The Blank Screen of Cyberspace

Abstract

Internet communication (cyberspace) media, which have entered our culture in various ways, present novel opportunities—and challenges—for analytic practice. The availability of new modes of interaction prompts reflection about the role of familiar structures for analytic work. We describe the most prominent interactional environments in the cyberspace world; factors affecting analytic work in cyberspace; and ways in which the cyberspace dimension of the outside world may affect even traditional analytic settings. For guidance, we invoke the familiar longstanding discussion of the role of the couch.

Notes

¹Feelings associated with synchronicity, with their roots in early infancy, may contribute to the experiences evoked by shared motor and speech acts in groups. (Consider singing in unison, synchronized dance, the roar of a crowd.)

²The Tavistock group-relations model is a setting designed to permit study of unconscious processes operating at the group level. It borrows heavily from analytic thinking, especially the work of Bion. Hallmarks include careful attention to time and task boundaries, use of countertransference as data, and interpretive input from a consulting staff—which, in turn, uses its experience, as a subsystem, to clarify what is enacted or contained within the system of the conference. This model is a setting for time-limited study, rather than long-term treatment, and has correspondingly different constraints of confidentiality. It is, therefore, well-suited to assessing how different media may permit or interfere with close engagement and the observation of unconscious process (Bion, 1961; Hayden and Molenkamp, 2004).