"I Wish To Speak to the Despisers Of The Body": The Internet, Physicality, and Psychoanalysis

There is, undoubtedly, a political economy of virtuality and cyberspace to do with the globalization of capitalism and its efficient running. However, this paper is concerned with the psychodynamics of what is best called computer-mediated communication (CMC), which includes e-mails, textmessaging, and the internet; in particular, it looks at some of the implications of the lack of physical presence in CMC for how we feel about CMC and for morality and ethics. It is customary to give some account of how this issue became significant for the author. In my case, the stimuli were several: a puzzlement about the use of mobile phones, for example, on leaving a train station someone uses their mobile phone to tell a friend they are just leaving the station; a fear that I, myself, am addicted to System Shock 2 (a computer game which is fiendishly difficult) and cannot cope with not being able to finish it; astonishment at the numbers of people walking around with a mobile phone permanently at their ears! This led me to think of CMC (a generic term for all computer-mediated communication in cyberspace) from a psycho-social perspective, in particular the role that the lack of physical presence plays in CMCs. What part does physical presence play in our being social? Can object relations flourish in conditions where social relationships do not involve some form of physical co-presence? What happens to our relationships, one with another, when they are in cyberspace? Is there a psycho-social approach to cyberspace? While not attempting to answer any of these questions directly, I am concerned with what those of a psycho-persuasion make of the expansion of the internet, mobile phones, textmessaging, e-mails, and other aspects of virtual relating. What is going on when the Japanese writer Hisao Ishii argues that young people who use mobile phones suffer from mobile phone neurosis when they do not receive enough calls and textmessages? I will start with a debt to Bob Young, who has written extensively on the Internet from the point of view of a psychoanalytically informed—particularly Kleinian—perspective. Many of the ideas in this paper are developments of his ideas.