The screen convinces us there are no consequences. When the avatar bleeds, someone real dies. Technology lies.
Technology as fiction of autonomy.
The screen permits a devastating fiction: that we do not participate in the social. The gamer who kills virtually, the troll who destroys reputations, the digital harasser—all operate under the illusion of being removed, autonomous, limitlessly powerful. The digital membrane separates the subject from consequences of their acts. The other becomes eliminable avatar.
Swatting crystallizes this structure with horror: gamers calling police to report fictitious violence at real addresses. A "game" that has produced deaths. Reality becomes videogame material. "Just do it," a young woman texted, encouraging her boyfriend's suicide. The superego's voice converted to push notification.
The contemporary subject inhabits a limbo between virtual and real without being able to distinguish them. Current clinical practice must name this confusion without moralizing, recognizing that digital violence is violence without mitigation. The other's body was never truly an avatar. The screen lies; the damage is real.
Diagnosis promises clarity. It delivers a label that substitutes the question. Where there was a subject, now there's disorder.
The silent violence of diagnosis.
The diagnostic manual classifies. In that apparently neutral gesture lies violence. The symbolic interpellation of diagnosis can foreclose subjective experience. Naming a disorder is not innocent: it creates realities, closes possibilities, substitutes the label for the question. Where there was a suffering subject, now there is an administrative category.
The history of psychiatry is marked by segregation. First with racist and colonialist accents; then, induced by pharmacology. It was hoped that naturalizing mental illness as brain dysfunction would end stigma. That hope evaporated. Diagnostic violence persists now with neuroscience pretensions. The brain replaces the subject.
Clinical work must resist the classifying temptation without naively rejecting diagnosis. It is about maintaining the tension: using categories when they orient without allowing them to substitute singular listening. The analysand is never their diagnosis; diagnosis is, at best, a provisional hypothesis that transference disproves.
Every border wall was first an inner wall. The migration crisis exposes walls we didn't know we had.
Visible walls, invisible walls.
While we debate border walls and immigration policies, we ignore the walls we build inside. Every physical wall a country erects reflects thousands of psychic walls its citizens had already built. The architecture of fear is first interior, then materializes in concrete and barbed wire. Politicians don't invent fear of the foreigner—they exploit it because it already exists.
The global migration crisis reveals more than public policy problems: it exposes the fragility of our supposed tolerance. When refugees were distant statistics, we were sympathetic; when they knock on our door, we discover walls we didn't know we had. The progressive who defends open borders may find themselves relieved when migrants go to another neighborhood. It's not cynicism—it's the clash between conscious ideals and unconscious defenses.
Dismantling the border wall without dismantling the inner wall only displaces the problem. True immigration policy begins in the psyche—in the capacity to tolerate the presence of difference without needing to turn it into a threat to justify our anxiety.
Reference:
Davids, M. F. (2021). Ethnic purity, otherness and anxiety: The model of internal racism. En K. White & I. Klingenberg (Eds.), Migration and intercultural psychoanalysis: Unconscious forces and clinical issues (pp. 11–29). Routledge.