ABSTRACT
This chapter explores the pathological dependence on the Internet from the point of view of a psychic withdrawal. The Internet is a system of networks, open to everyone, that defies any oligarchic or authoritarian type of arrangement; it is a new communicative democracy opposed to any type of censure. Psychic withdrawal is not a suspended area between fantasy and reality: instead, it is a psychopathological construction that exercises a hypnotic attraction over the rest of the personality, which is, consequently, continually impoverished. The photograph used by Bataille to reach ecstasy is nothing compared to the myriad figures of the perverse imagination that today’s Internet world makes available. The analyst listens with puzzlement to this communication and wonders what escaped him in the relationship with the patient, who had seemed to him to be more integrated and capable of affective dependence.
