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Unbearable states of mind and technological addiction - 1"of"17"
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PSYCHIC RETREATS OR PSYCHIC PITS?
UNBEARABLE STATES OF MIND AND TECHNOLOGICAL ADDICTION *
Adriano Schimmenti, PhD and Vincenzo Caretti, PsyD
Psychoanalytic Psychology (in press), 27 (2), April 2010
- The information contained in this file is confidential
and may be privileged for the sole use
of the designated addressee -
*Acknowledgements: The authors would like to thank Prof. Antonia Bifulco, Director of Lifespan
Research Group, Royal Holloway, University of London, for her precious advices and English revision
of this manuscript.
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ABSTRACT
New technologies are highly interactive. They promote imaginative involvement, and allow the
experience of different self-states, such as those involving withdrawal or “psychic retreat”. According
to Steiner, psychic retreats are areas of the mind populated by imagination and ideas which are poorly
aligned with reality. Psychic retreats are not necessarily pathological in themselves – for instance, they
can be used positively for counteracting anxiety or enhancing creativeness. However, with
technological addiction there is likely to be a misuse of psychic retreat. Here the total absorption with
the computer and its applications serves to hide painful or unbearable states of mind. In such instances,
the addictive behavior can protect the patient from painful mental contents through segregating self-
states with a disconnection in their representations.
Therefore in clinical work with individuals suffering from technological addiction exploring the use of
psychic retreats can serve as an aid to both diagnosis and treatment. Where the technological addiction
constitutes a temporary withdrawal from a specific stressful or overwhelming event, this can have the
function of protecting the individual from inner conflict. In the most serious cases however, the
dysfunctional use of new technologies is grounded in more chronic and pathological dissociative
mechanisms, and serves to prevent the mind from reactivating traumatic states connected to childhood
experience of emotional neglect or abuse. This distinction could be very significant for clinical
practice, because while it is likely that the first condition can be positively handled with appropriate
identification and treatment, the latter is much more difficult to deal with, particularly where the
addictive behaviors hide the weakness of the self, and the psychic retreats are pervasively used to
protect the patient from psychic agony and mental breakdown.
Key Words: Psychic retreats, Psychotechnology, Addiction, Trauma, Dissociation, Assessment.
Introduction
The man closes his eyes and runs the machine.
In a split second all around him disappears, and
he enters a world full of all desired sensation.
Among the complex perceptions and space-time
coordinates reproduced by Virtual Reality, he
can search for something that shelters him from
depressive feelings, or something new to allevi-
ate his sense of boredom and emptiness. He
wants to get lost in the other reality, where he
can decide to experience new exciting events, or
his most blissful past experiences. He can
choose Virtual Reality to relive a particular
phase of his personal history, or indeed someone
else’s life. The choice is not important: what
matters is that the other reality is so vivid and
true.
The machine permits the man to live his and
other’s lives again, and again, and again. Every
recorded moment is eternal, and he can join this
virtual reality whenever he pleases. The joyful
experiences of the past are no longer a blurry
shadow, and he can live endless existences that
other people have recorded.
This is the psychological frame of an imaginary
Los Angeles, full of violence and dominated by
technology, proposed in the movie Strange Days
directed by Kathrin Bigelow in 1995. In this
film, virtual reality machines, illegal but toler-
ated, are able to record and reproduce whole
sequences of real life, together with their associ-
ated perceptions and emotions. For people in
this movie, personal past events can easily come
to life again, as well as experiences belonging to
another person. These can include those that are
extreme and perverse.
Such an apocalyptic vision of a possible future
takes its rightful place in a wider topic explored
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inside contemporary cinematography, the rela-
tionship between identity and new technologies.
Indeed, in the last thirty years several movies –
some of them also well written and directed, like
Until the end of the world by Wim Wenders or
Blade Runner directed by Ridley Scott and based
on a Philip K. Dick novel – analyze this subject.
As stated the epistemologist Morin (1956/2005),
and later echoed by Gabbard and Gabbard
(1999) from a psychodynamic perspective, the
cinema is a symbolic mirror of our representa-
tion of the world, the screen in which post-
modern imagery projects contemporary desires,
fears and expectations.
We have to deal with the fact that information
technologies and new media have created a revo-
lution in our lives, because of the explosive
impact they have on current lifestyles, commu-
nication and the financial economy. Derrick De
Kerckhove (1995) and Pierre Levy (1997), two
of the most important scholars of the neurosocial
and anthropological influences of new technolo-
gies, argue that the architecture of intelligence is
rapidly changing, with contemporary media hav-
ing an intrinsic capability to influence our
psychic processes. They state that the interactiv-
ity, hypertextuality and connectivity of new
technologies such as the Internet or mobile
phones, are transforming our global approach to
knowledge, revolutionizing our ways of com-
municating, gathering and connecting
information. Thus they constitute psychotech-
nologies (De Kerckhove, 1995), that is
technologies having a main impact on the func-
tioning of both mind and relationships.
Computer-mediated communications are the best
example of this transformation. The Internet al-
lows us to create and to live in habitable worlds
(or their electronic equivalent), shaping new re-
lational processes very different from those
where there is the physical presence of a com-
municative partner. Moreover, although in the
past years the electronic forums, chat-rooms,
bullettin boards and MUDs (the on-line interac-
tive role games) have already served to establish
new relationships with unknown people, this
process has needed skill in computer applica-
tions and has occurred exclusively through
written texts. Today, the computer access to vir-
tual relationships is simpler, totally synchronous,
and it allows the interaction with complex digital
universes.
