Welcome to the Philosophy of Psychoanalysis. The lecture you are about to listen to was created by Associate Professor Doris McIlwain. This course has been made publicly available, but was recorded for a live student audience. Please enjoy. Lecture 7, Attachment, Perversion, and Online Presence. When Bowlby devised his attachment theory, he was chucked out of psychoanalysis. And so there has been a history of enmity between psychoanalysis and attachment theory. And so Miriam Steele and her husband in 1998 wrote a really beautiful article saying, attachment and psychoanalysis, time for a reunion. And they cite this guy, Harris, whom I absolutely love, who works in the area of theory of mind. And he says, if you really want to understand kids' cognitive and emotional development, you have to pay attention to how they develop a theory of mind, that is the conception of the other as other, and also a conception of their pattern of attachment to caregivers. So it's utterly crucial that you take those things into account. So even though Bowlby's theory of motivation is quite different from Freud's drive theory, he has a basis in psychoanalysis that's often not frequently or explicitly acknowledged. So I'd like to explicitly acknowledge that here. So his notions are very welcome, I think, in the theory as I see it. So what Bowlby says, there are three psychoanalytically derived assumptions. The parent's behavior influences the child's personality and social development. That's pretty uncontroversial. There's a cross-generational influence in the way that the child gives meaning or develops a mental model of her experience and of her caregivers. And these internal working models are shaped and activated by anxiety-provoking situations, such as when you're afraid or if you think you're going to lose somebody, then your attachment gets activated, your inner working models get activated. So this is exactly what psychoanalysis says, Relationships shape our psyche. What was once an interpersonal relationship becomes an object relation, part of the infant psyche. So Guntrip suggests that when things go wrong, it's often because people end up hiding behind masks of respectable good behavior. And the reason that we hide behind masks is that we don't feel that everything about us is acceptable, which is, of course, one of the hallmarks of shame. That we hide behind masks. We hide the vulnerable parts of ourselves and we have a mask of good behavior on the outside. That's starting off down the path of narcissism very nicely. He says, we've become aware of the subtle non-acceptances that great numbers of children suffer at the hands of their respective parents and family. And this, for him, is crucial in setting them off down the path of psychopathology. Citing Fairburn, he says, parents fail to get it across to the child that she or he is loved for her own sake as a person in his or her own right. And when I did research into people that were involved in new religious cults as adolescents, and I asked them if you could say one thing about, you know, your early childhood environment, this was the most common thing that people spoke about. Now, for no real reason, I just want to sort of give you a sense of how Guntrip uses that notion of dependence and independence to outline two prototypically different and quite extreme personality styles. He can't give an amazingly detailed theoretical account of how they arise, other than that attachment did or didn't go well for them. But the reason I'm giving these typologies to you is I find these unbelievably useful clinically myself. So even though I think I can't give a very good theoretical account of them, I've got a feeling that he's on to something quite important here. So I'm just going to give you very quick thumbnail sketches. I'm not going to lean very heavily on this, but it's just for interest's sake. So he says, at the extreme you get a schizoid, at the other extreme you get a hysteric. In the schizoid, the person is cold and aloof and they sometimes come across as very arrogant. And then in the hysteric, you've got people who are clammy, sorry, clamouring, clammy. Sorry, small hilarity break. Sorry, clamouring, needy and noisy. The schizoids are, and this is what's quite fascinating, because you would notice from the root of the word schizoid, which means to split, that it's almost like schizophrenia, but they're not schizophrenic. Nonetheless, what they would share with someone with schizophrenia is a fragmented sense of self, a deep-seated doubt about the reality of their self and whether or not it can make it in the world. So they've got a sense of being depersonalized, of not being real, of not belonging, of being very isolated and very out of touch with their world. They can be in a bunch of friends with arms around them and still feel that. So the problem is not relating to others, but finding out whether or not one has a self. And that's a little bit different from the introvert who's quiet and shy and uncommunicative, but there is that sense of being detached, a kind of shut-in person. Guntrip, in one of his chapters, which I'll put online if