The Covid pandemic has required us to keep a broader social distance from one another. For psychotherapists this should be less of a problem. With reliable broadband making therapy sessions (and presentations like this one) possible online, 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 and his book The Fabric of Reality (Deutsch 1997). The second approach digs further into philosophical implications around the idea that material reality is not an objective fact and consciousness is all there is. This is known as metaphysical idealism as analysed by Bernardo Kastrup’s (2020, 2021) work especially his understanding of Jung’s metaphysics.
Lastly, film narratives, as well as factual ‘reality’ 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) and the central role of meaning in both film and the therapy session. In doing so, I will bring us back to the definition of “virtual” which flagged it as something in essence or effect. In this way I bring a new perspective to the idea of “real reality” and “virtual reality” in our new way of working.