This book is the proceedings of an International Conference on Challenges of Psychoanalysis in the 21st Century: Psychoanalysis, Health and Psychosexuality in the Era of Virtual Reality, held 15-17 September, 2000, in Geneva, Switzerland.
Psychoanalysis has become a basic psychiatric science in very much the same way as the neurosciences or epidemiology. However, there is a certain present-day discrediting of psychoanalysis as a therapeutic tool stemming, to some extent, from the reluctance of psychoanalysts to submit their theories and practice to scientific scrutiny. However, as we...

During discussion of psychoanalysis and virtual reality in the new millennium, it was predicted that in the next century the differences between the conscious, unconscious, and the pre-conscious will have to be reconsidered in view of the ever-expanding concepts created by virtual reality. There will be virtual sexual acts over the Internet, ovum parthenogenesis will be possible without the intervention of the male, and clonic reproduction of the human being will be carried out in the laboratory. The child born in these circumstances will relate to a widening array of potential parental...