The Psychoanalytic Study of the Child
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The Transitional Phenomena Functions of Smartphones for Adolescents Alan Sugarman PhD To cite this article: Alan Sugarman PhD (2017) The Transitional Phenomena Functions of Smartphones for Adolescents, The Psychoanalytic Study of the Child, 70:1, 135-150 To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/00797308.2016.1277881
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Date: 25 March 2017, At: 10:52
THE PSYCHOANALYTIC STUDY OF THE CHILD 2017, VOL. 70, NO. 1, 135–150 http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/00797308.2016.1277881
The Transitional Phenomena Functions of Smartphones for Adolescents Alan Sugarman, PhDa,b a
San Diego Psychoanalytic Center; bDepartment of Psychiatry, University of California, San Diego KEYWORDS
ABSTRACT
The contemporary nonlinear dynamic systems model of development used by psychoanalysts suggests that generalized statements about the impact of cybertechnology on the developing mind are simplistic, naive, and unwise. Once we recognize that environmental factors are only one of many contributors to the developmental process and its outcome, it becomes necessary to be far more circumscribed and specific when studying this issue. Toward that end, one type of technology—the smartphone—and one developmental stage—adolescence—are addressed. It is suggested that smartphones can serve as transitional phenomena that facilitate the internalization of various regulatory functions previously provided by the environment. They can also be misused in a defensively perverse manner to compensate for developmental deficiencies and to defend against the affects aroused by facing those deficiencies. Five regulatory functions internalized during adolescence through using the smartphone as a transitional phenomenon are delineated: (1) narcissistic regulation, (2) drive and affect regulation, (3) superego integration, (4) ego functioning, and (5) self and object representational functioning. Brief clinical examples are provided to describe such usage and to clarify perverse misusage, also.
Transitional phenomena; smart phone; adolescents; internalization; selfregulation
There is great concern among psychoanalytically oriented mental health professionals about the impact of technology on psychological development. The very inevitability of the “electrified mind” (Akhtar 2011) raises the hackles of the vast majority. In particular, the potentially deleterious effects of the numerous cyberinstruments on the growing child’s object relations have been emphasized (Fisher 2011; Steiner-Adair 2013; Cundy 2015). Too often such discussions become unidimensional; authors speak as though all technology must have the same pathological effects on all children without considering the complexity of development, and the well-known fact that the developing child is an active agent in his or her interaction with the environment because he or she brings a more or less organized mind, already shaped by previous experiences and constitutional elements, to any new interaction or element in the environment. A blatant example is the “common wisdom” of mental health professionals, based on empirical findings (Huesmann 1986; Huesmann and Eron 1986; Singer and Singer 2005), that repeated exposure to violent television shows has a long-term deleterious impact on the child’s ability to regulate his or her emotions and impulses. Such overgeneralization flies in the face of contemporary psychoanalytic developmental thinking. Today we believe that every child’s mind at any moment is “a complex product of his CONTACT Alan Sugarman, PhD
[email protected]
4180 La Jolla Village Drive, Suite 550B, La Jolla, CA 92037, USA.
© 2017 Claudia Lament, Wendy Olesker, Paul Brinich and Rona Knight
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or her endowment, developmental history, current circumstances, and relationships with key figures” (Gilmore and Meersand 2014, 1) as well as the current context in which his or her mind is operating. Prescriptive linear understandings based on psychosexual stages have been replaced by a nonlinear dynamic systems approach that stresses the hierarchical organization of multiple mental systems that interact and become transformed throughout the developmental process (Jaffe 2000; Galatzer-Levy 2002; Harris 2005; Seligman 2005; Kieffer 2007). This view of interacting developmental systems rejects assigning decisive importance to any one system (Gilmore and Meersand 2014). Neither nature nor nurture alone can determine any single mental phenomena. From this perspective, no single environmental experience can possibly have the same meaning or effect on every child. Thus, I have been struck by the failure of those who condemn all violent television shows as detrimental to children to consider the simple issue of the child’s capacity to distinguish fantasy from reality. Children who possess this capacity (and most do by the ages of four to six) can grasp that the Road Runner’s sequential destruction of Wile E. Coyote is “just pretend.” They will not emulate it or believe that killing someone “for real” does not have a permanent effect, so long as they also possess an age-appropriate capacity to modulate their aggression, and enough superego internalization to manage their impulses. These latter capacities, as well as the ability to distinguish fantasy from reality, are shaped by their previous constitutional givens interacting with the specifics of their families, culture, and unique experiences, including trauma. Consequently, as a child analyst I find myself often recommending to parents that they allow their young children to watch such cartoons to help to obviate the child’s excessive, and symptomatic, anxiety about aggressive impulses and fantasies. Too often, children who are not allowed such exposure seem unable to regulate their aggression, alternating between poorly modulated tantrums and anxious, phobic symptoms. Being allowed to watch such violence and experience it as “just pretend” is a helpful step toward mature mentalization, a crucial mental function for affect regulation. A similar caution must be used when considering the developmental impact on children and adolescents of living in a world affected by cyberspace. The contemporary psychoanalytic perspective would ask questions about the nature of the cyberspace, the age of the child, his or her constitutional strengths and limitations, his or her previous developmental experiences, organizations, and dynamic conflicts; and his or her family and social structure. One cannot assume all children will suffer impaired relationships because they spend time on computers and tablets; not all adolescents will use the Internet to watch porn