Social Media as Failed Transitional Space

Though obviously and understandably not alone in this position, I’ve often thought of social media and its impact on the social and relational order to be a fairly insidious offering.  Of the generation that was in late adolescence when Facebook first emerged into our technologically mediated spaces, I was fairly skeptical from the jump, though admittedly at the time this was likely more due to my overall contrarian nature than it was zeal of foresight.  I only succumbed to joining the platform once I realized it had become my friend group’s, and more globally my peer group’s, primary way of organizing in-person social interaction.  Admittedly, as Facebook was the communication platform by which my now wife and I—who first met in graduate school and had socialized a bit in various academic spaces, but did not chance to meet outside of class until agreeing to do so after checking in via Facebook on some final assignments for a class we were both enrolled in—first began dating, I can’t completely discard its value.  However, I think it notable that, otherwise, both of us are mostly resistant to the platform, have often and at various points in our relationship abstained from most or all social media spaces, and largely view them as little other than marketing platforms for independent business ventures.  I think for those who see them as central to the way in which they socialize, connect with, and project themselves to and onto others, these spaces are worthy of a considerable amount of scrutiny, have potentially impacted social dimensions of the culture that are going to be hard to repair, and are central in creating self and self-other configurations that can be fundamentally damaging to the development of a healthy psyche.

Donald Winnicott and Philip Bromberg are the two theorists who most come to mind for me when considering what it means to talk about the development of a self.  Winnicott’s writing, though of the object relation and British Independent tradition, is largely about how the self and the person as individual emerges out of healthy relational and environmental contexts.  In his considerations of the “true” vs the “false” self, the development of the capacity to be alone, and the use of transitional phenomena as ways to secure processes of separation and disillusionment that occur throughout the life span, Winnicott deftly navigated the paradoxical stance of what it means for the individual to always be a self-in-relation and to emerge as a self out of those relations.  Bromberg concerns himself more about the internal dimensions of this phenomena (though still fundamental relationally organized) in his descriptions of self-states and the continuum of “me—not-me” internally organized experience.

The self as an entity always exists as a mediated experience.  This is different from saying the self should exist within the realm of media, though I think accounts for some of the confusion that occurs for the people who graft their sense of self too readily to phenomena that are mediums for representing existence.  With etymological origins in the Latin word for “middle”, and a series of contemporary definitions that all carry within them a quality of “intervening”, the notion of mediating carries within it a quality of “betweenness”, but a betweenness that is active rather than passive.  This is not a between space that emerges organically, but one with an agenda that seeks out a specific relational structure.  One may say that the earliest uses of these platforms were perhaps more organic, as they were given to us with a relatively clean slate in terms of their operational intent.  However, due to the usual market forces of capitalist society, as well as human and cultural influence being what they are, baser impulses eventually arose and were exploited for profit, with the spaces becoming a terrain upon which insecurities are elicited and satisfied in a remarkably expeditious manner, while profits could be raked in at the cost of further commercializing and commodifying identity and human connection.  And this all says nothing of the rampant politicization of the platform and the ways in which huge amounts of data can be packaged and sold to the highest bidder.

Winnicott’s idea of the transitional object is essential to the development of a self in as much as it is the mechanism by which we find ourselves able to navigate separation or disillusionment.  Winnicott is a bit fanciful in his description of this phenomenon, marking it as something that operates on the plain of existence and is therefore, by his measure, never purely internal or external.  Winnicott notes that when the child selects a “lovie”, of any sort, they are both finding and creating it.  This object helps with the navigation from one developmental phase to another, traditionally from the omnipotent position of complete dependence (and satisfaction of that dependence) on the mother to a mode of relatedness whereby we can comfortably embody and tolerate our having become a differentiated entity.  Some common examples are the use of the thumb as a transitional object away from the breast, or the classic teddy bear as something that begins to be carted around when it becomes apparent that mom or dad can no longer be expected to be available at every whim.  Winnicott plays with this concept throughout his text Playing and Reality, noting the various ways in which psychologically this process can be replicated in other phases and other spaces in our lives, noting the ways in which things like language and culture play similar roles of mediating the space between inner-and-outer, between me-and-not-me, and become an active space for negotiating aspects of our experience.

