ContextThe psychological and environmental effects of digital culture are increasingly challenging contemporary researchers and thinkers confronted with an unprecedented context. The analyses necessarily involve several layers of disciplinary understanding. One of the main characteristics that emerges from the work at our disposal is the paradox of the effects: we are in the presence of objects that are both creative and destructive. In the psychoanalytical approach, to this day, there is no consideration of the bidirectionality of effects: what the subject implements in the digital realm and, above all, what the latter produces in the subject's unconscious. ObjectivesThis work, which opens the “Digital Subject” debate proposed by the journal In Analysis, attempts to isolate the effects produced by digital hyper-stimulation in the normal subject in order to identify a series of unconscious particularities; it also aims to demonstrate the interest of the psychoanalytical conceptual framework in understanding the side effects of digital life. In this context, we will first describe the phenomenon of ordinary addiction and its relationship with the concept of trauma. This will lead us to decipher the redesign of the psychic limits through (perverse) excitation, pollution, and data extraction that goes beyond the classical logic of psychic functioning. The last theoretical point to be clarified concerns the beta screen (Bion) and its modifications when confronted with sensory agglomerations. MethodThis theoretical research explores a series of works mainly through psychoanalysis, sociology, psychosociology, and epidemiology, which allows for the understanding of the psychoanalytical concept of limit and the reworking that it seems to undergo in the digital age. Other inseparable concepts are defined and questioned: trauma, perversion, and the beta screen. ResultsOur theoretical and experimental data suggest the presence of a set of digital side effects that touch the psychic limits: the trend towards ordinary addiction, the increase in depression and anxiety around the world, the increase in screen time, etc. From a psychoanalytical perspective, the data suggest: the weakening of limits in the case of traumatic or even perverse excitation; the tendency towards regression and narcissistic withdrawal; the failure of transitionality; the tendency to build a beta screen (weakening of the contact barrier dividing the conscious and the unconscious) due to sensory agglomerations similar to the beta elements (in the Bionic sense); the blurring of psychic screens and hallucinatory doses. According to a psychosociological approach, we see the emphasis on a perverse individual-digital relationship, voluntarily structured by companies aiming at unlimited consumption and the economic exploitation of data. ConclusionThe observed effects, discussed here in an analogy with the environmental crisis, could be integrated into clinical and research work at the intersection of the psychoanalytical approach and other disciplines, allowing for a better understanding of digital complexity. We also propose a postmodern engagement of psychoanalytical reflections that integrates the plurality of powers and factors at play in the digital age.
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