Los adolescentes jugadores compulsivos de video-juegos presentan diversos funcionamientos subyacentes a su sintomatología. Para estos adolescentes, un taller de juegos en grupo asociado a un tiempo de discusión parece constituir una terapia adaptada. La utilización del objeto mismo del juego como mediación terapéutica ofrece la posibilidad de la emergencia de un material afectivo et perceptivo el cual será posible de elaborar en un segundo tiempo. Un proceso de toma de conciencia de su problemática así como también se da una distanciación con el objeto. Las interacciones permitidas por el grupo relanzan los procesos identificatorios y particularmente en el caso de victimas de violencias escolares. El conocimiento de los video-juegos al menos por uno de los terapeutas favorizan el intercambio, participando así, a la revalorización narcísica y al relance de los procesos identificatorios.
El avatar puede ser reducido a una especie de logo o puede venir a enriqueces un gran numero de detalles personales. Ello funciona en los espacios virtuales y para el que la posee es como una segunda piel y para sus interlocutores constituye un conjunto de objetos parciales ; ni totalmente reales, ni totalmente imaginarios. El avatar, introduce un nuevo espacio en el cual el interlocutor esta a la vez presente y ausente de una manera que puede constituirse en un objeto de consolación o de frustración.
El autor retoma la diferenciación establecida por D. W. Winnicott entre tres formas de actividad representativa (ilusionarse, sonar e imaginarse), el nos muestra que ello permite de establecer una topología de la maneras de jugar a los juegos de video. Estas tres maneras de jugar se oponen a la vez por la manera de ocuparse de los objetos presentes cobre la pantalla y por la manera que tiene el jugador de entrar en relación con sus objetos internos. Este modelo rompe con el modelo de la adicción al mismo tiempo que pone las bases de un enfoque clínico y terapéutico de las diferentes categorías de jugadores.
The tendency to believe in images is fundamental to psychical life. However, images – especially violent ones – can suggest models, but are by themselves unable to impose the desire to correspond to them. They are most often sought for their power of figuring, as much in the domain of body states and archaic imagery as of day-to-day emotions that are sometimes difficult to represent.
Adolescents spontaneously use three complementary means of managing the malaise provoked in them by violent images : language, interior representations and corporal representations. These three means are the key to education with images.
The word “ virtual ” has at least three possible definitions : that which is potential and in the process of becoming, that which is present but not actualized at a given moment, and that which excludes the body and its turmoil. In all these cases, the virtual establishes itself as a fantasy wherein the desire to be contained in the image, to interact with it, and finally to swap skins with it are all mobilized at the same time. But sometimes, virtual encounters are also used by adolescents as transitional spaces for the purposes of personal symbolization.
Transformations affecting youngsters’ relationship with their own image result from their adaptation to two radically new situations they are confronted with from earliest childhood : the omnipresence of images – most notably those that their parents make of them – and new family organizations in which the desire the child observes is maintained for a longer and longer time. « Being famous » is then perceived as the privileged means for resolving several contradictory desires and anxieties at the same time.
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.
For over-playing teenagers, the association of a videogame workshop and a talking moment seems to be an adequate therapy. The use of the videogame as the mediation object of the therapy allows for the emergence of feelings that might be elaborated through verbalization in a second step. It allows the teenagers to become aware of their own troubles, and consequently helps them to move away from them. Interactions facilitated by the well-disposed group strengthen the identificatory process, especially with the victims of school violence. At least one of the therapists should be very familiar with the videogame’s world, in order to facilitate the narcissistic revaluation process and the identification process.
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.
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.
Adolescence, 2012, 30, 1, 145-157.
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