and skew their entry into adult sexuality. Likewise, social media will not inevitably transform future generations into narcissists focused on exhibiting every minute facet of their lives while remaining detached and lacking empathy at deeper levels. This paper attempts a more contemporary view in a number of ways. To begin, it limits its focus to one developmental stage—adolescence—and to one type of technology—the smartphone. To be sure, such narrowing will still not address the complexity of the topic, but it does offer a way to consider some of the relevant issues by not comparing apples and oranges with regard to the type of environmental input being studied. Smartphones have become the device of choice for most adolescents because of the many options they offer. They serve as far more than a convenient way to place and receive phone calls, in contrast to more basic cell phones. Serving as a portable means to remain connected to the Internet and cyberspace, they allow the adolescent instant access to social media such as Facebook, Twitter, and more. Their excellent cameras allow teenagers to take, receive, and store photos that become used in
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numerous ways within the adolescent community. They can also be used to play the multiple types of computer games that some teens, particularly males, find so compelling. Their many apps allow their users a variety of useful functions, including the option to download and carry a library of their favorite songs. Finally, because they are so much more expensive than simple cell phones, parents tend to be unwilling to purchase them for their children until early adolescence. Hence, they have become a ubiquitous tool for most adolescents to use while traversing the many pitfalls and opportunities of that complex developmental stage.
The development of self-regulation Implicit and, at times, explicit in contemporary psychoanalytic thinking about development is an emphasis on the accrual of mental structure, and the integrated coordination of all the disparate mental functions we subsume under the construct of mind. No longer do we prioritize drive derivatives and interstructural conflicts about them when we discuss development, pathogenesis, or therapeutic action. Instead we look at what mental functions are working, what functions are compromised, and which ones seem virtually absent when we think diagnostically, or when we try to evaluate analyzability and suitability. Our ways of thinking about how these functions occur, develop, and operate have expanded far beyond the ego psychological distinction between maturation and development or its distinction between primary and secondary autonomy. In general, we are most concerned about what constitutes adaptive self-regulation, what promotes it, and what disrupts it. We believe that self-regulation involves a homeostatic equilibrium among all the mental functions or systems operating at any particular moment with the caveat that a healthy equilibrium is one that integrates and organizes all these functions hierarchically in a manner that is adaptive in the external world while facilitating an integrated sense of self (Sugarman and Jaffe 1989, 1990). Certain mental functions like affect regulation, narcissistic regulation, mentalization, and representational stability are particularly important in this regard (P. Tyson 2005; Sugarman 2007) with the proviso that no one or several systems are ever the complete or most significant explanation for any mental phenomena. An extension of Winnicott’s (1951) ideas about transitional phenomena is useful in considering how this hierarchical organization and adaptive self-regulation occurs. It has been suggested that there exists a developmental line of transitional phenomena (Sugarman and Jaffe 1989) that help to manage the inevitable disequilibrium that occurs between the developing child and his or her environment, as the child transitions from one developmental stage to another. That is, transitions between developmental stages create internal tensions because of newly occurring disequilibrium between the child’s previous mental organization, and his or her need to create a new one to adapt to the environmental and internal demands of the next stage (Hong 1978). From this perspective, transitional phenomena are used to regain inner–outer equilibrium via facilitating the emergence of a new hierarchical organization at each stage. “The specific nature of transitional phenomena will differ at each stage due to maturational and developmental shifts in cognitive functioning, defensive functioning, libidinal focus, affect organization, and the demands of the environment” (Sugarman and Jaffe 1989, 91). In general, the manifest form of any particular transitional phenomenon will parallel cognitive development, becoming increasingly abstract. For example, the iconic “blankie” of the toddler is chosen not only for its tactile and olfactory qualities, but because the toddler’s concrete cognitive functioning requires a concrete, tangible object. Fantasy
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becomes used, in part, as a transitional phenomenon in the oedipal and latency years because of the advent of operational thought, as even more abstract transitional phenomena such as new philosophies, musical tastes, and so on, accompany the formal operational and more abstract cognition of adolescence. As Gilmore and Meersand (2014) note, “transitional objects are gradually supplanted by the child’s pretend play, and later by the adult’s participation in artistic and cultural activities” (85). Despite manifest differences in appearance, transitional phenomena have a functional equivalence in facilitating the reciprocal relationship between the child and the environment that is emphasized by the current day nonlinear dynamic systems model. “Development is the process that integrates endowment, emerging capacities, environment, and experience, and results in nonlinear sequential mental organizations” (Gilmore and Meersand 2014, 15). This integration, involving the continued growth of reciprocal relationships between the individual and environment, is necessary because the developing child and functioning adult must adapt continually to changing external and internal realities (Sugarman and Jaffe 1989). Adapting successfully to both these realities both potentiates and is based on internal capabilities. Transitional phenomena facilitate an increasingly, although relative, independence from the environment by promoting the sequential internalization of key regulatory functions formerly provided by the caretakers. In this way, transitional phenomena can be seen as the vehicle for the “transmuting internalizations” of various maternal functions