title: Playing with unreality: transference and computer.
abstract: In this paper I describe the impact of cyberspace on the analytical relationship. My reflections will move from two clinical histories. In the first history, I describe the case of Melania, a patient who, at a certain moment of her analysis, started sending me e-mails, almost building a 'parallel setting'. I describe the relational dynamics linked to the irruption of the electronic mail into the boundaries of our psychoanalytic relationship. The second case is Louis, a 25 year-old young man with a schizoid personality who uses cyberspace as a psychic retreat. Over the years Louis told me, initially from a sidereal distance, of his necessity to create dissociative moments. The entrance to these retreats procures for Louis an immobile pacification, which may assume the characteristics of a trance: life comes to a halt in a state of 'suspended animation'. We can see the use that Louis makes of the computer as an attempt to live into a non-human object and to protect himself from relational anguish, but also to warm up a mechanical mother. Melania used technology to communicate with me, albeit in a roundabout way; for Louis, virtual space was a 'dissociative retreat' located on the border between sleeping and waking, which for years went untouched by our analytical discourse. For both patients, the computer was a tool for emotional regulation, and the analytical relationship aimed to give this tool some relational meaning, facilitating the shift from compulsive usage to a transformative use of the object.
authors.affiliation: Clinical Psychology Specialization Program, Sapienza University of Rome, Italy. Via Vigevano 41, I-20144, Milano, Italy. vittorio.lingiardi@uniroma1.it
authors.forename: Vittorio
authors.initials: V
authors.lastname: Lingiardi
mesh_terms: D000328:Adult; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D020407:Internet; D011575:Psychoanalytic Therapy / Q000295:instrumentation*; D014167:Transference, Psychology; D014584:User-Computer Interface