you're interested, he says it's as if the little pink fleshly baby part of the person has been put in a stainless steel drawer and shut away, protected but totally isolated, untouched and unmoved by what's going on around him or her. So when they do get someone they can depend on, and sometimes they do actually physically depend on them, they don't feel mentally in touch with them. They're often left with no conscious capacity to love at all. It's like I should be feeling love. He's being so nice to me or she's doting on me, but I just don't. And so there's this kind of dread sense of isolation and non-entity, non-being within, as if the true self is in cold storage. It's as if, and clinically what you sort of see is it's like the person runs in and out of the room. That's the way I think of it. It's like they're running in and out of the room. They'll get really close one day and you'll think they're going to retreat next week. That was too close. Yeah, they've told too much. They've been too intimate. So they'll be really removed and isolated, possibly even slightly punishing of you the next week because they've revealed a little bit too much. And so often what their partner will feel is that they're either right there or they're completely shrinking away. You know, they're either texting me every minute of every day and then I don't hear from them for a fortnight. Okay. So he says the possible origin of this is that the caregiver has stayed away too long. This is pure bulby. And the ego has begun to disintegrate. You know, the child initially when they're abandoned, they protest. And then there's despair. And then they're just kind of, you know, completely catatonic almost. Not expressive, not hoping, not expecting that anybody's going to come back for them. And he says the child has, as it were, fallen into a mental vacuum of ego, unrelativeness. Hysterics, on the other hand, are clammy, no, attention-seeking, demanding, overly dependent, manipulating other people, including their therapist by exhibitionistic uses of their own. And that's, you know, the sort of clamoring person who really, you know, wants you to know how much suffering they're experiencing. And please, please help me. He says that they're libidally frustrated, love-starved children. Often they use sexuality as a way of getting close to people because they can't feel close in other ways. And he says they're fighting for a primary supportive relationship, which can alone enable her or him to live. So the hysteric is a very, very needy person. There's a kind of rule of thumb with psychoanalysis. The earlier the disturbance, the more likely it's to show itself in somatic or bodily symptoms. Okay, so the earlier the disturbance, the more likely it is for it to be a conversion disorder later on. And the need for sensuous comfort can easily exploit genital and sexual impulses. So the hysteric may rush into sexual relationships and either be very active or very inhibited. And if they want to feel separate from the other, because they can't genuinely feel separate and solidly apart from the other person, they often are frigid or almost anesthetic. Like they'll feel nothing in the sexual experience. It's a kind of way of pulling back from too much closeness to the other. Okay, part B of the lecture is really short. And then we go on to part C, which is about the internet and relationships. I've put it, for reasons I don't understand myself, I have put an essay topic together on perversion. Because I suddenly started reading all this amazing stuff by Janine Chasseguet-Smirgel and Joyce McDougall and Whitebook and John Giordini. And I just thought perversion is really, really fascinating in a way. And so I'll put that out as an essay topic. And if no one does it, no worries at all. But I just thought it's really, really interesting stuff. Okay, so historically, all the old boys like Bebber and Freud and things like that, thought perversion was when you were more interested in your own organ pleasure than you were in the other person. And if the organ pleasure was it, and it wasn't about reproduction. So in other words, quite a simple, straightforward, slightly moralistic view of perversion. If you're not having sex for procreation, you're perverse. You know, that's the final thing. But what's entailed is, of course, that it's pleasure for its own sake, rather than pleasure as a form of intimacy. Sometimes it's denying the wholeness of the other. Like, you know, if your lover's got to put a paper bag over their head when you're making love to them, that's not real good, is it? You know, it's kind of like, yeah, great, thanks for that. It's lovely. So you're denying the wholeness of the other or the uniqueness of the other. If you render the other interchangeable, do you know you have four or five people so that you know and could possibly think you're attached to any one person? Okay, that's kind of denying the uniqueness or the wholeness or the specialness of the other. So it's often about part instincts and part objects. And so it's often pregenital, like, you know, people get caught up in all sorts of acts that don't entail