that others (Tolpin 1971; P. Tyson 1988, 2005; Rutherford and Mayes 2014) consider the building blocks of psychic structure. To quote Tolpin (1971), “the blanket as a way station both prepares and bolsters the psyche for the bit-by-bit internalization and stable organization of the maternal functions that have been transferred to the inanimate object at a time when the psyche is still too immature to make the transmuting internalization of these functions directly” (328). In this way, the process of internalization is a key contributor to the accretion of the psychic structure that allows for self-regulation. In essence, the human organism’s developmental process includes becoming increasingly autonomous from the holding environment through gradually internalizing a host of regulatory functions provided initially by it. Phase-appropriate frustrations stimulate the developing child to internalize the regulatory functions previously supplied by the parents, allowing him or her to use internal resources to regulate himself or herself; the child builds “emotional muscle” (Novick and Novick 2010). Such muscle carries with it a gradual depersonalizing of the parental object representations as the self-regulating functions associated with those representations are assimilated into the ego, becoming part of the self-representation (Jacobson 1964). The new hierarchical mental organization arising from this internalization leads to improved drive modulation, greater differentiation, tolerance, and control of affects and their expressions, and an expanded ego organization. Such transformation of intrapsychic structure promotes a greater sense of self-efficacy, a greater cohesiveness to the self-representation, a more broadly defined self-representation, and a stable overarching self-schema and sense of selfagency that is the essence of ego identity (Sugarman and Jaffe 1989, 1990). Any particular developmental stage can be studied in terms of the shifts in internal and external demands the child must balance to maintain his or her mental homeostatic equilibrium. As development proceeds, such balancing becomes more complex; therefore the transitional phenomena needed to facilitate internalization must also become complex. They must parallel the organization of the child’s self and object representations to be both inside and outside simultaneously.
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The internalization of self-regulatory functions via transitional phenomena in adolescence It can be useful to consider the functions that transitional phenomena help to internalize in adolescence when studying the impact of smartphones. Except for those who want to extend the developmental process to the decade between twenty and thirty, sometimes referred to as the odyssey years (Gilmore and Meersand 2014), most analysts view adolescence as the most complex stage the child must navigate. Multiple mental systems are remobilized, reworked, integrated, and transformed into an adult mental organization by the end of this period. Narcissism (Spruiell 1975), drive organization (Blos 1958), superego (Laufer 1964; R. L. Tyson and Tyson 1984), ego structure (Jacobson 1961; Rosner 1972), and self and object representations (Blos 1967, 1976; Schafer 1973) are all taken apart, modified, revised, and restructured into a hierarchically stratified and synthesized ego identity (Erikson 1956). Such extensive transformations challenge the adolescent’s developing mind to find ways to maintain equilibrium and a stable sense of self-agency and efficacy while such wide-ranging structural reorganization is occurring. One might compare it to the challenge of trying not to become lost or overwhelmed while driving around Boston during the multidecade-long “Big Dig.” Clinically, one sees such challenge leading, at times, to the emergence of severe psychopathology in a child whose previous mental organization seemed reasonably adaptive, and, at other times, to the transformation into an adaptive mental organization of an earlier seemingly pathological organization. Of course, frequently the developmental history provided by the parents reveals that the psychopathology for which the adolescent is being brought to treatment was foreshadowed in earlier mental organizations. One factor contributing to any of these outcomes is the degree to which crucial selfregulatory functions have or have not been internalized. One important tool for such internalization is the availability of useful transitional phenomena. In the case of adolescents, smartphones can serve this purpose. Like any other type of phenomena, though, they can be used adaptively toward the end of facilitating self-regulation, or they can be misused in a distorted way, as an alloplastic attempt to cope with absent or faulty inner capacities. For example, some adolescents might use the smartphone in the service of drive regulation, whereas other adolescents will not take advantage of the smartphone’s capacity to internalize drive regulation. Instead, they will become obsessed with using it perversely (Blackman 2011; Galatzer-Levy 2012). Such perverse usage does not usually refer to a circumscribed sexual perversion. Rather it involves a perverse defense (Coen 1998; Kulish and Holtzman 2014; Racamier 2014) wherein the smartphone is used defensively to avoid facing serious structural difficulties usually involving narcissistic regulation, regulation of aggression, reality testing, and object relating. This defense is like that described by Coen (1998): “I use the term perverse defense to refer to such cultivation of states like excitement, distraction, and pomposity, as well as sadomasochistic relations with others, in an attempt to ward off the unbearable: intense affects, painful ideas, and loving, committed need of a valued, distinct person” (1171). How does one determine whether the smartphone is being used to further self-regulation or misused to cope with deficient regulatory capacities? One potentially useful indicator is the degree of abstractness of the transitional phenomena in adolescence. For example, newfound philosophical and political interests can serve to internalize drive regulation or narcissistic regulation by helping the adolescent gain some distance from his or her drives or to see himself or herself in a more thoughtful and more balanced perspective. Or they can be used
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more concretely to solely express aggressive, rebellious impulses or to compensate for painful feelings of low self-esteem, as is currently occurring with middle-class teenagers in this country, and in Europe, being drawn to radical Islamic dogma via the Internet. A similar parallel can be used when assessing the functions of the smartphone for any adolescent.
