ABSTRACT
Role playing games on the internet, together with the network of computer systems that provide the data for cyberspace, have developed from the verbal imaginative stories of myth, through written language and literature, and out of board and table top games of fantasy and science fiction. Analysts, as adults, are aware that adolescents are capable of spending a great deal of time on the internet, on social network sites and playing games. T. S. Eliot says, in The Four Quartets, "Human kind cannot bear very much reality" and, as analysts, they accept that they can enter and use the worlds of the unreal through the use of normal projective identification. Virtual worlds have always been constructed to lessen or avoid the experience of psychic pain. The virtual space available through cyberspace allows analysts the possibility of continually reworking the struggles of their internal world, so that their external world and their life in it may be improved.
