1. Home
2. Culture
3. The Unconscious in the Digital Age: What Freud and Lacan Would Have Seen on Our Screens

What if the digital sphere, far from being merely a tool for communication or distraction, were above all a site for the projection of our individual unconscious? Seen through the lenses of Freud and Lacan, this hypothesis invites us to interpret connected life as a stage where our most hidden psychic mechanisms are exposed and endlessly reenacted in plain view. Our clicks, our likes, our stories—each operates as a signal, often beyond our awareness, tracing the contours of our desires, our lacks, our anxieties, and our repetitions.

Freud repeatedly insisted that the unconscious cannot be grasped directly; it reveals itself instead through slips of the tongue, dreams, fantasies, and symptoms. Today, the web provides a stage where these formations of the unconscious assume new forms. Each Google search, each video watched on repeat, each story posted—or deleted—becomes the expression of a drive, a desire, or a repression. The smartphone, grafted to the hand, serves as a relay of the psychic apparatus: it captures, archives, and replays what cannot be spoken elsewhere.

The phenomenon of ASMR (“Autonomous Sensory Meridian Response”) provides a striking example. In this trend, millions of internet users seek a soothing shiver through whispers, slow gestures, or amplified repetitive sounds. It enacts a desire for regression—a return to sensory shelter, to maternal intimacy. Here, the digital becomes a matrix fulfilling an unconscious demand for safety, for oceanic fusion, for intrauterine sounds. The enormous popularity of these videos—some surpassing 100 million views—reveals the extent to which the modern subject unconsciously projects archaic needs onto the digital stage.

Another example is the compulsion of the “infinite scroll” on TikTok or Instagram. What begins as a few minutes often stretches into two hours, leaving the user unable to stop, caught in the endless repetition of short, humorous, or astonishing videos. This is a clear illustration of what Freud termed the compulsion to repeat: the individual returns relentlessly to the same impulse, seeking a lost affect or a meaning that continually slips away.

Lacan demonstrated how identity is initially formed in the image, through the gaze of the Other, in the mirror. Social networks—particularly Instagram and Snapchat—intensify this dynamic. The individual posts, awaits reactions, and adjusts themselves accordingly, at times becoming lost in the idealized image they present. The unconscious demand thus takes the form of a desperate search for love and recognition.

The trend of the “extreme selfie,” seen notably among influencers or in “danger selfies” (some even risking their lives for a spectacular photograph), embodies the logic of a magnified ego, offered entirely to the gaze of the Other. Here, the unconscious expresses itself through the dramatization of the self, sometimes pushed to the point of the subject’s dissolution, the person almost entirely defined by others’ expectations.

This phenomenon is heightened by digital filters such as Bold Glamour on TikTok, which reshape the face in real time, erasing the boundary between reality and fantasy. Many online accounts describe a kind of “selfie dysphoria,” a discomfort experienced upon seeing one’s unfiltered face after prolonged exposure to filtered images. Once again, the unconscious is at work: the filter is not a mere embellishment, but a projection of an ideal ego, sometimes expressing an unbearable psychic tension.

The internet is also permeated by violence, anxiety, shame, and the repetition of trauma. The phenomenon of “hate-watching” (watching videos one despises) reflects a paradoxical enjoyment linked to the death drive, the pleasure found in hatred, in the repetition of discomfort.

In the same vein, the massive success of anonymous confessions on Reddit’s r/confession reveals how the unconscious manifests in the act of self-exposure: the unveiling of shame and the narcissistic demand to be seen—even within spaces imagined as hidden. Digital “sharing” is not always synonymous with transparency or authenticity; it can be an often futile attempt to unburden oneself, to repair a fracture, or to reconcile with one’s own ghosts. Each confession posted under a pseudonym recounts a fragment of the subject, as surely as a dream.

Finally, the proliferation of conversational bots as “imaginary friends” (for example, Replika, Anima, Character.AI) offers the subject a new space in which the unconscious can express itself. Speaking to an AI often means speaking to a projected image of oneself, exploring desires, fears, and fantasies within an apparent sense of safety. Many users report confiding in their bot about subjects they would not dare discuss with a human, the digital space thus becoming the arena of a fantasized transference, where the symptom is laid bare before the bot.

Nothing in the unconscious is ever forgotten. Digital technology, with its built-in logic of storage and traceability, functions as a memory without oblivion. Old Facebook statuses that resurface, Google Photos memories that appear years later, tweets unearthed to compromise a reputation—all of this reflects the return of the repressed. What was thought erased resurfaces, insisting like a truth long buried within the subject.

The Monica Lewinsky affair, tweets that resurface years later, instances of “revenge porn” (the non-consensual sharing of intimate images), and the phenomenon of “cancel culture” all illustrate how the unconscious—what cannot be spoken, yet always returns—finds in digital technology a spectacular, sometimes devastating, mode of expression.

In an era when every digital gesture leaves a trace, and every desire is recorded, shared, and repeated, digital technology acts as the subject’s most faithful mirror—sometimes cruel, sometimes liberating, always revealing. Acknowledging that our online lives mirror, amplify, and at times distort the unconscious compels us to reconsider modern symptoms, to discern—amid the noise of the Internet—the faint whispers of our ghosts. Far from neutral, our screens stage another scene: one in which the subject dreams, worries, performs, reenacts, and tells their story—to themselves and to others—often without even realizing it.