The uses of smartphones to internalize key self-regulatory functions during adolescence I now apply these ideas to the internalization process during adolescence. Several clinicians have recognized how transitional phenomena contribute to the internalization of regulatory functioning in adolescence (Downey 1978; Benson 1980; Rosenthal 1981). Benson’s (1980) emphasis on adolescent career aspirations as “narcissistic guardians” most clearly supports this paper’s perspective. Such career goals have an abstract, verbal, symbolic quality; so do the multitude of symbolic representatives of the youth culture that facilitate the internalization of regulatory functioning. Thus, the aspirations, art, music, and morality valued by the teenage culture become used to help the individuating adolescent to look inward for the self-control that his or her parents previously provided. Not uncommonly, sexual and aggressive derivatives infuse the transitional phenomena of preadolescence and early adolescence (e.g., sadomasochistic musical lyrics). By middle and late adolescence, new religions, political convictions, and social causes replace the earlier drive-infused transitional phenomena. All the transitional phenomena of adolescence are more abstract, more depersonified, and less animistic than the fantasies that constitute transitional phenomena in latency (Sugarman and Jaffe 1989). It is what they symbolize, not a simple, concrete icon, that makes them useful for the adolescent with formal operational capacities. It appears that five major systems or regulatory functions become internalized via transitional phenomena, including the smartphone, in adolescence: (1) narcissistic regulation, (2) drive and affect regulation, (3) superego integration, (4) ego functioning, and (5) self and object representational functioning. To some degree, these distinctions might seem arbitrary and overlapping. That should not be surprising given that all mental phenomena are subject to the principle of multiple function (Waelder 2007). Explicit in contemporary nonlinear dynamic systems thinking is the fact that any mental organization, at any moment, involves the balancing and integration of all the multiple systems involved in psychological development. Thus, the psychological function of the smartphone will always serve numerous purposes, including the internalization of multiple regulatory functions at the same time. Nonetheless, it is helpful for heuristic reasons to separate them out so as to better appreciate the complexity of the ways that any particular teenager can use the smartphone to internalize any particular regulatory function at any particular moment. The smartphone’s role in narcissistic regulation Developing and maintaining self-esteem is a core issue during the teenage years, poignantly emphasized in many coming-of-age novels, such as The Catcher in the Rye. Adolescents’ confidence and sense of competence are severely tested, in part, by their realization of, and attention to their parents’ flaws, as they turn a critical eye on them in their efforts to psychologically separate and develop their own unique identity. One destabilizing result of the press to sever object ties with parents, and the previous identification with them, is facing
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the impossibility of perfection. Yet the mind in early adolescence is too immaturely organized for realistic self-evaluation. Complicating these struggles is the need to integrate a new body image into one’s self-image. Physical appearance, sexual attractiveness, athletic prowess, and so on, become other arenas for concern. So does the current-day academic pressure in high school and the expectation by many middle- and upper class teenagers that they must gain acceptance to a highly prestigious and competitive college or university. Hence, naively idealistic values and symbols of their cohort can be used to retain a sense of perfection that is both separate and differentiated from their now imperfect parents, as well as vehicles to live up to what they believe the parents expect. The smartphone, with its ability to contain a mobile library of their culture’s music, or its allowance for snapchatting, or its access to other types of social media like Facebook that are not used by their parents, allows for narcissistic regulation. It is what these “apps” represent, not their concrete content, that makes them transitional phenomena. They are not transitional phenomena when their concrete content becomes used obsessively. Lily, an eighteen-year-old girl related to the real world as only a stage set for photos or stories that she could post on her Facebook page. She would go on trips and outings with her friends without showing any interest in what they were doing, or even in talking with them. All she wanted to do was to take pictures with them at the various sites they were visiting. These pictures would then end up on her Facebook page, with comments making it seem as though she had been experiencing great adventures with her plethora of friends. The problem came to a head after a visit to a departed friend’s new home, and city, where Lily had been virtually noncommunicative, and failed to even thank the friend or her family for their hospitality. Later, the friend saw the photos and captions from that visit on the patient’s Facebook page and confronted my patient with how she felt used. This example is simply one of perverse misuse so that the smartphone’s access to social media was only used to compensate for deeply rooted and unbearable feelings of inferiority and an inability to be close to real objects in the external world. The phone was used by Lily in the service of a narcissistic perversion (Racamier 2014). Her use of it to avoid genuine intimacy and object relating was akin to what Racamier (2014) described: “a particular kind of disavowal operates in the nonerotogenic manifestation of narcissistic perversion, in which the object is treated not as a person or as an amulet, but as a tool” (119). The smartphone’s role in drive and affect regulation The upsurge of and need to rework and regulate drives, and their