genitality, but entail earlier phases of psychosexual transitional development. Also, you can get, obviously, a fusion of aggression, sex, and power. And that's, you know, sadomasochism. That's one of the most flagrant, sort of obvious examples of perversion. But what people don't seem to really get reliably is that if you're perverse, if you're really perverse, rather than just polymorphously perverse like most of us, but if you're really perverse, you've had a trauma, you know, something's happened, and it's painful, and you haven't been able to cope, and it's shocked you, and it's been too much for you, and you haven't repressed it, you've dissociated from it. Because repression entails that part of you wanted it to happen, and you usually don't really want traumas to happen. There's usually nothing about traumas that's good. So you've had some sort of traumatic experience, and that's what's caused a perversity. And it's pretty invariably the case. But look, how perversion ends up getting characterized is incredibly various. Joyce McDougall is quite cool and embracing. She says they're neosexualities. They're just different ways of being sexual in the world. So she doesn't have any kind of moral slant at all. Janine Chasseguet-Smirgel says there's something really wrong with perversion. It entails blurring the genders, not really accepting that men and women are different, and it entails blurring the generations. So you get older people hitting on younger people, or you get people in positions of power hitting on people that are their employees, which is really tragic stuff. It's not the sex that's the problem. It's the fact that it's all about power, and it's crossing a boundary that should be protected, etc. So she's stricter about perversion. I think there is sometimes something about perversion that does make me a bit morally uneasy, if it's not consenting and all that kind of stuff. And I think when you see the extreme cases of people that are predators that groom young children on the web and meet them, then I feel a bit moralistic, I have to say. I don't see that as a neosexuality, whereas other forms of perversion, I'm more inclined to go, yeah, sure, if that's a neosexuality that's consenting adults, who's it harming? There was apparently somebody last year in one of my toots did a presentation about a guy that got put in prison because he liked to cover himself in cow dung. And I thought, look, it's perverse, but why would you put someone in prison for that? A good shower in his spine, you know. There's nothing wrong with the boy. Leave him alone, you know. But it's perverse. It's definitely perverse. There's lots of poo fantasies going on there, okay. And Stoller says love is beyond them. He says they are incapable of love. It's truly perverse because love entails the uniqueness of the whole other and the specific other and the one that you can't replace by somebody else. And so if you can have interchangeable love objects or part objects or it's all about organ pleasure, it's not love, says Stoller. So Freud sees it as an arrest, as having been given an object for your sex drive too soon. And that's a trauma. To be given an object when you didn't need one is a trauma. But John Giordini's article, and I really recommend that. It's one of the best articles I've ever read on perversion. It's just fantastic because what he captures, which I managed to have missed after many years of reading about perversion, I just didn't get how crucial the break with reality was. I only sort of worked that out about a month ago, much to my embarrassment. It's been in everything I've been reading. I just haven't been noticing it in the way that I should have. And of course, that is the heart of perversion. It's like what perversion entails is you've seen something, but you've denied the significance of it. It's like, no, I can't mean that. Now, if you think about it, that is probably the prototypical response to a traumatic event. God, you know, my mother is capable of exploiting me. No, couldn't be. I must have misunderstood. I deny the significance of what happened, of what transpired. So you perceive the fact, but you don't allow the meaning to stay. And Stekel says the little boy perceives that the woman is without a penis. You'll get much more about this in my lecture. I think I am doing next week, actually. Sorry, I think we've got morality and gender before you've got Andrew. So you've got me next week. Yes, you'll hear much more than you ever wanted to about that next week from me. Okay. About the significance of spying the gender difference. But then perverse people believe that the mother really has a penis. She's just hiding it somewhere. And it will show itself eventually. Okay. There's also denial of the generational differences, which is I love mum and dad. I want to have sex with them. Why can't I? Okay. It's all right to break those boundaries. And that's why when you really meet a perverse individual, what they will attack is your sense of your own reality. The sense in which words are binding. When you say, no, I'm not interested in going out with you. That will not be taken as