so alarmed about virtual reality, given that encounters with the virtual are the bread and butter of our work, as seen in transference analysis. He noted, with understandable dismay, how some clinicians, especially those who have drawn too clear a line between the virtual and the real, seem to believe that they are somehow above having illusions; he called this the “meta-illusion of having no illusion.” Is that not tantamount to an analyst’s denying that he or she too has an unconscious that “organizes the view” and seeks a way to declare its desires?

Freeman went on to discuss a case characterized by his analysand’s steadfast attempts to reassure himself that he was free from the constraints of reality through enacting various perverse grandiose fantasies. The protracted therapeutic process Freeman described was characterized by efforts to woo this patient toward the kind of psychological sustenance that is the reward for enduring the frustrations and limitations of grandiosity that come with playing life out more fully in one’s circumstances than in fantasy. Though his analysand’s grandiose perverse enactments were a hedge against the indignities inevitably inflicted by circumstance, they provided what essentially were empty psychological calories, a fact that necessitated their endless repetition.

It is interesting that the patient Freeman presented was afflicted not with some trendy social media vice but rather with “old school” perverse proclivities. I wonder if Freeman was implying that the essential psychological processes associated with coming to grips with frustrations and demands, as well as the processes underlying self and object differentiation, remain essentially the same, even in this cyber age. The realm of possibilitiues for evading indignities via fantasy has expanded exponentially with the explosion of representational refuges and partners the internet can offer. But the human dilemma of bearing up under the pressures of one’s circumstances and coming to grips with the limitations of one’s grandiosity remains the same, now as always.

Stephen Hartman’s paper was a passionate exhortation to analysts to resume a psychoanalytic attitude in their efforts to grasp the psychological ramifications of cyberspace. Theoretically and philosophically complex, the paper is difficult to condense without oversimplifying ideas that deserve a close reading. Following up on Freeman’s caution about not drawing too clear a line between the virtual and the real, Hartman noted the plethora of talking heads who, by virtue of their expertise (often self-proclaimed), have introduced a flamboyant and often alarmist rhetoric into discussions of cyberspace and its presumed deleterious effects on people’s capacity to form intimate relationships. Hartman argued for a return to a more sober, psychoanalytic approach to examining the interface of social networking and individual psychology, an approach characterized by curiosity and observation rather than judgmental opinion. Encouraging the psychoanalytic study of “the space where mind meets machine,” Hartman focused on furthering the development of a working theory of the “cyberobject” (a construct first articulated, he noted, by fellow panelist Glen Gabbard).

Hartman used the brilliant video “Noah,” a prize-winning short at the Toronto Film Festival in 2013, both as a springboard for his remarks and as a way to instantiate them. The video, directed by Patrick Cederberg and Walter Woodman, tells the story of a seventeen-year-old boy who fears his girlfriend might be breaking up with him. He comes to believe that he has found evidence supporting his fears on the girlfriend’s Facebook page. Part of the brilliance of the short is that the viewer watches the story unfold entirely as it plays out on Noah’s computer screen. Windows open and close. Images from others’ webcams (some pornographic, some not) cascade across the screen, the frenetic clatter of keyboards providing background noise. Noah types, interacts with other webcams, moves back and forth between diverse Facebook pages and Chatroulette, interacting with friends and strangers alike, displaying that unconscious computer dexterity that so many of the young seem to have hardwired into their hands. The mind-numbing speed and ephemeral quality of these transactions are powerfully evoked.

Hartman used the video to elaborate and deepen the cyberobject concept. He began by reminding us that as psychoanalysts “we assume mental instability. Our lexicon describes the nascent subject and the fate of the object as a rich journey with multiple possible interations.” With a tip of the hat to Roy Schafer, Hartman noted that “objects of our imagination come to life in the interpersonal field as both internal and external introjects.” Hartman agreed with Schafer’s assertion that “introjects lurk in the shadows of experience ready to pounce or appear as saviors” (1968, p. 70). In a similar vein, Hartman suggested that “introjects never die. They lurk awaiting re-presentation.”