Bromberg navigates similar terrain in his work, highlighting the great difficulty we are presenting our clients with when we asked them to engage in a process of change.  Bromberg carefully cites Winnicott’s ideas about object usage and Ghent’s discussion of paradox in his own paper on resistance, where he speaks about the difficulty in negotiating the boundaries between preservation and change.  The same that gets negotiated in the process in which transitional objects are so useful.  In the idea of object usage, the therapist/analyst themself gets incorporated into the role of transitional object, being tasked with the complicated maneuver of allowing oneself to be used while also using oneself to direct that process in a manner that may be therapeutically or analytically useful to the client.

The idea I want to put forth is that social media, a technology that when used appropriately could conceivably be an interesting vehicle for coming to more clearly define and differentiate oneself, ends up withering on that front by failing to allow folks to effectively negotiate the permeable and paradoxical boundaries at play here.  Platforms like TikTok, SnapChat, and Facebook, work hard to preserve their position in the realm of object relatedness, maintaining a certain level of illusionment and, through the abuse of and failed negotiation of twinship transferences, keep users/consumers firmly entrenched in a me that is not-me.

In Sharon Salzberg’s book on lovingkindness, the word intimacy comes up, specifically in the context of failures to develop an intimate relationship with our self.  As I’ve been reading this text while I’ve been constructing this piece, I think there is something to the notion that transitional phenomena demand a kind of intimacy to be properly used.  Unsurprising that amongst psychoanalysts, Winnicott and Bromberg are two of the most prominent advocates of the necessity of the negotiation of the “real” relationship to produce the kind of change we seek in psychotherapy.  The exchange that takes place in social media, though theoretically between people, is fundamentally a-relational.  It lacks intimacy of any kind while providing the illusion of intimacy, an illusion that one is being invited in the world of another and that the other cares that one is receiving the invitation.  That’s not to say the maintenance of intimate relationships is not possible in this space.  It is in the same way that people use all kinds of technologies to maintain relationships over long distances.  These same technologies, when inadequately incorporated into a position of intimacy, tend to serve the purpose of increasing the degree to which we feel separate.

I think, though, that in writing this I am trying to say something more than social media is insufficient for taking up the role of transitional object.  I think rather what I am getting at is it deliberately fails in that role so as to maintain a kind of dependence and sustain the illusions required to stimulate that dependency.  The original purpose (though this may be too strong of a word) of the transitional object is to make up for the inevitable failures of the “good enough” caretaker.  Disruptions in that initial relationship make it necessary for the child to displace their unanswered relational needs onto an object that is of their choosing and theirs to manipulate in fantasy.  To borrow from the language of the ego psychologists, it is the process by which, in negotiating internal and external in the negotiated fantasies of the transitional object, the child develops the ego strength necessary to tolerate frustrations in the world by developing that capacity somewhat indirectly.

Social media grants no such permission.  For its most influential users to maintain that influence, they must continue to interrupt any transition away from what they have to offer.  Parents know this acutely, though it is a kind of awareness available to anyone who has taken on any sort of caretaking role.  The hardest part of being tasked with being responsible for another is knowing when and how it is appropriate to allow that other to take on the burden of being responsible for and to themselves.  You’ll watch children in a literal sense using play as a space to explore independence, loss, and the failures and successes of self-sufficiency (it is my opinion that all adults do this as well, though largely in the privacy of their own mind and imagination).  However, I don’t think the possibility of finding independence in this space is impossible, but our methods might have to get a bit more creative.  Lately, it’s been suggested by some of my younger clients that they are getting curious about what it might be like to be a content creator rather than just a consumer.  It may seem strange to potentially convince our clients to get more online, but then remember, one of the first things children play out in fantasy when they are sufficiently capable of “playing pretend” is playing house or pretending to be “mommy” or “daddy”.  Ever one to be curious about the possibilities of paradox, perhaps the only way for people to feel more sufficiently developed outside of these spaces is for them to become more engrossingly engaged within them.  Said another way, in some instances, perhaps the only way out of the world of technology, is through it.