For instance, the on-line interactive game Sec-
ond Life has over fifteen million affiliates. Each
player moves around the virtual world by means
of a carefully constructed avatar (a virtual im-
age) whose aesthetic features are easily
modified. The player can communicate with oth-
ers on-line by voice simply through plugging a
microphone into the computer. The interactive
areas inside Second Life’s digital universe can be
infinitely developed and expanded, since the vir-
tual space – unlike the physical one – never runs
out, and this virtual world and its applications
are easily accessible for a novice to the game.
Inside Second Life there are around ten thousand
public communities, whose members share af-
fairs of all kinds (cultural, economic, sexual,
political, religious), so the player has endless in-
teractive opportunities. For instance, a player
could explore the digital reproduction of a town
(perhaps chatting with another avatar in a Ro-
man square), watch new collections of the most
prestigious international fashion houses who
have their electronic counterparts on Second
Life, join the electoral meeting of a party leader
who has his or her own virtual representation on
the site, or indeed even enter a club whose
members share the same sexual perversions.
Psychotechnologies have several positive fea-
tures: they facilitate interactions across time,
gender, race, and geographic boundaries; they
sustain culture and democracy through the shar-
ing of knowledge, information and the arts; they
allow people to find innovative and creative
ways to ‘play with reality’ (and with one’s own
self). In the words of the clinician and philoso-
pher Sherry Turkle (2004, p. 19): “Just as
musical instruments can be extensions of the
mind’s construction of sound, computers can be
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extensions of the mind’s construction of
thought”. But there is the other darker side of the
coin, with psychological disorders relating to
new technologies. They are increasingly ob-
served in clinical practice, so understanding
them is imperative.
New Technologies as Psychic Retreats
Computer-mediated communications allow us to
experience aspects of personality not easily
accessible in everyday life. The guarantee of
anonymity, the total control of the technological
tool mediating the interaction, and the physical
distance between the communicating partici-
pants can reduce social constraints and facilitate
the emergence of peripheral or weakly explored
self-states (Turkle, 1993). For these reasons new
technologies can be used as psychic retreats
(Steiner, 1993), to facilitate withdrawal inside
specific areas of the mind, characterized by feel-
ings of omnipotence and directed to counteract
strong emotional stress.
By ‘psychic retreats’ Steiner refers to parts of
the mind based on archaic relationships with
internalized objects, populated by imagination
and ideas poorly aligned with reality. In
Steiner’s viewpoint, psychic retreats are struc-
tured to hide psychic pain, fear of loss, primitive
aggression, anguish about fragmentation, and
feelings of existential void; so psychic retreats
assume specific features (such as neurotic,
borderline or psychotic characteristics) in
relation to patient’s personality organization
(Kernberg, 1981, 1984). Steiner has undoubtedly
given an invaluable contribution to the
psychoanalytic understanding of clinical
impasses too, arguing from a contemporary
Kleinian wiewpoint that psychic retreats
represent a third position in the dialectics be-
tween paranoid-schizoid and depressive
positions, where a defensive posture is devel-
oped to avert primitive fear of death, feelings of
annihilation, and perceived psychic threats aris-
ing from contact with significant individuals
within the patient’s life, so that a relative internal
peace may be achieved.
Our conceiving of psychic retreats moves from a
different theoretical perspective, mainly orga-
nized in the framework of attachment theory,
developmental psychopathology and relational
psychoanalysis; consequently, it does not fully
coincide with Steiner’s remarks on the topic. As
highlighted elsewhere (Caretti, Craparo &
Schimmenti, 2007), we think indeed that a
healthier use of psychic retreats may exist,
where the search for emotional relief under dis-
tressful conditions can be accomplished trough a
momentary escape into states of self-absorption:
this use of psychic retreats can be non-
pathological, and sometimes is in service of the
Ego, personal energy, creativeness, and object
relations. Nevertheless, we totally agree with
Steiner in the opinion that “traumatic experi-
ences with violence or neglect in the
environment lead to the internalisation of violent
disturbed objects” (Steiner, 1993, p. 4), and
these in turn could be counteracted through a
withdrawal within pathological psychic retreats.
When the psychic retreat is excessively ex-
tended, it always poses risk of distortion in both
self and relationships, until the loss of vital con-
tact with reality occurs together with the
development of a morbid addiction.
It is possible that the individual’s approach to
technologies tells us a lot about his or her use of
psychic retreats, as well as his or her psychic
functioning. The peculiar features of new infor-
mation and communication technologies may
indeed represent an important support for the
withdrawal involved in psychic retreat: the total
control of the medium and the boundless possi-
bilities of interaction are able to evoke sensory
stimuli and states of mind as an alternative to the
usual expressions of consciousness.
We could then argue that the withdrawal within
virtual worlds is related to specific unconscious
tasks, and thereby to hypothesize that patients
could variously use computer-mediated experi-
ences: a) for a healthy, wider exploration of their
self and its attributes, b) to express inner con-
flicts and counteract unpleasant feelings, or c) as
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an autistic object which has the primary function
to contain unbearable and overwhelming states
of mind, giving a guise of cohesion to a very
weak and fragile identity. It is to be emphasised
that while the two latter forms of interaction
with technologies may similarly involve psycho-
logical symptoms and dependence, it is likely
they do not share aetiology, clinical dilemma or
prognosis. To begin exploring this distinction,
we present a clinical example from our case
files. 1
Milli: a temporary retreat inside virtual worlds
Milli is a 38 year-old woman, married, with a 4 year-
old daughter. She has been working in the fashion
industry since she was 23. Milli was born in a small
French town, but moved to Paris with her parents and
her sister while still young. She remembers a happy
childhood, in which her parents succeeded in trans-
mitting a deep sense of trust and warmth. Although
her parents were busy professionals, they were emo-
tionally present and always devoted the whole
weekend to family trips, frequently allowing their
children to decide on the activities and places to visit.
