ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on a particular kind of technological development, the domain of cyberspace, and considers the fate of the body in cyberspace. More specifically it explores how retreat into cyberspace may be used by some young people as a way of bypassing the psychic implications of being-in-a-body and the related anxieties. This focus may help us understand clinical presentations during adolescence in which the young person is referred with an 'addiction' to cyberspace and in which anxieties rooted in the body, sometimes specifically focused on its appearance, may not be apparent at first assessment. Faced with the external complexity of the demands of the modern world, and the internal complexity and pain inherent in what is psychically required to develop a body and mind that feel one's own, it is tempting to retreat into virtual spaces where the reality of the body is either denied altogether.
