Contents & abstracts



Focus
Development Processes and Virtual Worlds: Promises and Deceptions

M. P. Ferrigno. Lacking both Reality and Experience: When Cyberspace Destroys the Illusion. Richard & Piggle, 26, 3, 2018, 205-216.

Facing the constant advances made by the digital technologies and virtual reality (which are pervading our lives at an increasingly detailed level), psychoanalysis, too, must know how to make good use of the new languages and the new ways of communicating and weaving relationships that Cyberspace offers. Indeed, these new tools and the new virtual realities inevitably influence their users’ process of development and subjectivization. It is necessary to engage with these new realities during psychoanalytical work as well, so as to accommodate the different experiences that web-surfing patients bring us. Partly through its exposition of some clinical experiences, this article tackles how psychotherapists can understand and deal with the new forms of communication that Cyberspace is promoting and their repercussions on patients who make a non-virtuous use of them.


S. D’Ambrosio and F. Tarello. When On-line is necessary for On-life: Journeys in Constructing the Self. Richard & Piggle, 26, 3, 2018, 217-229.

Simone and Safyia are both adolescents in psychoanalytic therapy. Their stories are of two journeys in which construction of the Self has been atrophied by powerful forms of parental projective identification and in which a heavy use of social networks is both a means of escape/isolation and a quest for a space that may permit psychic life and allow a personal identity to make itself manifest. The article seeks both to analyse the part the new technologies played in the identity-building journey and to describe how psychoanalytic therapy can allow the construction of a transitional space where the adolescent can shift from the images on the screen to the three-dimensional nature of thought and representation.


C. Trumello. Videogames: “Virtual” and “Real” Experience in the Analysis Room. Richard & Piggle, 26, 3, 2018, 230-243.

The world of telematics has imposed new conditions on our way of communicating and these have also made their way into the analytic relationship. This goes for adults but also, and above all, for children and adolescents. It is becoming ever clearer how, during the age of development, digital games can, in different ways and in varying degrees, interact with representational capability and the symbolization processes. It is in this perspective that the author presents some clinical material and offers a reflection on the psychotherapy undertaken with a nine-year-old boy who, through his stories and drawings, brings the characters of certain videogames to the analysis room. These will help to weave the therapy’s narrative plot. The work highlights how it was necessary to welcome, listen to and understand the “virtual characters” who gradually created a pathway to the patient’s emotions.


E. M. Marzano. “Have You Got Google Earth?” An Adopted Thirteen-year-old Boy’s Journey in Search of his Origins. Richard & Piggle, 26, 3, 2018, 244-253.

The article describes the journey in search of his origins that Simone, an adopted thirteen-year-old boy, undertakes in the analysis room, using the Google Earth software on the computer offered by his therapist. The therapist is at the patient’s side during the “journey” and allows him the illusion that there exists an external reality that corresponds to his ability to create the object of his needs magically. At the same time, however, she is engaged in helping him gradually face disillusionment, paving the way to frustration and fostering a stable examination of reality. The article hypothesizes that the use of a device that, on the one hand, seems to cancel distances but, on the other, acts in such a way that the distance is always maintained, a device that allows one to connect and disconnect and experience both a real and a virtual reality, a real and an a-temporal time, mitigated the risks of the journey back to the patient’s origins when combined with the therapist’s sharing and interpretation. It appears to have fostered the process by which Simone re-appropriated his past: a past that would otherwise have been too distressing.


A. Kriss. The Player and the Game: Compulsion, Relation and Potential Space in Video Games. Richard & Piggle, 26, 3, 2018, 254-271.

For years, video games have been anecdotally associated with psychopathology, despite their increasing popularity among the general public and the lack of empirical evidence to support such a link. In this article, the author argues that games are more than symptoms and that game worlds can act as a kind of potential space (Winnicott) not fully belonging to either intrapsychic or objective reality, but making contact with both. This space allows players to engage with complex psychological material-such as compulsions, self-and-other relations, morality, and personal growth--in vivo during the play session. Through exploration of the structural building blocks of games and specific case examples, the author suggests that an understanding of how and why patients play games can serve as an important clinical tool for sparking therapeutic change.

Clinical Reflections
A. Bincoletto, M. P. Chiavelli, R. D’Agostino and R. Di Lascio. Parental Functions and Identification Processes in Eating Disorders. Richard & Piggle, 26, 3, 2018, 272-282.

Taking Winnicott’s concept of the pure female element as their starting point, the authors highlight how, in eating disorders, the identification processes develop out of a lack of experience of being in the primary relationship with the mother. In serious eating disorders, moreover, the authors detect a form of collusion in the parental couple that is based on a deficient identification with the pure female element on the part of both parents and one that, in the father, causes an experience of envy regarding an exasperating lack of the breast as something that is (Winnicott 1966). In such a situation, the parental deficits prevent the child accessing his/her own internal world.

Psychoanalytical Work within Institutions and Health Care Services
F. De Marino and G. Cusumano. Between Psychoanalytic Theory, Fairy-tale Literature and Analytic Practice. An Experience of Reading in Schools. Richard & Piggle, 26, 3, 2018, 283-303.

In this article, the authors offer some theoretical reflections on the use of the oral tradition’s fairy-tale as an element of psychic exploration. Even if they are thousands of years old, fairy-tales raise issues that are still asking to be investigated. They influence and modify our way of perceiving, desiring, knowing and thinking and they are a precious point of departure for observing individual and group functioning both at the intra-psychic and the relational level and for promoting transformation. This is an area explored by Daniela Bruno in a recently published book. The decision to echo her reflections whilst trying to expand on them derives from the experience of experimentation and research with school children recounted in the second part of the article.

The Enchanting Screen
A. Gentile. Call Me by Your Name. Richard & Piggle, 26, 3, 2018, 304-307.

Reviews

Recommended Reading