Milli developed her interest in fashion during one of
those trips, when her mother met an old school
friend. This woman showed the family her small stu-
dio, and explained to the children how she designed
and created the dresses. The woman gave two dresses
to the sisters: Milli wore her dress during the festivi-
ties, and she has guarded it over the years with the
aim of giving it to her future daughter one day. In
late adolescence, Milli studied hard to achieve her
dream of becoming a stylist. Even though she has
been living in the complex and difficult environment
of the fashion world, she didn’t develop any seri-
ously at-risk behavior, as happened with her
colleagues. At the age of 29, during a party, she met
her husband-to-be, a brilliant architect she married
three years later. Milli loves her husband, and sees
him as extremely supportive and available, although
she thinks that he is a little touchy and sometimes too
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
1 Name of patients are changed and some details are omit-
ted to protect confidentiality. To illustrate as clear as
possible how different forms of psychic retreats can be in-
volved in technological addiction, diagnostic cases have
been selected for this article.
intent on his work. At the age of 34 Milli gave birth
to a much wanted baby, Emmanuelle, a source of
great happiness and joy to the couple.
When her mother died suddenly, Milli was with her
husband in Italy where he was working. Milli experi-
enced a deep feeling of mourning, impossible for her
to communicate. She desired to be alone, she refused
sexual intercourse with her husband, actively looking
for conflict with him, and she was also very aggres-
sive at work. During that same period she discovered
Second Life, the virtual interactive world, and there
she created the alter-ego of a kajira, a Gor slave.
Gors are role-playing games based on the saga of
science fiction novels written by John Norman, in
which the life system is based on rigid castes, and the
interpersonal relationships between men and women
are structured as interactions between a Master and a
Slave. The first promotes the domination of the
woman (also reflected in sexual activities), while the
latter gives up her freedom to become totally subju-
gated to her Master. Milli began to play Second Life
frequently, devoting most of her spare time to it; and
while not jeopardizing her work life, she neglected
her husband and daughter.
During another trip to Italy for her work, Milli had
difficulty in connecting to Second Life; and this gave
her the opportunity to reflect upon her withdrawal
into the virtual universe, in which her passive and
self-derogating attitudes were in contradiction to the
image she had always had of herself. Milli confided
these thoughts in a friend, who sent her for the psy-
chological consultation (with one of the authors).
The diagnostic work with Milli was pleasant and
very fruitful. From the first interview, the clinician
had the impression of a lively, intelligent woman in
her mid-thirties, full of vitality but also very reflec-
tive. Endowed with a fundamentally healthy
personality and functioning at high level, she had al-
ready elaborated many of the principal driving forces
that pushed her in the Gor world, including personal-
ity traits such as perfectionism and a proneness to
fantasize deriving from her childhood. But she was
still not able to identify during the diagnostic inter-
views, the reason why she was becoming addicted to
Second Life.
During the interviews, Milli immediately recognized
her feelings of guilt for the time taken away from her
family and spent playing Second Life. She also ac-
knowledged that her alter-ego behaved in a way she
would never do in real life, especially in sexual and
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interpersonal relationships. While she did not think –
although certainly rationalizing a bit – that she was
really unfaithful to her husband, because she did not
have real sexual intercourse and did not feel any real
sexual excitement while playing with her virtual
Master, she admitted that there was something un-
controllable and irrational in her compulsive seeking
for him. Whilst she did not ascribe her Master par-
ticular powers, such as intelligence or other qualities,
she nevertheless felt she was forced to execute his
orders. The clinician suggested to Milli that such
feelings could be related to a desire to be in control
of something unpredictable, and waited for her asso-
ciations. Almost instantly she had an insight,
becoming aware that one of her major fantasies about
the interaction with her Master was to be able to read
his mind, in order to predict his requests and realize
them before he asked her. At this point, whilst con-
tinuing the exploration of her feelings, the clinician
discovered with surprise that Milli was unaware of
the fact that her involvement with the Gors started
when she lost her mother. Whilst the information was
obviously present in her mind, she did not make any
association either about her mother’s loss and her
feeling of ‘being lost’ in the hands of his Master, nor
about the loss and the possibility to live a second life.
The assessment then moved to the exploration of
Milli’s feelings of bereavement; and in the final di-
agnostic interview the clinician suggested that the
aggression and distance she showed toward her hus-
band were probably due to distorted ideas around the
loss. Specifically that the reason she couldn’t be pre-
sent when her mother passed away was because her
husband made her travel with him to Italy for his
own business commitments, which then sustained her
strong unconscious sense of guilt, over which she
began punishing herself and her husband by submit-
ting passively to the wishes of a stranger and ‘virtual’
aggressor. However, the clinician also told Milli that
in his opinion this process seemed more of a transi-
tory compromise than a pathological reaction, a way
to proceed in the elaboration of the loss experience.