a no. Okay. And there will be an attack of boundaries. I know where you live. I've got your mobile phone number. Do you know that sort of I can get inside even though you said I couldn't kind of thing. So that's why psychoanalysis talks about sustaining the frame. Like psychoanalysis is quite ritualized. It's incredibly ethically bounded. And the reason it's so ethically bounded is to keep the other safe and to keep the analyst safe. Because you're going to have people coming in whose precise task is to attack the frame, to attack boundaries, to try and become the special ones who don't have to follow all the rules, etc. But often perversion entails, strikingly enough, highly ritualized encounters. Adam Phillips says the pervert is someone who knows too precisely what gives them pleasure. I always think of it, you know, as equivalent to when you want someone to scratch your back. No, no, not there. Oh, no, just higher. No, off to the left. No, right. Yes, that's it. Okay. That's what the pervert is like. It's more like, well, I can only fancy you if, you know, you enact these unscripted scenarios, etc. Okay. Okay. Part three of the lecture. All kind of interconnected in an interesting sort of way, I hope. I hope it makes sense to you. I can see a deep but fragile logic to the three parts of the lecture. If you can't, feel free to ask me explicitly and I'll try and put it into words. Okay. Does the net enable us to leave the body behind? I've just got to check my time to see how fast I've got to go. How are you going? Am I talking too fast today? You're coping? Cool. Great. Okay. Okay. Look, how many selves have we got? It's a really difficult question because, in fact, if we are capable of dissociation, we can go into quite markedly different self-states that protect us. Okay? Sometimes people get manic with excitement to take themselves away from despair and sadness. When you trash yourself and get drunk because you've had bad news, it's kind of, you know, alcohol-induced dissociation of a sort. You know, it's taking flight rather than sitting down and facing it. And I'm not dissing getting drunk in those circumstances. I'm just saying that's what it is. You know, it is dissociation of a sort. There is no real one-self-one-body rule, unfortunately. We can house many different selves. What we want to end up with is an overarching reflective sense of self that keeps all those different selves together. And then we're kind of more or less normal. But some people don't even have that. They have, you know, more fragmented, more dissociated selves. And sometimes they're very high-functioning people. I'm not saying it's necessarily a disorder, but you do get levels of dissociation. So what's cool about the net is it seems as though we can create an online persona, an avatar, and we don't have to carry around all our cultural baggage or all our own personality baggage. And if you study it, often the avatar has quite a strong relationship to aspects of a person's personality. But sometimes it's a remarkable freeing. People will be a different gender, et cetera. And that's quite common. What the net shows, I think, is the link between language and embodiment. That's one of the reasons it fascinates me. And I mentioned that there's a regression in language use on the net. And you'll see examples in those articles where language becomes a kind of action. So what I'm asking, I suppose, is self-embodied. Obviously, I'm not an innate self-theorist. I don't believe that we are born with a true self. I think ourselves get cobbled together out of bits and motivational pieces and life experiences and a capacity for theory of mind and reflection and a few other little ingredients. But do we have to have a self that's totally reflective of the body we inhabit? And how free are we to construct a self online that has actually nothing to do with our actual body? Now, social constructionists say, yes, the net is totally free. It's like a projection surface. You can be whatever you want. But is that actually what you find? Is going onto the net like Simmel's notion of an adventure? Georg Simmel is fantastic to read. And sociologists from 1925, a man of independent means, so didn't have to bother about any institutions, and just wrote like a dream and way ahead of his time. Absolutely fantastic stuff about the metropolis, about money, about secrecy. Yeah, just wonderful. And he writes about adventures. And he said, adventures are where you can step outside of your normal mode of existence, your normal way of being, free almost from the constraints of your own body and of society. Is that what it's like to go on the web? Well, often what we find is that people have avatars that are quite compensatory to their actual body. And this can be quite tragic. You know, there are sort of parodies of the beauty myth of society. All the women have got double D cups and all the men are sort of like, you know, 12 inch long sort of thing. It's this kind of terrifying sort of vision of everybody on the web being over-endowed in a sense, you know. And it's quite strange to have that because, you know, normally we think of language