Hartman seemed to be arguing that the virtual world of social networking can be thought of as constituting a sort of potentiality in which an infinite array of cyberobjects can be constituted and relinquished in a medium of highly compressed time. All kinds of part-object relationships, perverse and otherwise, can rapidly be brought to life as activated introjects and then just as rapidly be relinquished or transformed. Cyberobjects, he stated, are neither internal nor external (rather like transitional objects), a fact that renders moot the distinction between real and virtual. “Infinite presentations of the object (some we aim to match, others we match to ourselves, still others we use to recognize like subjects and love objects) grant us interiority and alterity” (Hartman 2012, p. 457).

Hartman’s application of these ideas about the cyberobject to Noah provided a strikingly nuanced view of how this adolescent used his foray into cyberspace to work through the loss associated with his dawning realization that his girlfriend might indeed be leaving him: “in the spin of Chatroulette, various combinations of Noah’s introjects are constructed and broken down; his experience of self is changed by the pace of rupture and innovation in the presentation of the cyberobject. Were we to endow the cyberobject with alpha function (Bion 1962), in seventeen minutes we’d witness Noah scroll through breakdown, trigger introjects and offload their nastier traits while, at the same time, observing the iteration of others’ projections in his off-kilter avatar. ‘WTF!’ becomes ‘I can get pretty neurotic sometimes’ becomes ‘I’m Noah.’” By the time Noah loses Partner, he has been a stud, played the fool, seen more than one fragile phallus, spoken as brother, and imagined being lover. We watch him watch himself as he assumes greater responsibility for his actions in each iteration.”

Hartman does not see social media as posing an existential threat to the capacity for intimacy. Like Freeman, he expressed skepticism about drawing too clear a line between the virtual and the real. Assuming an attitude of curiosity, he suggested that analyzing a person’s way of engaging social media can offer analysts an opportunity to observe the recursive processes associated with introjects illuminating external objects (thereby creating cyberobjects) that may in turn modify the introject and so on. He is open to the possibility that this recursive process between the subject and the cyberobjects he or she has created can foster growth and working through. He acknowledges, though, that people may well vary in their capacity to create cyberobjects, let alone cyberobjects that can become part of a progressive developmental trend.

Glen Gabbard approached the topic of cyberspace by providing a personal, clinically grounded historical overview of the gradual incursion of cyberspace into his consulting room. His remarks focused on the technical questions these incursions have raised. He described how in 1998 (a time from the Pleistocene period of the cyber age) a patient first alerted him, via e-mail, that she had developed powerful feelings of a personal nature for him. Gabbard candidly noted his uncertainty about how to respond to her sexually explicit e-mails, adding that he decided to take them up in person with his patient. The analytic process that ensued was conducted partly in person and partly in cyberspace.

Gabbard described how these e-mails felt somehow illicit, evoking embarrassment, shame, and an anxious pressure to delete them as soon as he had read them, both to protect his patient’s confidentiality and to avoid their discovery. The tension created by these e-mails led him to realize that his patient “had created a split self—the erotic Rachel in e-mail and the inhibited Rachel who showed up in my office.” (This case is discussed in greater detail in “Cyberpassion: E-rotic Transference on the Internet” [Gabbard 2001].) The technical tension here seemed to have been organized around how to avoid prohibiting his patient’s method of conveying an important aspect of her subjectivity into the analysis without inadvertently colluding with maintaining the patient’s split-off erotic self.

Gabbard then described the case of a nineteen-year-old young man whose social life and friendships were conducted mostly in cyberspace. This patient said he preferred virtual reality to the reality of his parents and that he spent more time with online friends than with friends he saw in person. Gabbard came to recognize that were he to enter the young man’s intrapsychic world in order to help him, he “would have to accept that his object world was one that existed in virtual reality, where gender and sexuality were elusive.” Again Gabbard’s technical position seems to have been organized around the principle that patients have the right to convey themselves as they are inclined to do in an analysis, rather than having to comply with our preferences and predilections. His position had the distinct advantage of allowing him to maintain an openness to what could be learned about his patient from analyzing his relationships with his cyberobjects rather than viewing these relationships as merely uninteresting ways of avoiding “real relationships.”

