Our Attuned Countertransference: can virtual reality experiences develop it?
There is a significant amount of work happening at the interface between research on mental health and Virtual Reality (VR), Augmented Reality (AR), and Mixed Reality (MR). For example, our speaker Noreen Giffney is part of the creative team behind ‘The World Comes Alive’ – a new VR experience and the first underpinned by psychoanalytic thinking, directed by Prof. Jill Bennett in the felt Experience & Empathy Lab at the University of NSW in Sydney. Noreen will provide us with an overview of the development of ‘The World Comes Alive’, focusing on psychoanalytic theories that inform it, including writings by Melanie Klein, Wilfred Bion, Marion Milner, Donald Winnicott, Christopher Bollas, Betty Joseph and Thomas Ogden.
She will then talk about how ‘The World Comes Alive’ might be useful in clinical training in psychoanalytic work and further professional training contexts, for the development and integration of theoretical knowledge with observation, analytical and interpretive skills, as well as increasing the capacity for self-awareness and self-reflectivity – all needed for our work in the consulting room.
The development of a clinical skill incorporates reading, demonstration, practice and repetition; it involves activity, and it needs to be shown and perceived in the external environment. Important skills in a psychoanalytic context include being able to observe, analyse and interpret. Capacity is different: capacity needs to be developed from the inside. Psychoanalytic trainings facilitate the enlargement of capacity through lengthy, immersive experiences such as a personal analysis, an infant observation, and an experiential group.
Theory is introduced and taught by means of reading, talking and writing, which can prompt a less emotional and more rational and intellectual way of engaging with it, with the result that theory can remain split off and unintegrated. Noreen will explain how and why she thinks ‘The World Comes Alive’ might be useful for bypassing the therapist’s / analyst’s defences of rationalisation and intellectualisation in presenting a ‘here and now’ experience informed by the theories required for the clinical practice of psychoanalysis.