Hauke, C: The Screen and The Soul. Virtual Reality, Real Reality and How Things Are
Abstract:
The Covid pandemic has required us all to keep social distance from one another, which for psychotherapists and their clients should be less of a problem. With reliable broadband making “virtual” sessions online possible, why do so many people still find the virtual session falls so far short of the “real” meeting in person? Maybe our assumption that there is a “real” version and there is an inferior “virtual” version is wrong to begin with. I would like to lay out three approaches to this question.
The first derives from quantum theorist David Deutsch’s book The Fabric of Reality (Deutsch, 1997). The second approach digs further into the idea that material reality is not an objective fact and that consciousness is all there is. This is known as metaphysical idealism as analysed by Bernardo Kastrup’s (Kastrup 2020, 2021) work - especially his understanding of Jung’s (and Schopenhauer’s) metaphysics.
Lastly, films have long been delivering “reality” to us on screens in their own virtual way. So I will finish by discussing the bio-evolutionary ideas around visual perception, affordance (Gibson, 1979) the reality of film and the central role of meaning in both movies and the therapy session. In doing so I will bring us back to the definition of “virtual” which flags it as ‘something in essence or effect though not actually or in fact’. In this way I bring a new perspective to the idea of “real reality” and “virtual reality” in our new way of working.
Presenter Bio:
Christopher Hauke is a Jungian analyst in private practice, a Senior Lecturer Emeritus at Goldsmiths, University of London interested in the applications of depth psychology to a wide range of social and cultural phenomena. His books include Jung and the Postmodern: The Interpretation of Realities, (2000); Human Being Human. Culture and the Soul (2005) Visible Mind. Movies, Modernity and the Unconscious.(2013). He has co-edited two collections of film writing: Jung and Film. Post-Jungian Takes on the Moving Image (2001) and Jung and Film II – The Return. www.christopherhauke.com