Social media has profound impact on how we experience the world and interact with others. Rapidly advancing technology has created platforms that have become increasingly image- based and emotionally manipulative. Do the new patterns of communication change patients’ mental processes? Is free association becoming more imagistic? Contemporary clinical set- tings invite new perspectives on the intersections between the social and individual realms, patients’ modes of expression, and analysts’ interpretations.
In the mosaic of virtual life, images prevail. In the place of artis- tic production conceived by an exceptional talent, we now find more democratic and widespread visual forms: photographs, reels, videos, short digital stories, and so on. This increase of visual ele- ments on social media posts and interactions has an impact on communication, social connection, and virtual identity. The storytelling habits are transitioning from words to imagery, from lived to virtually experienced, from written and spoken to imagistically constructed. This movement slowly but steadily may be changing how we live, what we feel, and how we express ourselves. Conse- quently, it impacts how patients free associate—and perhaps how analysts perceive mental processes.
It was Sigmund Freud who first addressed how imagistic compo- nents become connected to certain characteristics of manipulated groups, shaping social mentality and repressing individualization: “A group is extraordinarily credulous and open to influence . . . It thinks in images, which call one another up by association . . . and whose agreement with reality is never checked by any reasonable function” (1921, p. 78). Most influential social media platforms promote or require communication in images and short sen- tences. The majority of their users are teenagers and young adults: Auxier and Anderson (2022) describe a study in which “A majority of Americans say they use YouTube and Facebook, while use of Ins- tagram, Snapchat, and TikTok is especially common among adults under 30.” If mental representations are created by the internalization of what is happening between us and the external world, what types of representation are likely to be formed in the minds of those who predominantly learn and interact in social media contexts with imagistic content?
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