The relationship with the inner aggressor, repre-
sented by her Master, was controlled through the
mediation of the computer - a technological tool -
which enabled her to contain and regulate her feel-
ings of passivity and impotence she felt in relation to
the bereavement. Milli listened with attention to the
clinician’s interpretations, and welcomed them as
reasonable and probably correct. She commented that
‘Second Lives’ do not mean ‘Second Chances’, and
that she wanted to come back to her true life again.
She emphasised the word “true” in a way that made
the clinician feel satisfied about the results of the as-
sessment and his advice. The clinician was at least
partially aware of Milli’s further psychic processes
and those aspects of her personal history that led her
to find a retreat in the virtual universe of Second
Life. Although offering to initiate treatment or to
help finding a suitable therapist in Paris, in the light
of her insights during the diagnostic interviews, her
high-level psychic functioning, and the resilience she
showed in other difficult experiences during her past
life, the therapist suggested she should continue to
explore her feelings by herself. Milli decided to ac-
cept the clinician’s advice. For some months he
heard nothing more from her until recently, he re-
ceived a phone call from Milli’s friend telling him
that Milli does not play Gors anymore and that she is
expecting another baby.
Milli’s case illustrates how virtual worlds can be
used for temporarily sheltering the mind from
anguish, for counteracting an emerging state of
psychic pain deriving from distressing events
beyond personal control, and for giving an ex-
pression – albeit dysfunctional – to conflictual or
wounding inner experience. But, as we will
show in the next paragraph with another case
example, new technologies can also become a
container for unbearable and totally non-
representable states of mind. A mechanical
mother whose deceptive presence has the pur-
pose of individual estrangement from awareness
of loneliness and emotional coldness inside the
self (Schimmenti & Piazza, 2006).
The Developmental Roots of Technological
Addiction
Technological addictions are usually defined as
nonchemical (or behavioral) dependencies that
involve human-machine interactions (Griffiths,
1995). The emerging of this diagnostic class has
its rationale in the assumption that new tech-
nologies contain inducing and reinforcing
features which may contribute to the promotion
of addictive tendencies (Widyanto & Griffiths,
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2006). Studies in literature seem to support the
validity of the construct (Caretti & La Barbera,
2001; Caretti, Craparo, & Schimmenti, in press;
Del Miglio, Gamba, & Cantelmi, 2002;
Widyanto & Griffiths, 2006; Young, 1998), but
some issues still remain unclear or uncertain.
For instance, the debate in the field of Internet
addiction (the most studied technological addic-
tion) involves two opposite schools of thought
(Huisman, van den Eijnden, & Garretsen, 2001):
those authors who believe that Internet addiction
deserves classification as a new psychiatric dis-
order in its own right (Shaw & Black, 2008;
Young, 1998), and those who define certain in-
dividuals as having problematic Internet use in
relation to specific online activities, such as
gambling or pornography (Del Miglio, Gamba &
Cantelmi, 2001; Yellowlees & Marks, 2007).
Mostly important from a clinical perspective,
empirical literature demonstrate that individuals
who are premorbidly vulnerable are especially at
risk of using the Internet in a problematic way
(Liu & Kuo, 2007). There is evidence of signifi-
cant associations between Internet overuse and
shyness (Chak & Leung, 2004; Scealey, Phillips,
& Stevenson, 2002; Yuen & Lavin, 2004), anxi-
ety (Scealey, Phillips, & Stevenson, 2002;
Caplan, 2007), feelings of loneliness (Engelberg
& Sjöberg, 2004; Yuen & Lavin, 2004;), depres-
sion (Young & Rodgers, 1998; Ko et al., 2008),
and symptoms of attention deficit/hyperactivity
disorder (Yen et al., 2009). Whang, Lee and
Chang (2003) also found that heavy Internet us-
ers show dysfunctional social behaviors and tend
to use the Internet to escape reality. It is then
likely that the most severe technological addic-
tions engender a significant variation in ordinary
consciousness, where disturbing states of mind
are replaced by computer-mediated sensory ex-
periences with the (unconscious) purpose of
influencing mood and psychological functioning.
Hence, even considering the diagnosis of techno-
logical addiction as having the right to exist
because clinical and empirical data seem to sup-
port its reliability in terms of symptoms, a major
theoretical problem on the nature of such a dis-
order remains. It is rather clear that giving a
name to another addictive disorder does not tell
so much about patients suffering from that dis-
order: as a matter of fact, the inclination for a
specific behavioral dependence can have many
psychological, psychosocial, and developmental
roots; moreover, patients with the same diagno-
sis often present substantial differences in the
clustering and severity of symptoms.
Undoubtedly, personality and character structure
of patients can explain – at least partially – the
variability in their levels of psychic functioning
(PDM Task Force, 2006), and this is true as well
for people suffering from technological addic-
tion (Caretti & La Barbera, 2001). On the other
hand, since several studies in the field of psycho-
technologies suggest that new media, with their
epigenetic properties, are definitely changing the
human mind, it remains crucial to understand
how some people are caught in technological ad-
diction – and how clinicians can help these
patients.
In this respect, an interesting point can be made
about contemporary perspectives on the self. In
fact, some years ago Sherry Turkle proposed a
powerful metaphor of the self as a system of
windows programmes opened and running si-
multaneously – analogous to the way a
computer’s operating systems work. In her well-
known work Life on the screen (Turkle, 1993),
she conceives of the postmodern identity as a
multiple and dispersed structure, and she argues
that virtual realities serve to test the nature, plas-
ticity and functioning of these self-windows.
