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.

Adolescence, 2009, T. 27, n°3, pp. 591-600.