as a form of sublimation. If I speak rather than acting out, that's a sublimation. If I say I'm really angry at you rather than thumping you, that's a sublimation. If I say I fancy you rather than jumping your bones, that's a sublimation. But interestingly, what's happened on the web is that the representation of pleasure becomes pleasure in representation. Like it's almost like the words themselves give a little, you know, charge of pleasure. And I suppose that's the way it is. Like that's art too, that you end up loving creating a work of art that encapsulates something of your pleasure. But symbols are quite a lot faster than transport. Like you can chat to someone more quickly than you could get to their side. So we've now had this kind of communication revolution where you've got these quite abstract symbols. But nonetheless, insofar as we are creating them from an embodied psychological perspective, it's not just our psychology that goes through the words and the symbols. But I'm suggesting that aspects of our bodily desire and the residues of the way that our bodily desire has been received by others and shaped by others also gets communicated. So you think you're inhabiting an avatar, but bits of you are intruding into that experience massively. And language functions very differently on the web in a sense, in that you're able to convey in a depersonalized way experiences to others who haven't had those experiences. And you can obviously say things that you actually can't physically do. And some of the great science fiction like Snow Crash. In Snow Crash, there's this guy who's got a sort of an online existence, actually. And he's completely crippled. And he needs the equivalent of an iron lung to exist. But his mobile avatar is, you know, very strong, very powerful. I think it's a little bit like those blue creatures that we saw in... What was the name of the movie where the guy has got... He's completely paraplegic. Avatar. It is called Avatar. No wonder I can't remember the name. Avatar, exactly. I was thinking, what was it called? It was something really close. Yeah, yeah, exactly. But Snow Crash is way before Avatar. Snow Crash is, I think, mid-80s or something like that. It's kind of real... Well, it was in those days. It's a real fantasy novel. Now it's not so much fantasy. I just read before I walked out of my office today that Nokia has just patented a substance which, if it's inserted into your skin as a tattoo, will vibrate when you get a phone call. Anyway, so you've got this notion in the net as freedom from the looking glass self, where all people are equal and there's sort of inequalities of birth left behind. Everybody can be beautiful. It's an island of fluid self-creation. You can be whoever you wish to be. It seems to offer sublimation because you're speaking in a written form. You're acting symbolically. And there's this kind of immense intimacy like schizoid personalities are so much more able to be really intimate without having to run in and out of the room in this sort of immediate environment. So I suppose I'm raising the question, has it got therapeutic possibilities? It's this kind of stuff. It also offers a form of regression. You've got the fantasy of the other rather than the real other. Like people often get quite disappointed when they meet someone that they've had long-term online interactions with. Sometimes they go, let's go back to the net. It's too disappointing to be in real life. Often you exaggerate the degree to which the other is the same as you, because it's the medium of identification. And you've got this kind of, yeah, quite regressed kind of communication because you don't have to wait. It's instant. You don't have to sort of, you know, front up with who you are and be consistent and responsible and moral and reliable because it's anonymous or it can be. And it's kind of isolated and yet it's intimate. Now, what actually happens, of course, is that you don't leave the moral codes of beauty myths and things. Everybody's gorgeous online. Everybody's got body parts of exemplary proportions. So rather than treat it like an adventure playground where we could all be blue and, you know, whatever, we actually mimic and masquerade and parody what's required in the real world, in a sense. Okay, major question for me is, does the net, just because you're operating in this medium which is instant, anonymous, you know, do these attributes mean that any kind of exchange has got a strong potential to become a perverse exchange? Does it systematically appeal? Like I just said that I imagine schizoid people would find, you know, it easy to be intimate on the web. Is that true? And does it appeal to people for whom sexual variations in interpersonal and sexual relationships are already appealing? Okay, do you have more than one identity on Facebook? You know, do you have more than one identity in your other web exchanges? Because that's already a kind of a different self-states, in a sense. If you accidentally got one when it all started up and you didn't know you got more than one identity, that's a little bit different. Okay. So in other