Turkle states: “The Internet has become a sig-
nificant social laboratory for experimenting with
the constructions and reconstructions of self that
characterize postmodern life. In its virtual real-
ity, we self-fashion and self-create” (p. 180). As
with psychic retreats, these ‘window experi-
ences’ of the self are not pathological in
themselves (Toronto, 2009). Instead they repre-
sent a way of mental functioning which is
consistent with the multiplicity of roles carried
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out in everyday life inside Western culture. Here
we are used to rapid shifts from one internal and
interpersonal disposition to another (for instance,
in a very short time we move between distinct
relational models and their linked states of mind
in order to respond appropriately as parents,
partners, professionals, colleagues, institutional
representatives, and so on).
“The capacity to feel like one self while being
many” (Bromberg, 1993, p. 166) and the self-
awareness and tolerance of paradoxical aspects
of the inner world are considered important aims
in psychoanalytic psychotherapies too (McWil-
liams, 2004), constituting an essential objective
of the treatment in the relational tradition
(Bromberg, 2006; Mitchell, 2000; Pizer, 1998;
D.B. Stern, 1997, 2009). There are after all a
number of disorders, both internalizing and ex-
ternalizing, where it is possible to detect a
substantial difficulty in sustaining the dialectical
tension that characterize the multiplicity of
viewpoints and possible perspectives about the
self and others. Some patients seem to have a re-
duced capacity to contain multiple self-concepts
within an overarching self-schematization, and
they dissociate or split apart aggregates of expe-
rience as a result.
From a developmental perspective, this capabil-
ity of standing in the spaces (Bromberg, 1996) –
that is, of maintaining a sense of continuity and
oneness despite the paradoxes, conflicts and un-
avoidable contradictions that different self-states
may evoke – is not easily achieved. It needs
more than cognitive abilities, it also requires a
secure base (Bowlby, 1988). Whilst a develop-
mental environment characterized by care,
affection, and devotion promotes the child’s psy-
chosomatic integration, to perceive one’s own
unity in spite of the inner multiplicity, when the
caretakers hinder the emotional development of
their young, thnrough abuse or neglect, they risk
damaging the child’s ability to experience
mental states both in self and others (Fonagy &
Target, 1997). Furthermore, the lack of positive
experience with caretakers during childhood
dramatically impairs the emotional regulation
system (Elmendorf, 2007; Gergely & Watson,
1996; Schore, 2003), in terms of both self-
regulation and interactive regulation abilities
(Beebe & Lachmann, 2002). At its extreme this
condition leads to the development of an affect
regulation disorder. This may involve hy-
perarousal responses, in which overwhelming
states of mind and acting out behavior dominate
(Van der Kolk, 2005), or emotional deactivation
and detachment responses, as commonly seen in
alexithymia (Krystal, 1988; Taylor, Bagby, &
Parker, 1997). In the latter, deficits in identifying
and describing feelings as well as externally ori-
ented thought, indicate a disconnection between
bodily sensations, affect and cognition (Bucci,
1997). However, both types of disorder involve
an intense fear of mental life whereby children
may try to find a solace in the use of an autistic
object (Tustin, 1980, 1986). This could later be-
come a drug-object, in a doomed and illusory
attempt to contain and modulate emotions as
well as providing a guise of continuity and em-
bodiment for the self, through the obsessive use
of sensory-dominated experiences (Ogden,
1989).
Several forms of addiction seem indeed to repre-
sent a dysfunctional effort to cope with the onset
of overwhelming negative affect, for example
the drug-object is repeatedly and pervasively
used to produce altered states of consciousness
that generate safe sensory impressions to pre-
clude the anguish of fragmentation. Joyce
McDougall (1985) underlined that the addict can
feel enslaved against his or her own will by a
particular drug or behavior, but in spite of the
dire consequences of an addictive object, it is in
fact internally experienced as good, because it
gives a feeling of consolation and, in the ex-
treme, may even give meaning to life. Thus,
dependence on substances and behaviors share
major psychological features, which belong to
the sphere of personal histories and internalized
object relations that push a person to compul-
sively seek a drug-object for tolerating and
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regulating his or her affective states. Consistent
with this perspective, are neurobiological re-
search findings which confirm the presence of
several structural and functional similarities in
the brains of people suffering from different ad-
dictive behaviors (for a review on the topic, see
Grant, Brewer, & Potenza, 2006).
When the misuse of technology takes the shape
of a serious and impairing addictive disorder, it
is then possible to hypothesize that retreats to
virtual worlds are grounded on pathological dis-
sociative mechanisms. In such cases,
dissociation has the purpose of avoiding the
traumatic memories connected with childhood
neglect, and their related states of mind, reaching
awareness. Another case example will help to
illustrate this point.
Mario: denial of affect, dehumanizing relation-
ships and severe technological addiction
Mario is a 23 year-old skilled computer technician.
He comes to our assessment by request from his
mother, who is worried about legal action against
him for possession of a huge cache of hashish. How-
ever, Mario does not only have problems with illegal
substances. He is also obsessed with computers, and
he devotes not only his entire work time, but also his
spare time to them. He spends most of his days
choosing and buying new hardware, learning ad-
vanced techniques for programming and hacking
computer systems. Also, when sexually excited, he
goes into erotic chat or videoconference sessions
with unknown people.