Around 2005, Gabbard started to see the effect of Facebook and other social media on how some of his patients experienced themselves. He noted the now common phenomenon of younger patients becoming increasingly preoccupied with their Facebook personas. Some of his patients seemed more preoccupied with their images on Facebook than with the actuality of their feelings about their circumstances. How to represent a change in their relationship status on Facebook could at times seem to overshadow how a patient actually felt about the breakup of a romantic relationship.

Gabbard “began to recognize that the psychoanalytic construct of the self was also changing in the cyberspace era. Today one watches oneself from a distance, as a Facebook creation parading by a screen, a virtual version of the self freed from the vicissitudes of the body. It is also a self that is shaped by what one imagines others wish to see online and by subtle forms of manipulation by Google, Facebook, and other major players. Social networking coaches advise their flock to ‘be authentic’ on social media. The contemporary young adult must decide which version of the self should be presented on social media to have the greatest chance of appearing ‘authentic’ to others. However, appearing authentic and being authentic are not the same thing.”

From here Gabbard took up the phenomenon of the loss of analytic anonymity. Echoing Freeman’s observation that whereas analysands used to have to bring a certain industry to learning things about their analyst’s life, today, in the cyber age, they almost have to work at not finding such information. Similarily, Gabbard observed how analysands now often come to initial sessions armed with extensive background information, some accurate and some not. Acknowledging that such information gathering can be experienced by the analyst as disquieting and invasive, he posed the technical question of how to respond to analysands who use cyberspace in such ways. He suggested that “while we can feel violated, we have to recognize that what is on the web is public information. Were we to forbid our patients to Google us, they would become terribly interested in what we wished to hide, analogous to telling a child not to go into a particular room in one’s home.”

Gabbard also commented on how difficult it is to get misinformation removed from the internet. He mentioned a New York Times op-ed piece written by Zick Rubin, a social psychologist who discovered that he had been listed as deceased in his Wikipedia entry. In the piece Rubin humorously and ironically recounted his ordeal getting this misinformation removed from his entry. Gabbard described a similar experience of dealing with misinformation on the web. In 2008 a colleague suggested that he should take a look at his Wikipedia entry. It was accurate except that it ended with a bit of misinformation: “Dr. Gabbard is currently an Awesome Ranger at the Cub Scout Camp in Port Huron, New York.” Gabbard said he didn’t even know what an “Awesome Ranger” was and had “never set foot in Port Huron.” (Doth he protest too much?) During this part of his presentation an audience member tweeted that she thought that Gabbard was an Awesome Ranger, a sentiment that seemed widely held by those in attendance.

Gabbard also took up the issue of patients who want to send and/or receive texts while in session and the technical conundrums this presents. He offered that there is “no ‘correct’ way to do analysis. Each patient must do analysis the way that he or she must do it. Hence an effort to set limits on the use of texting or access to the iPhone potentially may create problems for the analysis. . . . Psychoanalysis is not coercive—we allow our patients to show us who they are without controlling what they say or do. On the other hand, an analyst cannot simply ignore the use of texting; . . . one must attempt to analyze whatever is transpiring in the analytic discourse.”

Gabbard closed with some practical reflections on doing analysis in the twenty-first century. “We must not attempt to force our analysands to submit to our preferred way of doing things. We must understand that change has been set into motion, and we cannot stop it. . . . we cannot stop the juggernaut of life. . . . analysis assumes a special role in a society where we are tethered to our iPhones and there is no time for reflection. We are the only remaining sanctuary for quiet reflection where we can discover who we are and where we are going.”

This panel served up a rich meal. The presentations approached the topic of cyberspace from different points of view, but each shared a distinctly psychoanalytic sensibility. The panel offered a timely corrective to the rampant, often histrionic editorializing about the dangers posed by cyberspace. The panelists grounded their observations and comments in a way that both acknowledged the newness, the overstimulating and encroaching qualities, of cyberspace phenomena while reminding us that we can approach these phenomena analytically and that in so doing continuities with the past emerge. The audience was reminded that Freud was struck, from the earliest days of his researches, that human beings have always brought an inexhaustible creativity to their efforts to blunt the painfully limiting effects of reality through immersion in fantasy. But Freud was also aware that this ubiquitous struggle with coming to grips with the “real” and with the associated loss of grandiosity need not lead only to neurosis and dysfunction but can become the source of creativity and cultural advance.