words, let's look really closely at the nature of the medium itself. In a sense, I think it does promote a more intense degree of perversity, but I don't mean that in a moral sense. That's why it's quite important that one day we do end up really talking about what we mean by perversity. And if you do that essay, you'll really know. It doesn't mean that I'm moralizing, but I do think the net has got elements that create more perversity. Because it's got the hallmark of perversity. It's got something of a break with reality. The virtual objects that you're relating to may have no real-world equivalence. They are imaginary objects. You can fashion a virtual self and body, quite literally. The fact that we don't doesn't, in a sense, lessen the possibility of that. But reality does intrude. It emerges from its consequences. Like, if you're spending all the time in an internet relationship and you're saying, but it's not sex, no bodily juices were exchanged, you know, I couldn't get pregnant, etc. But you're still neglecting your partner, you know, if you've got one, or your family. In other words, it still has consequences that are akin to, you know, real-world relationships. And, of course, reality emerges from the interactions with other people. People feel very turned on and excited or attracted or in love. And they'll sometimes leave their current existence to go for an internet relationship. In a sense, that's what culture is. Culture is kind of, like I said, of symbolic meanings. But it has very powerful consequences, material consequences. So, for those that didn't hear that, there was a 15-year-old girl who met a man in the Middle East and she travelled without her parents knowing the Middle East. There's also that very sad example in Sydney's West where a young girl met a guy on Facebook and she was a conservationist. And he said, you've got to come and do this inaugural camping and I'll show you the ropes of being a conservationist in this nature reserve. And she was killed. And that was, like, I think last year. I think it was last year. So, in other words, you know, the unverifiability of who the other is. You know, you don't meet them in the context of, yes, he's a friend of X and X is a good guy, so he's like, and going alone to strange places. It's just, oh, my word, it's sad. It's terrifying stuff. But it may all be like that. Do you know what I mean? Because that's the possibility, I think, that sort of aspect intrudes. So, the attributes that I think lend themselves to perversity is the instantaneity of the gratification. Anything that gives you instant goodies has got the possibility for addiction, basically. Immediate gratification. You've got to watch out. Because that oral personalities don't want to wait. That's a kind of good rule of thumb. They want more and they want it now. Okay, it's also a break with reality testing. So, the temporality makes it perverse. But the fact that you can not really verify what's being exchanged, you know, you don't know who you're talking to. You don't know if they're actually a woman or actually a man or actually the age they say they are. So, there is a bit of a break with reality. That can either be an adventure or it can be some sort of escape. So, the way language functions, I know I've mentioned that a few times, but I actually am a bit fascinated by that. Where language becomes a kind of action. Because language can operate at the level of the unconscious, running away with the subject. And because language is their kind of action, it actually does seem like a little bit of acting out necessarily happens on the web in this meeting of exchange. And look, what's interesting about it is that when language is running away with you in that way, it's not necessarily the case that you're conscious of what you're revealing or saying or wishing. So, it's not necessarily part of the talking cure where you're putting into words desires that you've never known you've had. It's more like a kind of talking out akin to an acting out which brings bits of the body with it like your desire or interest. And you might lose interest in your partner and only become excited by the online avatar. So, are net relationships just like any other kind of relationships? I actually don't have a complete answer. I think they're a bit more instant. You can talk to a friend immediately. You can talk to people that are obviously at a distance in other countries. There's certainly in the real world body, you really are shaped by the particular kind of body that you inhabit. And that will influence what enactments you are able to embark upon. If you look at people at nightclubs, I was always fascinated by that, that people would end up being with people that were just about as good looking as each other. Do you know? And I thought, because there's nothing else to go on. Because you can't have a conversation. Because you can't hear anything. So, it's more like, yeah, that person's about as good looking as me. I'll go after them, do you know? Whereas in the real world, you can have absolutely gorgeous people physically with absolutely gorgeous people mentally. Do you know