Mario is an individual that the psychoanalytic litera-
ture would identify as a spoilt child (Heimann,
1978). He remembers that from his early life he has
had everything he desired: the most expensive toys,
the trendiest motorcycle, the best computers, the
most luxurious car and as much money as he needed
to spend on anything he wanted.
But Mario seems to exist only for the things he pos-
sesses. The clinician cultivates his acquaintance with
Mario during the diagnostic interviews and very soon
he understands that Mario had been a spoilt child -
but using the definition of Borgogno (1999/2007), to
mean a “deeply deprived child”. The material gifts he
used to receive hid the extreme parental indifference
toward the child. Mario grew up in a family that he
describes (without realizing it) as deprived of love,
and more devoted to appearances in social life than
in sharing emotions, mutual exchanges, affection and
feelings. Whilst his father is an important profes-
sional figure, he has always been emotionally
neglecting and disinterested in the affective devel-
opment of his child. He spent most of his time
increasing his own power and prestige. Mario’s
mother was more available during his childhood, but
she had sudden and uncontrollable temper tantrums,
frequently scolded him - even in front of his friends -
and pushed him to be more like his father.
Since the first clinical interview, it was evident that
Mario’s personality and behaviors were entirely or-
ganized to protect him from mental pain. In fact he
was alexithymic, he seemed unable to reflect upon
his addictive behaviors, he could not connect his sen-
sory experience of absorption in computers and
hashish with complex mental states, affects and mo-
tivation, and furthermore he was unwilling and
unable to describe his feelings. For instance, when he
was asked about being on drugs, evidently bothered
by this question Mario stated that when he was
‘stoned’ he felt relaxed and peaceful, but he was un-
able to identify the presence of internal or external
stressors that would make him feel uncomfortable
when not in such a state. The same could be said
about his technological addiction: he asserted that he
felt a sense of mastery and power while using the
computer and its applications, and a titanic excite-
ment when doing so, but further inspection of his
thoughts and feelings about the addictive behaviors
seemed impossible, and Mario’s answers only
strengthened the impression that his addictions were
totally tuned with his beliefs and shallow interper-
sonal style.
While Mario was undoubtedly very ‘materialistic’,
he also was a succesful person, certainly in his own
evaluation. He worked efficiently, was fit, going to
the gym regularly, and dated several girls. The clini-
cian very soon became aware that Mario showed a
lot of ‘normotic’ characteristics.
This apt expression coined by Bollas (1987) refers to
those apparently ‘too normal’ psychological condi-
tions, which show over-adjustment but hide a deep
deficit in the identity structure. In the words of Bol-
las (1987, p. 136): “a normotic person is someone
who is abnormally normal. He is too stable, secure,
comfortable and socially extrovert. He is fundamen-
tally disinterested in subjective life and he is inclined
Unbearable states of mind and technological addiction - 10"of"17"
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to reflect on the thingness of objects, on their mate-
rial reality, or on ‘data’ that relates to material
phenomena”. In normotic personalities, the self is
conceived as a material object among other man-
made products in the object world, so subjectivity
and internal experiences look numbed or even
erased.
The way Mario described his relationships was in
fact characterized by a predominantly externally ori-
ented thought, which probably served to furnish an
internal stability against painful and overwhelming
self-states. His difficulty in accepting painful feelings
associated with interpersonal experience was disso-
ciatively excluded from awareness, and often
aggressively expressed in the form of narcissistic
overstatements. Referring to this, the clinician ob-
served that sometimes during the interviews he felt
he was watching an experimental theatre perform-
ance, a flat monologue about things-a-man-has-to-
do-in-his-life, where the scenario never changed but
disturbing shadows were projected onto the back-
ground. For example, while Mario was discussing in
an alexithymic and unemotional way the end of his
last love affair (his ex-girlfriend indeed left him be-
cause he did not show affective warmth inside their
relationship) the clinician asked Mario for a closer
examination of his feelings for this girl, and if he had
the desire to go back to her. Mario immediately an-
swered: “Doctor, do you think I eat the butt of the
bread?” This refers to the typical oblong Sicilian
bread, whose extreme parts are tough. This phrase
was very denigrating of his ex-girlfriend, and meta-
phorically it means that an important person such as
him cannot be interested in the common things peo-
ple do and feel, and should have privileged
treatment.
Mario’s provocative words showed his narcissistic
rigidity and the emotional barriers in his personality,
as well as the assumptions that guide him in giving
meanings to the internal experiences. The clinician
interpreted this sentence as the direct expression, de-
void of any elaboration process, of Mario’s
identification with the dismissing paternal object,
furthermore internalized on the basis of intrusive ma-
ternal aggressiveness. At that point he chose not to
share these thoughts with Mario, and perhaps this
was an error, although all previous attempts of con-
frontation were in vain and unsuccessful.
At the end of the diagnostic sessions the dissociative
nature of Mario’s addictive behaviors and his evident
refusal to provide a closer examination of his internal
life brought the clinician to suggest he undertake
psychotherapy treatment. Mario answered that whilst
he considered the assessor “nice” - perhaps because
the clinician seemed to understand something about
Mario’s affairs regarding computers and Internet - he
was not interested in these “kinds of solutions”. He
would prefer to solve his “true problems” with the
“best lawyer” and will be careful not to be “caught
again by the police” (his words in quotations).
This case clearly differs from the first one pre-
sented. It is very likely that the withdrawal into
technological and substance addictions in
Mario’s case testifies to a more severe psycho-
pathological condition, sustained by a deficit in
emotional self-regulation and an insidious use of
dissociative mechanisms – as defensive exclu-
sion of painful mental states (Bowlby, 1980).