associated affects, is one of the earliest psychoanalytic foci about this developmental stage. Hormonal maturation and adolescent cultural icons force both sexes to struggle to integrate intensified libidinal and aggressive wishes and fantasies. Movies, popular music, video games, and the Internet interact with biological maturation to flood the adolescent psyche with drive derivatives. One can see both sexual and aggressive derivatives in the contemporary focus on body piercing, sexualized musical videos, and the rites of passage for many high school and college athletic teams, fraternities, and sororities. An absence of appropriate transitional phenomena can lead to enactment and fixation at perverse ways of experiencing and expressing sexual or aggressive impulses. At the same time, the smartphone can offer access to more useful transitional phenomena that help to internalize drive regulation. For example, Jake, a shy late adolescent, struggled greatly to gain comfort and confidence with his sexual urges. He had been slow to date, and clung to his one and only girlfriend
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despite his increasing dissatisfaction with her sexual inhibitions that also showed elsewhere in her personality. Finally, he ended the relationship despite his fear that he might have great difficulty forming another romantic, sexual one. In his usual obsessional way, he read books on flirting and “picking up” girls. Having carefully “researched” and thought through his dating strategy, he became adept at flirting via texting. Sessions were spent, in part, describing his acumen at gaining the interest of girls via this modality, and building on that interest to date, become romantic, and even have sex with them. Gradually, he generalized from flirting via texts to flirting in person, often surprising himself with his own success at picking up girls at work, at bars, and sometimes at local farmers markets. For this patient, his smartphone was a helpful transitional phenomenon, learning to express and regulate his sexual urges via a modality embraced by his generation. A contrast can be seen in David, another adolescent patient struggling to integrate his grandiose and sexually overstimulated fantasies. This patient had always been socially popular as well as academically successful. A talented athlete, he never stuck with any particular sport long enough to live up to his potential. Instead, his two priorities were getting the excellent grades that would gain him admission to an Ivy League university, and having sex with as many attractive girls as he could. These goals were not far from the values of his parents, who focused on their physical appearance and their own Ivy League degrees. His sexual overstimulation involved both his unusual closeness with his physically attractive mother, and his identification with his father, whom he had discovered enjoyed watching pornography in their theater room. He fantasized that his father often masturbated to the pornography. The patient, himself, began watching pornography on his computer at age ten. By adolescence, he would describe attractive girls to me as having bodies as perfect as “porn stars.” He was skilled at persuading them to send him nude photos of themselves, often wanting to show me some of the pictures to gain my confirmation about the perfection of their bodies. David was very sexually active during high school, but with a noteworthy lack of interest in the girls with whom he was having sex. It was purely the perfection of their bodies and the “bragging rights” that went with having sex with such beautiful bodies that interested him. From the perspective of this paper, he just used his smartphone as a vehicle for actualizing, rather than facing, the narcissistic and sexual issues that were a long-standing part of his personality organization. It did not facilitate either drive or narcissistic regulation. Rather, it left him reliant on external ways to obscure and compensate for deep insecurities. His reliance on action via the phone was like the narcissistic perversion described by Racamier (2014): “the most perfect form of narcissistic perversion is represented completely by action and hardly at all evinced in phantasy” (119). It also is like the perverse behaviors described by Kulish and Holtzman (2014), who reported that, “Based on our clinical experience, we endorse the emphasis on aggression, humiliation, and dehumanization of the object, and we view early narcissistic problems as intrinsic to the understanding of perversion” (285). One sees the smartphone used in either of these ways with regard to regulating aggressive urges also. Owen, an inhibited fourteen-year-old, began to use both his phone and computer to compete with friends on the various games the phone’s Internet access allowed. Over time, the comfort he gained competing aggressively in this way generalized to comfort with more direct, in-person, competition, such as athletic activities. Both parents noticed and reported to me his significantly improved aggressiveness on the athletic field. In contrast, Heidi, a socially inhibited and maladroit eighteen-year-old, also enjoyed playing such competitive games on her phone and computer. In her case, much of her inhibition and awkwardness were a
