Virtual dependence: a phenomenon-structural view about digital compulsion

Abstract

Virtual dependence can be a phenomenon capable of naming a contemporary socio-cognitive mutation. From the perspective of Structural Phenomenological Psychopathology, using a brief clinical case study, we seek to analyze how virtual dependence finds fertile ground in the postmodern technological social structure. This is a qualitative study based on the phenomenological method. Fundamental issues such as temporality, spatiality, corporeality and intersubjectivity were analyzed. In them, we seek to expose that subjectivity is always intersubjectivity and historicity. The study pointed out that social factors related to virtual dependence, such as psychic isolation, competitive individualization and intersubjective impoverishment, can interfere with the subject's structure, revealing a condition of existential vulnerability and psychic saturation. The frequency of compulsive behavior is important for the understanding of the case, but it is the structural-phenomenon analysis that allows us to understand psychic suffering as immobility in times of connectivity. Suffering lies less in frequency and more in the sense of stagnant, crystallized existence