Both the patients described indeed used tech-
nologies as psychic retreats, but while in Milli’s
case psychic retreat sheltered her from some un-
pleasant feelings (mainly guilt and loss for not
being with her mother while she was dying, and
anger toward her husband for taking her to an-
other country when it happened), and probably
served also as a (dysfunctional) way to elaborate
and overcome the inner conflict, Mario’s retire-
ment within virtual worlds and hashish seemed
instead to protect him from entire parts of the
internal experience, from seeing the unbearable
‘shadows on his back’ with their deficits and
their fragility. Still, whilst considering a possible
temperamental disposition for his psychic func-
tioning, was there something in Mario’s personal
history that may have determined his approach
to his inner world and external reality? We will
posit that it was emotional neglect.
Emotional Neglect and Technological Addic-
tion
It is widely demonstrated that childhood trauma
is a powerful risk factor for the development of
several psychological disorders in adolescence
and adulthood, including addictions (van der
Kolk, 2005; van der Kolk, McFarlane, Weisaeth,
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1996). Extreme and pervasive experiences of
abuse and deprivation in infancy are certainly
able to generate continuous, frightening, excru-
ciating states of psychic terror (Main & Hesse,
1990; Shengold, 1989), which are violently en-
graved on the mind and body, damaging the
possibility of consolidating and integrating iden-
tity. Several studies in the field of neurobiology,
infant research, and developmental psychopa-
thology (for instance, Beebe & Lachmann, 2002;
Cicchetti, Rogosh, & Tooth, 1998; Fonagy et al.,
2002; Gergely & Watson, 1996; Jurist, Slade, &
Bergner, 2008; Maughan, Cicchetti, Toth, &
Rogosh, 2007; Sander, 1975, 1987; Siegel, 1999;
Shore, 1994; D.N. Stern, 1985; Tronick, 1989)
suggest that a main vulnerability to psychopa-
thology is also determined by a lack of mirroring
and attunement during development, regardless
of the presence of definite abuse. The quality of
emotional interactions with parents crucially in-
fluences the child’s development, thus when
caretakers do not love their young or they are not
able to give meanings to his or her communica-
tions, their unavailability can make the child
powerless in making sense of his or her internal
states (Schimmenti & Bifulco, 2008). In sum-
mary, as explained earlier, in such cases the
parents do not facilitate through intersubjective
sharing and mutual exchanges either the devel-
opment of mentalizing function (Fonagy,
Gergely, Jurist, & Target, 2002) or abilities for
self-regulation and the interactive regulation of
affective states (Taylor, Bagby, & Parker, 1997).
For this reason the parental lack of attunement
together with the natural child’s dispositions and
attitudes may have a dramatic impact on child’s
development. This experience could be termed
emotional neglect and could be defined as a
“specific, and potentially traumatic, configura-
tion of the relational field including the child and
his or her caregivers, characterized by the ab-
sence of emotional reciprocity. In this situation,
the child’s affective needs are subdued to paren-
tal demands, conflicts, fears and projections”
(Craparo & Schimmenti, 2008). Emotional ne-
glect can embraces a series of negative
childhood experiences, including parental indif-
ference, role-reversing, behaviors directed to the
psychological domination of the child, and is
sometimes disguised under other abuse. Each of
these phenomena can have a traumatic impact on
the affective development (Bifulco & Moran,
1998).
As previously stated, when the child is emotion-
ally neglected, he or she may use dissociative
defenses to preserve the attachment system
(Main & Hesse, 1990; Main & Morgan, 1996).
In this case the dissociation acts through a dis-
persion and a loss of the normal associations
among mental states and their representations, in
order to protect the individual from mental con-
tents which are not ‘simply’ conflictual, as in the
repression mechanism: instead they are unbear-
able (Bromberg, 2006).
Childhood emotional neglect is the basis for the
spreading of dissociative mechanisms and their
pathological expressions; it is then likely that the
emotional neglect is to be considered a core con-
cept even in understanding the most severe cases
of technological addiction. When intrapsychic
barriers are raised up in the mind to self-soothe
and protect from the awareness of having unlov-
ing parents, this brings to a stalemate in the
creation of ‘bridges between the islands of the
self’ (Pizer, 1998) and such a dis-association
process (Siegel, 1999) obstructs the potential for
plasticity and the dynamic movement among
multiple representations of oneself which main-
tain a sense of cohesion and integrity. As we
have seen in Mario’s case, in emotionally ne-
glected children this rigid system may provoke
addictive behaviors characterized by autoerotic
narcissism and ritualization. In this case, the
withdrawal into somatic and sensory stimuli
evoked by the technological medium may also
have the adaptive function of anesthetizing the
painful emotions connected to childhood neglect
through a dissociative segregation of related
states of mind.
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But the price to pay here is really high, because
the surrogate object, the drug-object with its psy-
chic retreats, demoniacally stands in their place
and parasitically leeches the psyche. Lingiardi
(2008) in a recent paper entitled Playing with
unreality, describes the clinical case of a
schizoid patient, Louis, who was raised by dis-
turbed and “emotionally sterilized” (p. 116)
parents and who used the cyberspace as a psy-
chic retreat. The retreat took the form of trance-
like states, a sort of suspended animation that to-
tally estranged him from his deep psychic pain.