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reaction to significant conflicts over her anger at her insensitive parents. In her case, though, the phone and computer never were used to internalize improved modulation of and comfort with her aggression. Instead they remained concrete ways to express her competitiveness and to compensate for her discomfort being assertive directly with others. Consequently, her anger at her family continued to be expressed only through masochistic, passive-aggressive behaviors. Thus, I had to focus on the defensive and compensatory nature of her smartphone usage to work on the underlying discomfort with and problems in regulating her thinly veiled hostility. The smartphone’s role in superego integration The ego ideal and superego structures are both reworked and modified during the extensive internal transformations that characterize the traversal through adolescence. By the time the adolescent moves into adolescence, the developmental process ideally has allowed him or her to develop a superego strong enough to manage and repress his or her incestual strivings while not becoming so rigid that it inhibits other object-directed sexual urges and behaviors (Jacobson 1961; P. Tyson and Tyson 1990). Early in adolescence, the superego’s regulatory capacities can suffer, as the teenager relinquishes his or her identifications with the parental introjects (Blos 1962). Both sexes struggle to regulate their potentials for drive discharge via action as well as their regressive urges. Promiscuity becomes an avenue for adolescent girls to counteract their regressive pulls to the pre-oedipal mother, whereas adolescent boys use a variety of actions against passive or homosexual longings and anxieties. At such times the adolescent subculture’s mores, values, and prohibitions can mitigate the urge to enact. This subculture can simultaneously promote the socialization of guilt through these new values that differ from those of their parents. New beliefs and ideals evolve in this way. The ego ideal is weakened and then restructured as the teenager first deidealizes and then forgives his or her parents for their imperfections. During this process, new ideals and idealizations are sought. The ideal goal during this stage shifts from gaining parental love to regulating self-love (Laufer 1964). Transitional phenomena like the smartphone can facilitate the internalization of new standards that modify and articulate the ideal self, a component of the ego ideal (P. Tyson and Tyson 1990). These transitional phenomena are used by the adolescent to integrate the ego ideal and superego to promote stable self-esteem and selfregulation. “The ideal forms of behavior until adolescence are aimed at assuring the love from the original objects or their equivalents in the superego. In adolescence, the ideal toward which one strives has the additional important roles of helping the person to free himself from the original sources of narcissistic supply and of paving the way to emotional maturity” (Laufer 1964, 210). Hence transitional phenomena facilitate the emergence of a loving superego (Schafer 1960). Gabriella, an adolescent girl I treated, had experienced inordinate difficulty with feeling separate from her mother for her entire life. I understood these difficulties as originating in her constitutional sensory hypersensitivity that made her an unable-to-be-soothed infant. The attachment problems following from such a problematic infancy had a debilitating, cascading effect on her self-regulatory capacities throughout her development (P. Tyson 1996). By adolescence, an early sign of individuation involved immersing herself in the breeding and showing of dogs. While working at a kennel on weekends, she became progressively more upset over the cruel training tactics of one of the handlers. Her complaints to the owner of the
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kennel and to her parents went unheeded. Finally, a dog was accidentally killed by the handler’s cruelty. Although all the adults bemoaned the unfortunate occurrence, none of them thought it necessary to go beyond that. My patient, however, was horrified and incensed, not only at the dog’s death, but at the willingness of the adults to let it go. Via her smartphone and the Facebook page she created through it, she mounted a campaign to expose the cruelty of the handler and the kennel owner who had ignored his techniques. This effort united her with a variety of animal rights proponents and led to the handler’s name coming up as a “dog killer” any time someone searched him. In this way she used her smartphone to relinquish her parents’ value of “not making waves” and forged a new one that involved standing up for what one thinks is right despite the criticism of others, in this case both her father and the kennel owner. Her lack of interest in the Internet and computers, more generally, might have left her without a vehicle for revising her superego were it not for her smartphone. Later, she expanded on this newfound comfort with asserting her values to engage in spirited debates with classmates over political issues in class and as a reporter for the high school newspaper. Doing so made her different from either parent, whose value of never taking public stands with which others might disagree had negatively affected their personal and professional lives in various ways. The smartphone’s role in facilitating ego functioning Given the multiple systems being integrated and transformed during adolescence, ego functioning can become strained and ego regressions are not uncommon. In particular, the upsurge of drives including regressive, pregenital ones (Blos 1962) and the relinquishing of parental introjects can tax the ego’s executive functioning. It is not uncommon to see previously excellent students begin to have difficulty managing the added academic expectations with a subsequent drop in grades, for example. At other times, previously successful defenses become unable to regulate the new internal and external demands of being a teenager. At such times, regression to immature defenses or to magical thinking can be used by the adolescent in a maladaptive attempt to maintain internal equilibrium. When development goes well, the adolescent faces and conquers such developmental challenges and conflicts (Nagera 1966). The smartphone can both facilitate such synthesis and transformation and be misused in an attempt to cope with ego functions that are not well established or are slipping. Gabriella, mentioned earlier, is a case in point. She had always been a highly anxious and disorganized student, feeling overwhelmed at school assignments while resisting her parents’ best efforts to help her learn to study and organize herself. Psychological testing had revealed very superior intelligence and no learning disability. Instead, she was simply unable to regulate her anxiety enough to stay focused and organized. Complicating the matter was her identification with her mother, who also could space out regularly because of her own poorly modulated anxiety. High school, not surprisingly, was stressful because of the number of different class assignments she had to keep straight. Complicating the matter was her preference for defensive avoidance of anxiety, so that she would miss class or an entire school day to avoid the embarrassment and guilt she felt over not having done her work. At the same time, she sabotaged all efforts to teach her to organize herself by using calendars, day planners, and so on. As she gained interest in her smart phone and its symbol of her teenaged culture, though, she began to use its calendar and schedule functions. Doing so gradually
