Cyberviolence et cyberharcèlement. Une violence fantasmatique pour l’agresseur, une violence traumatique pour la victime

Abstract

In France, we estimate that 6% of Internet users have been victims of cyberbullying and 42% of cyberviolence. After recalling the traumatic implications of this kind of violence, the author describes the different forms of cyberbullying (flaming, harassment, denigration, masquerade, happy slapping, outing and exclusion), as well as the three mechanisms that underlie it: 1. The extimacy that allows adolescents to share parts of themselves online, which can equally have positive and negative valence; 2. The online disinhibition effect, which implies that Internet users say things in cyberspace that they would not say in the physical world; 3. Finally, cyberviolence as the expression of a fantasmatic violence, which allows the surfer/user to live out a paradoxical form of intimacy on social networks: outside his physical self and whilst simultaneously being inside his own sense of self. In other words, in a digital era, one can at the same time be outside one's body while remaining (in one's imagination) within one's own self, which constitutes a major upheaval in the expression of one's self, which happens as a cyborg-Ego (“Moi-cyborg”) (Tordo, 2019). This would explain in particular two sets of data found in scientific literature concerning the cyber-stalker: on the one hand, that one does not find a psychological profile of the stalker but rather a profile of situation which would foster the harassment; on the other hand, that the observation of the mental health of the stalker does not differ from that of the uninvolved pupil, all other things being equal. In view of this evolution of the ego, the author proposes that to consider a new perspective on cyberviolence, and correspondingly on cyberbullying. However, as the author argues, this process of extension of the ego cannot be exclusively attached to social networks but to all forms of technological relations. In other words, this violence has less to do with social networks than with the basic psychological relationship of the individual with all technologies. However, social networks would make visible what other technologies cannot: the fantasmatic violence as it exists inside the ego of each individual (to the exclusion of any pathology), this one being able to possibly more concerned with cyberviolence. Two clinical vignettes will illustrate these phenomena.