ABSTRACT
This chapter attempts to redraw the contours of some basic psychoanalytic concepts concerning mental development as opposed to mere adaptation, particularly with regard to Western society as people know it today. It discusses the disappearance–recent, but now widespread in Western society–of the latency period, and the impact this may have on repression and on the model of the neuroses as the prototype of how the human mind works. Mourning lies at the intersection of several domains that themselves link together various components of mental functioning. In "Mourning and Melancholia", Sigmund Freud attempted to follow the economic perspective of his topographic model, with the emphasis on the functional role of the external object, in the service of the pleasure/unpleasure principle. Virtual reality has a completely different relationship to the pleasure/unpleasure principle and to the reality principle from that of fantasy. Increased denial of the reality principle with, at its apex, denial of the reality of one's own death.