what I mean? And they can look like a mismatch at the physical level, but they're not at all a mismatch in the big scheme of things. Well, that's in the real world with your real world body. But online, some say that the body's entirely left behind. This is from the articles that you'll be reading. Actions and interactions are seen as entirely dissociated from the corporeal body. And I sort of think, well, the corporeal body is still going to be having its effects. Because attachment patterns, templates of loving, transferences, object relationships, those are all the residues of your body that are now mental and psychological that you will betray through your language. So, your body is online. And the effects of your particular body are there in your online exchanges, I think. The internal working models of your attachment are still going to have effects. And those are the residues of our experiences of others who've cared for us. But look, internal working models, even though they sound very structural and very cognitive, they're quite hot, affectively charged processes. Like, if you want secure attachment, you will pursue the other. They're quite motivational. But this is just saying more of it. They're inextricably tied to each other, these relationship cognitions, by their emotional content. In other words, in attachment patterns or internal working models, affect is the glue. It's the glue that links the relationship cognitions together. In other words, working models are quite fundamental to the way that you organize your expectations about other people, what you think they're likely to do. So, even spoken intimacy, the body's there. Language runs away with us on the net, but it takes the body with us. It's like free association in that regard. It's still going to reveal our unconscious concerns. It's still going to reveal things about us. So, there is the possibility, I think, that net relationships can be therapeutic, just as real-world relationships can be forms of acting out. But the medium, I think, tinges things a little bit in the direction of the perverse. So, you have to be more aware of that, I think. But I think intersubjective intimacy is obviously still possible, if there's enough sensitivity on the part of each participant. And also, I know from young people that have been around me in my world, that they save their emails and their chats, and they reflect upon them later. Like, if relationships break up, they'll often be reading chats they've had previously. And so, there's the possibility that you can integrate parts of yourself that you might have projected outwards onto others, or formally split off. Like, new insights are possible if you reflect on those exchanges with the other. So, it may offer an opportunity to become conscious of what was previously unconscious processes. So, therapeutic or acting out, what's going to all say, look, there's no commitment, no diseases, just clean, nasty fun. In other words, they think it's kind of very, very different from the real world. And it sets you free from a lot of the concerns that you would have with real world exchanges. Are there addictive properties of the net? Well, I think yes. But I think some of those are quite fascinating. There can be the co-construction of fantasy. Like, normally, when you create fantasies to pacify your drives, because there's no one there that you love at the moment, or you're fantasizing the mother of all ice creams, because you're really hungry. But on the web, in real time, you can have co-constructions of fantasies. So, things unfold. You can also have that sense of escape, which is like substances, whereby you're free from the constraints of your psycho history, or free from the particular mood or state that you're in. It can be like an adventure. It can be a shifting of desire. If you're in a neighborhood where there's no one your age and stage, and you're very lonely, you can shift that kind of isolation of your desire, and find people that you're able to speak with. But there's also that lack of empirical fixity. You just, there's so much you don't know about who you're exchanging your words with. Do we leave cultural constraints behind? Well, no. Appearance doesn't matter, and yet. Age, sex, location is the first thing people ask. Everyone's gorgeous online. There's the parody of the beauty myth. And I actually think that on the net, it actually apes and parodies cultural discourses. I mean, for breasts and penises to be so important, it seems a bit nutso. But it also enates sort of Western conceptions of romance. Like, there's a lot of wooing that still goes on, a lot of flirtation, a lot of inhabiting of ideal bodies. And obviously, I can't say the next thing on Ireland, but it takes me back to Erica de Jong's notion of the ziplash. There's no consequences of the exchanges and the interactions. Okay. That was Lecture 7 of the Philosophy of Psychoanalysis podcast, presented by Associate Professor Doris McIlwain. The theme song to the show was created by Rose Mackenzie-Peterson. The producer is myself, Nina McIlwain. Thanks to Andrew Geeves and John Sutton. Speak soon. Thank you.