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reduced her previous disorganization and she developed more age-appropriate skills at planning and anticipating. Over time, these generalized so that the phone itself was no longer necessary in this way. Not only was the smartphone useful with internalizing the executive ego function of planning, anticipating, and organizing; it also facilitated some internalization of anxiety regulation and modified her immature defensive reliance on denial and avoidance. Thus, it improved ego expansion in a number of ways at the same time. Interestingly, Gabriella had been slow to use the cell phone her mother had given her. At fifteen she was still relying on her mother to know when to pick her up, and to shield her from the calls from a boy at school who had developed a crush on her. Her anxiety about talking with this boy, and either reciprocating his interest or rejecting it, was so overwhelming that she preferred to leave the phone turned off in her room, at home. It was only after significant therapeutic work on this reliance on avoidance and on using her mother as a regulator of anxiety that Gabriella began to use her smartphone. From then on, she dealt with such anxieties more directly via the phone, either answering the calls, using caller ID to allow the call to go to voice mail, or actually blocking calls from those individuals she found particularly distasteful. Eventually she became comfortable enough to handle the complexities of boy–girl relationships directly, in person. Here again, one can see the ways in which the smartphone served a transitional phenomenon function by promoting the internalization of anxiety regulation and strengthened her defensive capacities enough that she could give up her primitive defenses of denial and avoidance. The smartphone’s use in enhancing and stabilizing self and object representations Transitional phenomena, including the smartphone, can be quite useful in helping the adolescent to complete the second individuation process (Blos 1967). The object removal or relinquishment of infantile ties to the primary objects require the adolescent to transform his or her internal, representational world (Schafer 1973). His or her aims from earlier childhood must be modified, regulated, selectively accepted or rejected, and substituted to detach psychologically from earlier introjects and identifications. Likewise the internal object relational templates through which he or she has organized relationships with others must be transformed. It is impossible for the age-appropriate sense of autonomy and agency to emerge at the end of adolescence without the formation of well-differentiated, integrated, and hierarchically organized self and object schemata (Klein 1976; Meissner 1986; Sugarman and Jaffe 1990). By the end of adolescence, the teenager should have developed a self-schema that acts as a mediating and synthesizing agent able to receive information from both inside and outside, and to use that information to confront the environment. For this to occur, the qualities of the old identifications must be revised and subordinated to new attachments and identifications (Jacobson 1961). John, a studious fifteen-year-old, struggled with seeing himself as an active agent, able to think and have opinions different from his parents. He was an excessively conscientious boy, presenting with a variety of inhibitions such as not wanting to learn to drive. All of them were related, in part, to his difficulty in modifying his infantile views of himself and others. His parents were ardent Republicans, watching Fox News on television and reading the local newspaper with its conservative, Republican orientation. In therapy, John talked about his love for and wish to respect his parents, and his discomfort with feeling the political outsider at his liberal high school. This conflict paralleled many others where he struggled with wanting
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to be different from his parents, while worrying that doing so was tantamount to treason. At some point, he was upgraded to a smartphone by his parents. Using its access to the Internet, he began to read the digital versions of the New York Times and the Washington Post. Armed with the perspectives gleaned from such readings, he became more active in conversations with fellow students both inside and outside the classroom. At some point I realized that he was only doing such reading outside his home and away from his parents. My question about this led first to his fear of his parents’ reaction, and later to his realization that they would be accepting of his newly found political orientation. As he became more comfortable admitting this difference from the views of his parents, he developed zeal in expressing his views; doing so seemed to create a more vivid sense of self as intentional and autonomous and he learned to drive. It also promoted the formation of a more hierarchically organized self-schema composed of multiple ideals, possible selves, and so on. For example, he could be a free thinker while remaining a loyal, loving son. As he developed a Weltanschauung, or coherent worldview, an integrated and broad-ranging perspective of self in relation to others could emerge (Jacobson 1961). It is this perspective that allows for the emergence of ego identity that has both autonomous and affiliative elements. What Klein (1976) called “we-ness” is as important as separateness.
