We have discussed the issues and limits the adolescent faces in managing his body through the use of an avatar in on-line games and communities. If the avatar may first appear very limited to us in the figuration of the real body, these limits finally seem to help the adolescent filter the pubertaire’s access to these virtual worlds, to make it into a place of narcissistic restoration, at the cost of drive activity that must other outlets in this universe.
The avatar may be treated as a double of the self or as a companion, a guide whom one follows or a slave to whom one gives orders. But in any case, its owner is invited to engage here in three complementary forms of symbolization: sensory-motor, imaged, and verbal.
Thus it can embody a fragment of oneself, a person one has known, admired or feared, even someone that one has imagined on the basis of stories one has heard or a family legend. This exploration can enable the construction of a potential space or, on the contrary, foster disavowal. Asking a player to speak of the choice and the history of his avatar is an essential moment of psychotherapy.
The article analyzes the phenomenon of virtual communities (Second Life and Cryopolis) in light of psychoanalytic theory, recognizing in their functioning a preponderance of impersonal and group motifs: paternal, maternal or fraternal complexes or imagines that organize representations and determine behaviors.
Using interviews with members and administrators of these sites, we will show that, within these virtual communities, the place given to authority, to justice, to the conception of reality or to genealogy suggests the crumbling of the paternal complex (or paternal metaphor in Lacanian theory) in favor of the fraternal complex. Finally, we will offer the « digital hydra » as a metaphor for these « communities of connected brethren ». Adolescence, 2009, T. 27, n°3, pp. 667-677.
The authors attempt to demonstrate the impact on an individual of different psychological functions of the creation of multiple avatars in video games, more particularly in MMORPG. The avatars are either fragmented representations of the self that provide, as a whole, an image of the player personality, or they may come as a crude quest for sensations and motor stimulations. These different relational aspects of the avatar will be illustrated using adolescent clinical cases.
The idea of using fictional characters to represents the human is one of the fundamental components of Indo-European culture and finds new expression thanks to the Internet and the development of virtual worlds. The avatar, the digital representation of a real « player », is the talk of the town in recent years mainly because of the success of Second Life, the most famous of these universes.
The way that the avatar is constructed expresses the compromise between freedom of expression offered by the virtual and the emergence of social structures proper to human beings.
The avatar may be reduced to a sort of logo or enhanced with a large number of personal details. For its owner, it functions in virtual spaces as a second skin, and for its interlocutors as a set of partial objects. Neither totally real, nor totally imaginary, the avatar introduces him into a new space in which the interlocutor is both present and absent, in a way that can engage either the element of consolation or that of frustration.
Do video games have the potential to act as a vehicle for effective psychological counseling ? This was the question we tried to answer in several experimental video game workshops that were held with adolescents in a youth counseling center. Connecting elements between the clinical framework and the virtual world can create a space where youths can feel comfortable to express themselves. It is during post-game debriefing that the effectiveness of this medium is put to the test. At the end of this article we try to shed the light on whether the final creation involved in this virtual tool is subject to an interpretation or to a simple act of reading the story of the avatar.
Nous avons approché les enjeux et limites pour l’adolescent de la gestion de son corps par un avatar dans les jeux et communautés en ligne. Si l’avatar nous apparaît d’abord comme très limité dans la figuration du corps réel, ces limites nous apparaissent finalement comme permettant à l’adolescent de filtrer l’accès du pubertaire à ces mondes virtuels, d’en faire un lieu de restauration narcissique, au prix d’une pulsionnalité qui doit trouver d’autres voies d’écoulement dans cet univers.
L’adolescence est une période-clé de développement des circuits cérébraux sous-jacents à la régulation des affects et des comportements. Les recherches en neuroimagerie permettent une meilleure appréhension des trajectoires de développement cérébral normal et pathologique de l’adolescence. Ainsi, des modifications du développement normal semblent impliquées dans la physiopathologie de troubles comme la schizophrénie ou les dépressions.
L’avatar peut être traité comme un double de soi ou un compagnon, un guide que l’on suit ou un esclave auquel on impose ses ordres. Mais dans tous les cas, son propriétaire est invité à y engager les trois formes complémentaires de la symbolisation : sensori-motrice, imagée et verbale.
Il peut alors incarner un fragment de soi, un personnage qu’on a connu, admiré ou redouté, voire quelqu’un qu’on a imaginé à partir de récits entendus ou d’une légende familiale. Cette exploration peut permettre la construction d’un espace potentiel ou au contraire favorise le déni. Demander à un joueur de parler du choix et de l’histoire de son avatar est un moment essentiel d’une psychothérapie.
Adolescence, 2009, T. 27, n°3, pp. 721-731.
Revue semestrielle de psychanalyse, psychopathologie et sciences humaines, indexée AERES au listing PsycINFO publiée avec le concours du Centre National du Livre et de l’Université de Paris Diderot Paris 7