The Digital World and Developmental Pain

The adolescent's tendency to take risks in relying on information technology can in some cases harden into dependency, compulsive use, excessive exposure, but in others can become a positive self-experimentation. As a consequence, the risk is connected to the use which the adolescent makes of these electronic instruments, which can be directed towards the exploring of the multiple dimension of the Self and thus towards bringing about the process of subjectivation, or as a surrogate for the construction of the acquisition of gender identity (flight register) and the acquisition of generational identity (omnipotence register). I believe that the adolescent needs someone to give meaning to the use he or she makes of technology, as a demonstration of the Other's interest in the fantasies he/she is trying to represent by means of them.

Serge Tisseron (1998, 2004, 2006, 2012, 2013, 2014, Tisseron et al., 2006) has widely explored the modes in which adolescents use technology. In relation to this he claims (2014, 20) that on the one hand the technology seems to enable «the construction of an idealised representation of oneself and of one's privileged interlocutor» by means of intense sensorimotor sensations guaranteed by videogaming, for example; on the other hand, the technology represents «an attempt to escape an unpleasure through, for example, the virtual game… The player invests in a virtual space in which to struggle against the separation anxiety which makes him feel impotent, vulnerable, and unarmed, because he feels threatened by a situation which contains an potential for excitation that is inadequate, either because it is excessive or because it falls short» (2014, 22 - translations by the translator of this article). Tisseron goes on to say that it is this feeling of inadequacy which exposes adolescents to feeling disappointed and ashamed of themselves, and impels them to withdraw from reality and the relationship with the other. The theoretical and clinical con