ABSTRACT
This chapter argues for Lacan's work as a specific form of representation grounded in contemporary internet communication media, in 'cyberspace' as a constellation of environments for contemporary subjectivity that includes virtual reality, chat-rooms and web-surfing. This chapter examines the way cyberspace has emerged as a new anthropological space, and how this space throws everyday commonsensical images of individual psychology into question. Cross-cultural psychology was much of the time concerned with comparing other cultures, 'primitives', with the advanced delights of modern civilization. Modern psychology is constructed within particular fantasies of technology and space, culturally specific notions about the ways in which certain instruments can be put to work in delimited situations. Psychoanalysis should be understood in its broadest sense here to encompass views of reality as being underpinned and undercut by dynamic unconscious processes. Lacanian psychoanalysis does not treat as empirical definable substance any of the paraphernalia that characterize accounts of psychoanalysis in psychology textbooks.