For Louis the computer had become a sort of
mechanical mother, able to give affective
warmth and protect him from real commitments
in interpersonal and therapeutic relationships.
It is then likely that such a pathological in-
volvement with computers, as containers for
unbearable states of mind and overwhelming
emotions, is also the consequence of the False
Self (Winnicott, 1965). This fallacious core iden-
tity, devoid of energy and creativity, emerges
indeed because of the disownment of the child’s
personality and affective demands by caretakers
who are unable to guarantee any emotional mir-
roring to balance gratification and frustration.
They therefore fail to guide the child in those
developmental phases in which needs and the
desires are then experienced in omnipotence. We
could argue that in this case the abuse and mis-
use of technologies represent a pathological
transitional phenomenon, in which the addictive
non-human object stands for both a feared and a
desired fusional union with one’s own mother
(McDougall, 1980, 1984). From such a point of
view, as observed in a previous paper (Schim-
menti & Piazza, 2006, pp. 77-78), “the total
absorption with technological experience points
out the human aspect, more than the diagnostic
and the psychopathological one, where the child
remains alone in front of the abyss of the screen
[…] there he discovers the reflection of his own
self and, rather than bearing the doubtful obses-
sion about its authenticity, he directly plunges
into the screen. It happens because he needs
someone who understands and accepts. He needs
a mother giving him warmth and attention, and
although this mother is not made of flesh and
blood, now the child only wants to sleep and
dream. In that boundless desert full of people,
painted with a million colours and enriched by
sparkling sounds, the child has perhaps discov-
ered how to realize this dream”.
It is then likely that in severe technological ad-
dictions the withdrawal inside the psychic
retreats has the function - like the False Self - to
create the illusion of a painless internal reality.
This is obtained through a total absorption
within techno-mediated experiences, which per-
mits a denial about the neglected self-states, and
the expulsion of their connected memories and
emotions from the awareness.
La Barbera stated (2005, p. 122): “As the drug
addict in detecting the existence of an extraordi-
nary and pleasant sensory world during the
initial ‘honeymoon’ phase and discovers a wide
range of emotions, and consequently realizes
that new meanings can be given to object rela-
tions, so the consumers of virtual experiences
discover the possibility to enter a world which
fully gratifies their needs”. From our perspec-
tive, when such needs are submitted to
dissociation, extraction, denial or splitting due to
parental emotional neglect, the individual can
find a retreat inside technological addictive be-
haviors, but in such cases it is perhaps better to
define the psychic retreats as psychic pits, where
feelings, states of mind and pieces of one’s own
self are buried and lost in oblivion.
Conclusion
There is no doubt that technological addictions
constitute a new frontier in clinical research, and
further studies and closer observation are needed
to appraise the real impact of computer-mediated
communication on the mind. Nevertheless, the
high incidence of such psychological disorders
forces clinicians and researchers to study their
potential risk factors.
Unbearable states of mind and technological addiction - 13"of"17"
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The question has been here analyzed according
to a developmental-relational perspective that
conceives the self as an overarching structure,
which has the function of negotiating among dif-
ferent states of mind to integrate related affective
states. Nevertheless, the possibility of negotiat-
ing multiple self-representations as well self-
regulating and interactively regulating affective
states are the results of complex developmental
processes, in which caretakers play a decisive
role. If parents are not responsive, if they neglect
their child and are unwilling to interpret his or
her communications, feelings and experiences
within the attachment relationship these in turn
cannot be mentalized and they will instead be-
come traumatic and non-representable. These
unbearable states of mind are kept beyond
awareness through an insidious, pervasive and
enveloping use of psychic retreats, in order to
prevent psychic pain and a sense of fragmenta-
tion from emerging.
Observing technological addictions from this
point of view, shows how some psychodynamic
aspects (such as the compulsivity of behaviors,
or the extensive role played in them by attach-
ment disorders and dissociation) could be very
similar to those of other forms of addiction.
However, there are also some specific aspects
that have to be underlined:
a) firstly, the current information and
communication technologies are able to evoke
sensory stimuli and states of mind that are
alternative to ordinary consciousness. Such
potential could certainly be used in a creative
and integrative way, for example in temporary
shelter from conditions of emotional stress and
for exploring peripheral characteristics of the
self. But in the case of technological addictions
it is used to expel from awareness painful or
overwhelming states of mind;
b) in the second place, the possibility of over-
controlling the virtual experiences may facilitate
the obsessive ritualization of the interaction with
technologies. In most severe cases, this becomes
the way for the technological addict to protect a
very rigid and fragile self, constructed of empty
identifications.
The ability to distinguish dissimilar expressions
of psychic retreats – and different personality
organizations besides them – will result in the
accurate assessment and eventually the treatment
of technological addictions. The two clinical il-
lustrations considered in this work show that an
apparently pathological retreat within virtual re-
alities could represent the expression of a
neurotic conflict in basically healthy individuals
who however have some psychological difficul-
ties in the elaboration of specific painful events.
But the psychic retreat within a virtual world
could be also the expression of a most serious
psychopathological condition and could have the
function of defending the patient against intoler-
able and overwhelming states of mind, keeping
them far away from awareness. The incapability
of tolerating and modulating the painful feelings
related to unbearable states of mind is often the
consequence of a deep failure inside the attach-
ment relationships, in which the parents have
subdued the mind of their child for their de-
mands and their projections. In such cases,
technological addictive behaviors protect the self
from the vertigo of the affective void and the
psychic agony.
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