Conclusion It is impossible to make sweeping generalizations about the developmental impact of the “electrified mind” (Akhtar 2011). This state of affairs should not be surprising to child analysts. Our contemporary model of development emphasizes the need to understand psychological development as involving the interaction and transformation of multiple mental functions or systems including innate endowment and the impact of the environment. This nonlinear dynamic systems model emphasizes the interaction of all these factors with each other so no one of them warrants being viewed as the most significant. Technology is just one of the facets of the environment traversed by the developing child. Neither it, nor any other aspect of the environment, can have the same effect on every child because every other system will also have an effect, both singly and in combination. No two children will be identical in terms of all these systems, their histories, their interaction, their transformations, or the hierarchical ways in which their minds organize them. Given this complexity, this paper attempts a more modest task of considering some of the ways one type of technology, the smartphone, can affect aspects of one developmental stage, adolescence. The aspect of the smartphone studied here is its ability to serve a transitional phenomenon function for adolescents. Specifically, it can facilitate the internalization of the regulatory functions necessary for the adolescent to move through that developmental stage, and exit it as a self-regulating adult with an integrated and hierarchically organized selfschema or ego identity (Erikson 1956) that involves a sense of agency and a capacity to be intimate with others. Five regulatory functions that it helps to internalize were emphasized: (1) narcissistic regulation, (2) drive and affect regulation, (3) superego integration, (4) facilitation of ego functioning, and (5) self and object representation enhancement and stabilization. Other regulatory functions could have been discussed also, but these five were chosen because of their salience in adolescence. Clinical examples of the ways some teenagers have either used them in this way, or misused them to pathologically compensate for impaired or limited capacities to regulate themselves
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are provided. Comparing situations when the smartphone served transitional phenomena functions with those when it served compensatory functions shows that it allows access to a transitional space (Kieffer 2011) in the former situation. That is, the phone facilitates access to a space wherein the adolescent can practice self-regulation of one sort or another without having to completely regulate himself or herself in the external or “real” world. It allows him or her the illusion of doing so while remaining somewhat removed from more direct or fully “real” self-regulation. For example, Gabriella “practiced” her new ideal of standing up for her beliefs via the smartphone before actually doing so in person, face to face with others, at school. Similarly, John “practiced” his autonomy and individuation by reading the New York Times online via his smartphone before he actually exposed it in person to his parents. It appears that the smartphone can offer the teenager, who is able to use it, a mental space to take in and experiment with new skills that feels still somewhat removed from actual interpersonal reality. This mental or transitional space of illusion, and the smartphone’s ability to potentiate it, is akin to ways in which analysts, particularly child analysts, work in the displacement when trying to help patients integrate aspects of themselves into conscious awareness. Children are able to mentalize and be aware of their minds’ workings in the displacement offered by play well before they can do so in direct discussions about themselves with the analyst (Sugarman 2003, 2008a, 2008b). In such play, their inner wishes, fears, fantasies, and so on can be “known” because it is only pretend. Because they are experienced as only “pretend,” they can be experimented with absent the various threats, including anxiety, of knowing them in the real world of interaction with others such as the analyst. “It is by means of play that they are discovering what they feel, what they know, and what they want” (Slade 1994, 91). The same safety and expansion of self-awareness leading to self-regulation can occur via the smartphone. Using it in the ways described here allows the adolescent to “play” with new regulatory capacities while acting as though it is still just “pretend.” The affective and interpersonal distance from actual direct interaction makes it feel a safe playground on which to try these capacities out, modify them, and gain expertise with them before leaving the playground and going out into the real interpersonal world. “Thus, it could be argued that these virtual worlds may constitute a form of transitional space in which participants have opportunities to play with identity, at a greater remove than would be possible in the family or in the actual community, but in a safe space that affords some autonomy” (Kieffer 2011, 56). At these times, despite the tangibility of the smartphone itself, it is its ability to allow the adolescent to use it in a more abstract or symbolic manner that helps him or her internalize the necessary capacities for self-regulation. In contrast, adolescents like Lily, or David, who just use the phone to compensate for structural deficiencies, fail to move beyond its tangibility. The phone remains concrete, never offering an entry into the world of illusion. Instead it is experienced as reality without any quality of “pretend” or play. Lily truly experienced her world of Facebook photos and postings as real life, never grasping that it was just an escape from an interpersonal world that she found terrifying and confusing. David never grasped that the girls who sent him nude photos or dropped by for casual sexual acts modeled on pornographic Internet videos were persons with an inner world that went beyond their bodies and what those bodies could do. There was nothing abstract or symbolic in the ways these adolescents used the phone. Instead they continued to concretely equate fantasy and reality, what Fonagy et al. (2002) called the mode of psychic equivalence. Adolescent and adult self-regulation cannot occur so long as the
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teenager remains stuck in a mode of psychic equivalence wherein reality and fantasy are equated. It is only its integration with the pretend mode that allows for the emergence of the verbal, abstract, symbolic mentalization so essential for optimal self-regulation (Fonagy et al. 2002; Sugarman 2006). Thus, even in situations like those of Lily and David, the smartphone is not the culprit behind their failure to self-regulate. The problem lies with the preexisting problems with the mental organization they brought to their use of the smartphone. This mental organization is the by-product of all the multiple dynamic systems and environmental experiences that went before it. One can never understand the impact of any technology on development without considering the complexity of the developmental process that both preceded and continues to be the context in which that technology entered the child’s life.
Notes on contributor Alan Sugarman, PhD is a Training and Supervising Psychoanalyst and a Supervising Child and Adolescent Psychoanalyst at the San Diego Psychoanalytic Center. He is also a Clinical Professor in the University of California, San Diego Department of Psychiatry. Dr. Sugarman is the Head of the Department of Psychoanalytic Education of the American Psychoanalytic Association. He has published widely applying psychoanalytic developmental thinking to treatment and diagnostic issues.
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