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Clinicians working with adolescents have started to realise how important it
was to start to understand the impact of electronic media, the internet,
bbm, all sorts of things
on the young people.
It is very difficult for us old
persons to understand how much
there has been a radical change in relationship even between young people
because of these new tools.
In the past, adolescence was really
a time of emotional
secrecy, discretion
and sometimes physical exuberance.
Now
young people
tend to
share their
emotions, their thoughts, their love
and to expose it to the world through
Facebook,
through the internet,
from very personal comments, texts
but also pictures of them that,
in the past,
I, we would have hidden,
or maybe share only with a few friends.
This also has led to a possibility to get in touch with anybody at
anytime.
In the olden days, maybe school times was when you interacted, but then you went back
home.
Now
at 11 pm,
your phone starts to bleep because somebody has said something about you
and then suddenly your whole group of friends
is starting to comment.
Not only this, but adolescence was a time where your sense of identity and
also of *** identity was developing.
Nowadays
anybody has access to material
which 20 years ago, 25 years ago
was
limited
to paying adults.
Therefore
they are going to have
to come to terms with images, which at a certain age,
can be traumatic,
but also lead sometimes to absolutely surprising expectations with regard to
what is okay or not,
and how one should behave
with one boyfriend or one girlfriend.
More deeply than this, there is an issue with
the development of what I would call identity,
subjectivity.
The psychoanalysis Jacques Lacan talks about the 'mirror stage', as a key
phase in the development of personality.
This mirror stage is when the child, a toddler,
for the first time
recognises himself or herself
in the mirror-
"This is me."
It is a very important moment because before that
you had a sense of yourself but then you start to assume an image.
I mean you're also this,
and you become aware that what you see in the mirror
is what others
see of you.
So you have to take into account
reality but also
a very strange aspect of reality, which is your image.
This image
you can manipulate, you can
dress up,
you can put some makeup on yourself, but at the same time there is
something that you can change,
which is
the reality of your body -- how tall you are,
how blonde, or dark haired,
how fast,
how muscular,
how pretty.
You negotiate something with that sense of reality,
one of the problems that we see now
is that when you are dealing with friends through
the internet, very often you can manipulate this image,
you can change it.
And the extreme example is represented by some games in which you
are
actually, on screen, an avatar.
You are an electronic creature,
and the quality of this creature you determine, you invent.
Now
if you can be
powerful and fast and beautiful and clever and always winning
for hours and hours and also in your interaction with friends,
how is this going to impact
on the sense
of self,
when you are back to reality,
where you're playing, when you're
having fun with
real others?
What do you expect of them,
but also what do you expect of yourself?
And it is
very possible that
the
very nature of the electronic media
is having an impact on the developments of structures
that,
we psychoanalysts would call,
the ego ideal or narcissism, which actually means in simple terms
the image of yourself,
what you expect of yourself, your value
but also
your hopes, your
plans, your expectations
in life.
How could you deal
with
the
change
that this involves,
if there's a massive disappointment then in reality when, having being
world champion
footballer
on FIFA, a game,
then suddenly you can't kick a ball,
or you realise, you may discover
over the years
that, to kick a ball,
you need to learn,
when actually onscreen it's a completely different process of learning,
it's a learning that is actually transferable from one game to the other
largely?
So suddenly
you discover
that to be as good as you thought,
you're going to have
maybe to make an efforts,
to work,
to discover and to accept that you don't know,
which is the first step towards knowledge.
Could it be that it is that sort of
electronic impact that explains why
nowadays young people want to be
celebs?
Do they have a skill -- can they sing,
can they act,
can they play?
Maybe not. Does it matter?
No,
because actually
what you want is the status,
not necessarily
the apprenticeship,
the long process
and actually mastering the skills and the qualities required.
So there is a divorce between reality
and the imaginary world.
This divorce always existed but,
in the past,
the reality principle
brought you back
to
a more humble or realistic position.
Nowadays
there is an enormous amount of frustration
because what you have experienced as real life,
but is in fact a virtual life,
does not fit your experience
of your real life.
How much is this connected with,
not just disappointment, but psychopathology, is something that we're
going to discover
probably over the
next
10 to 20 years, but it's very important that
clinicians, professionals,
start to think
about
this modification
already now.