Rejoinder to Robert A. Paul's Response

My thanks to Dr Paul for his kind comment, and for his sincere effort to integrate our differing outlooks. My own commentary was more critical, because the current cultural turn (or should I say cultural slide?) appears to me quite less benign than it does to him.

Two months ago my wife Luisa C. Busch de Ahumada received in consultation a toddler just 2 years old, Ben, brought because of unending shrieking: when not given his mother's smartphone he went into a furious cry which lasted uninterrupted for two or three hours, and he would throw himself violently backwards, heedless of pain. This had its start at age 6 months when the mother gave him her smartphone to entertain himself with and found that ‘he was happy’. Despite her successful experience with a 19-month-old mute autistic girl (Busch de Ahumada and Ahumada, 2015) and other early cases, she felt he was hardly treatable. Ben's early handling of the smartphone screen had fed his feelings of omnipotence in ways that a teddy bear or a rattle would have not, in a dynamic of empowerment disclosed by Leo Kanner (1943) in the autistic spinning of objects. Ben connected to his smartphone-screen, and just to it: his omnipotent ‘ego’ was a ‘me and my smartphone-screen’, while his threatening, furiously rejected ‘not-me’ included his mother and the rest of the universe. Early access to screen technology bred the pathology.

This excruciating limit-case strongly supports the advice of the Joint Statement to the U.S. Congress (2000) that children younger than 2 years should be kept completely off screens. The equation of virtual realities to Winnicott's transitional object, quite usual in psychoanalytic circles, evades what Winnicott (1971) highlighted revising his classic paper ‘Transitional Objects and Transitional Phenomena’: that, unless supported by hope, the would-be transitional object risks veering to become a fetish-object, as happened in Ben's case.

That Paul (2016) believes the effects of what goes on socially is