With the intensification and increasing complexity of communications using new technologies, a new public space is emerging, one which goes beyond the virtual/real division, into an interweaving of social arrangements and partially virtual communities. The « being-together » of adolescents is expressed in this space by a reconfiguration of different forms of interaction, using « chat-French ». Are these digital language practices an obstacle to the acquisition of linguistic and social abilities ?
Starting from a case study, this paper addresses the complexity of simultaneously performing a « work of adolescence » and a « work of disease » for adolescents suffering from a serious somatic disease since childhood and being also under dialysis for a shorter amount of time. Being dependent on an artificial kidney, a nursing team, and his mother, the adolescent can hardly also grow as an adolescent. Dmitri is an adolescent who whose corporal changes have been thwarted by disease and death. During psychoanalytic work, he tries to elaborate this, starting with some video game experience. In video games, and hence, through another machine (the computer), he creates and then incarnates an avatar that lies between two universes, the real one, and a virtual one. From this state, he constructs a tale in which life and game fade into each other, where reality and the virtual world melt together in order to make the latter more bearable and also in order to make more bearable the idea that he is bound to live with a machine. This idea materializes by means of a game which he can both control and share, and which therefore serves as a transitional space
This article recalls the main steps of a « psychotherapy by virtual » of a young psychotic teenager. In this article, we will see how the use of a computer game proves to be a vector of a first transference address from the psychotic to the clinician.
Therefore, the virtual will be studied through the magnifying glass of the pathology, revealing a function of « emergence » specific to cybernetics.
This function is triple. Firstly, this contingency loads the emergence promises, allowing the user to expect from the machine anything but, and much more than, it is able to deliver. Secondly, this emergence gives the machine the appearance of autonomy, which helps the patient to delude himself into not considering himself as the origin of his representations. Lastly, this generator of representations enables the symptom by giving it a form, thus processing what Freud called a « force of healing drive » preparing the way for a transference relation
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.
The Massively Multiplayer Online Role-Playing Game World of Warcraft (WoW) has a complex and deep storyline. The player moves in this frame that gives meaning to every performed action. We offer a thematic and psychoanalytic interpretation of the themes used in WoW. Through quests, we highlight the concepts of introjection, passing the position of omnipotence, management of aggressive impulses and internalization of the civilizing process. The game, like the fairy tale, seems to replay psychological problems metaphorically inscribed in a meaningful scenario.
The author goes back to the distinction D. W. Winnicott made between three forms of representational activity (daydreaming, dreaming and imagining) and shows that this distinction helps to establish a typology of ways of playing video games. These three ways of gaming differ both in the way objects shown on a screen are invested and in the way the gamer relates to his internal objects. This model breaks with that of addiction while laying the groundwork for a clinical and therapeutic approach to different categories of video game players.
Teaching with serious games is increasingly a response to the challenges of pupil education. The present research was conducted over the 2009-2010 school year. This study focused, on the one hand, on self-esteem and intrinsic motivation because these correlation strongly with good results at school, and, on the other hand, on gender, because it has an effect on self-esteem and intrinsic motivation. The aim is to measure the variation of self-esteem and knowledge, for thirty-two boys and girls, ten or eleven years old, after using video games for ten hours. The Coopersmith Self-Esteem Inventory (SEI) has been used both before and after the experiment, to measure the children’s self-esteem. Learning increase has been measured using questionnaires. The results show an effect on self-esteem, with a greater one for boys than for girls. The effectiveness of the proposed serious game, which deals with History and Art History, was measured and pupils learned a great deal. A gender is seen to have an effect on both self-esteem and knowledge.
The author recognizes action as a fundamental element of the video gamer’s psychology because, on the one hand, the gamer projects himself dynamically, through action, into the moving character, and, on the other hand, the gamer is going to have to represent these actions to himself as his own. But only in part, since it is important for the playful dimension that the player have fun seeing the representation of actions that are impossible for his own body. The virtual character is thus described as another self, both the double of oneself and necessarily different from oneself.
Starting with the distinction made by D. Arsenault and M. Picard between sensory, systemic and fictional immersion, the text tries to provide a metapsychological point of view of the phenomenon. Immersion can be caused by saturation of the senses, mastering of the game or identification to the protagonist. Regression, denial and attractor object correspond to the different types of immersion. As regression, the video game immersion is a fantasy of uterine regression and corresponds to different stages of the construction of reality. As negation, it relies on the suspension of the judgment of existence and a prevailing operation of self-pleasure ; as an attractor objet, video game immersion organizes the psyche around an aesthetic object. The different types of video immersion are linked to the ways each one interiorizes the world and reflect symbolizations by the body, by images and by words.
This article suggests three imaginary representations – exile, combat and masquerade – as illustrations of the unconscious forces that give rise to the digital behavior of adolescents.
Adolescence, 2012, 30, 1, 101-106
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