Lecture at Freud's Museum in London

Dr. Gomes spoke to a group of psychoanalysts and psychoanalysts in training at Anna Freud's room

“Considering the complex, unending, confusing context where information and knowledge are disseminated in virtual context, it might be important to consider how individuals have been dealing with emotional metabolization and how the “adult self” experiences this reality in identity splitting.

This presents the possibility of representational differences or different internal processes of splitting and, if so, how it impacts free association and clinical work.

It is not possible to ignore that the mosaic environment is dominated by images and is reinventing new forms of identity.

The avatars and metaverse are not just the result of technology advancement, they also represent a new form of being, that is, the virtual individual. In this case, considering the self in its primary form—a linguistic culmination of a rich and ongoing social incorporation process (Cashdan, 1988) — what forms of internalization and metabolization occur in this new world of virtual life? And how might it be impacting free association and analytical interpretation?”