Contenu du sommaire : Réel et virtuel

With Cogito having made it possible for anyone to decipher the “signatura rerum” (the Signature of All Things), the only objection that can be still made to the generalized confusion between the real and the virtual is the kind of fiction that can evoke the collective expression of myth or the unexpressed expression of a fantasy to force an individual to invoke a belief system, thus removing him from the indubitability of universal knowledge. The fiction to which this paper lends a voice, in an essay on “implied psychoanalysis”, is that of the reality show, something invented before the term existed by Marivaux in “The Quarrel”, in order to resolve the issue of “inconstancy and infidelity in love” and of whether it should be attributed to one gender rather than the other. Its expression only helps to remind one of the extent to which the individual, especially if feminine, as the supreme object of desire, common to both sexes, is dependent on the mirror image, the founder of the personality, but also the originator of all illusions. Reregistering this desire within time so that constancy can become fidelity must be the result of a decision, which can enable blood relationships, which operate in the realm of love and are always grafted on - and haunted by - the family, to be distinguished from those of affinity, which catch desire in order to cheat it more effectively with the portrait and the mirror, those artifacts that technological civilization constantly disseminates.

New technologies are completely changing identity, intimacy, one's expectations of other people, the relationship with images and forms of learning. This leads to new kinds of relationships and psychic defense mechanisms. Education must be rethought, especially giving more importance to narrative in building the self and to learning how to empathize with others.

Struck by an unusual news item, the authors try to understand the processes involved when individuals invest themselves in so-called “virtual” worlds. They wish to show how virtual space fails as transitional space. Indeed, trying to create a space for illusion is unsuccessful to the extent that these virtual worlds do not leave enough room for experience's tangible reality and, hence, for the process of disillusion necessarily connected to the capacity for illusion. The avatar, as a representation of the ideal I, is another way of imagining the virtual's (almost) entirely imaginary world. However, with the case of an adolescent “addicted” to massively multi-player games, the authors invite the reader to see how using the virtual world may perhaps generate a particular kind of suffering, but may also represent an attempt to resolve other difficulties creatively. The authors therefore consider the use of these virtual platforms both as a subjective symptom, but also as one of contemporary society.

The authors explore the role of images in video games on adolescents. The use of images, even recurrent ones, can be compared to daydreaming, usually associated with continuing play in the child. As opposed to the ability to daydream, there is the escape into withdrawal and addiction to images; these conflicts concern the development of the feeling of object loss linked to the process of adolescence.

More than a quarter of Belgian teenagers are said to blog. Using a psychosocial approach, with a questionnaire and interviews, we have tried to define the different psychological functions filled by the teenager's blog. Far beyond the simple sharing of information, a blog seems to be a new environment for culture, exchange and the presentation of self. The noticeable parallel between the blog and Didier Anzieu's concept of “skin ego” leads us to locate the blog at the borders of the self, virtuality and reality. A teenager uses it to present himself to his peers, while protecting himself at the same time, bringing into this “virtuality” bits of his “real” life that he can choose, manipulate and summon up, thus controlling his “virtual” image, which inevitably superposes his “real world” image. Adolescents can thus use blogs as a new type of transitional space.

Is virtual reality a promise to “expand our boundaries,” as one often hears? That isn't all it is. This article will try to show how virtual reality also makes its appeal more credible by invoking an indivual's incompleteness. The immediate consequence of this negative is an appeal for desire, making a connection between virtual reality and the unconscious, using a fantasy renegotiation of the relationship between the Self and the object in an idealizing mode. We will analyze how this mechanism – which is sexually motivated – could be considered a legitimate psychotherapeutic practice.

With all the glitter of the word “virtual”, today's society is faced with its own reality. The fragmentation of the original meaning of the word allows it in a way to fetishize a dimension of the virtual which protects it from what has still to be considered. This remnant is left for clinical psychology, among others, to examine. Clinical psychology is itself fragmented and can no longer manage to retain its own virtue, which consists in holding together the real and the virtual. Using a space for exchanges with teenagers on the internet, the author evokes this coexistence in clinical practice, based on the ways teenagers treat the real through the virtual.

The proposed discussion focuses on the psychic content of a story, which enables it to be differentiated from another kind of narrative, and examines the internal substance animating it and giving it the authenticity of a symbolically meaningful expression. The story, as a virtual narrative, would require the voice of a storyteller to bring it to life and act as a meaningful expression, able to have a life outside its own subjectivity. Using the various constants and functions of the story, related to emotional forces, to pleasure and magic, the discussion shows that the story allows symbolic psychic content to emerge by representing imaginary characters in an elusive space and time. Like a dream or a word game, the story offers a way of resolving internal conflicts and fulfils its primary psychic role of taming archaic terrors, leading to maturity, and so constitutes a privileged cultural mediation for individuals with autism, psychotic and borderline pathology in an attempt to restore a failing fantasy and imaginary life and lead to symbolization.

In the first scene of Krzysztof Kieslowski's Decalogue 6, the appearance of a hole at the center of the window of a ticket counter is the starting point for an esthetic reflection on the connection the cinematic image establishes with the real world, which it contains within itself at the level of a virtual encounter - an encounter that is promised but constantly delayed. Secondly, four instances of the ticket counter device — which recurs in Kieslowski's films— will be studied as a “mise en abyme” of the failure of a meeting with the real (tuchè) in the cinematic image.