The digital age, in its ever-expanding state of technology, continues to offer a reconceptualization of our most fundamental human characteristics with each technological advancement. Mark Zuckerberg and Elon Musk are two prominent figures in forging this new and dubious path for humanity. Most recently, Elon Musk has just announced that the first human candidate for Neuralink, a surgical implant meant to merge the brain with the internet, is ‘recovering well’ from the surgery. Jan de Vos’ 2020 book titled “The Digitalisation of (Inter)subjectivity” discussed how the efforts of these tech billionaires and other digital age technologies ultimately serve the commodification of the subject and give rise to a ‘digital death drive’. In his book, he points out how our technology and social media were created with psychological models in mind, essentializing what it means to be human through what the psychological and neuropsychological ‘psy-sciences’ purport being human to be. As such, digitalising every aspect of the human experience may lead to the undoing of humanity as we know it. Adjacently, philosopher Byung-Chul Han has written on psychopolitics and the impact of rampant technosolutionism and neoliberalism on how humans live their lives. He alerts his readers to the frictionless state of being that ensues from the neoliberal focus on performance and production. In the fully-realized digital society, technologies that proclaim to facilitate intersubjective engagement instead commodify the human subject. This paper will follow suit with de Vos’ psy-critique of these issues, exploring whether or not psychoanalysis can offer an alternative to the predominant psychological and neuropsychological models that risk objectifying the human subject.

This presentation will present the results of an explorative study in which self-presentations on TikTok were examined in connection with content on eating disorders. Representations in which the recovery from eating disorders is discussed and documented were also included and understood as a digital expression in the sense of learning from experience.

The latter are also known as #Recovery. While there are already international findings on the thematization of eating disorders on social media platforms such as Instagram, there is still a need for research on representations on the comparatively young platform TikTok. The changed and thus new formats on TikTok - especially short videos - in turn lead to changed forms of aestheticization of self- and body presentations associated with eating disorders.

Combining media theoretical and psychoanalytical social psychological perspectives, selected qualitative form and content analyses of videos are presented and discussed on the basis of key questions: What meanings about eating disorders are intentionally conveyed by adolescents and young adults via videos? How do the manifest motives relate to the aestheticization of the self-presentations and thus also to implicitly conveyed meanings?

Drawing on psychoanalytic theory, we present a qualitative content analysis of selected videos and argue that they necessitate a reconceptualization of the psychoanalytic concept of ‘hysteria’. Traditionally understood as a regressive condition which often seeks a return to childhood and the ‘pure’ or ‘innocent’ body of the child while maintaining strict bodily boundaries against others, the TikTok videos show a type of hysteria which maintains the holding onto strict symptom-based identities, but also an opening up towards unknown users on TikTok. This act is often underscored through the use of the #ForYou hashtag. Secondly, many videos also present a creative and complex negotiation, rather than turning away from, issues of sexuality by tapping into existing aesthetic regimes on the platform.

Historically, discussions of self-harm in fiction have prioritised concerns around imitation – that is, the possibility that seeing or reading about self-harm might cause people to self-harm. Such discussions have prioritised the views of parents, clinicians, researchers, and politicians: people who self-harm have often been erased or ignored. This paper explores specifically how such debates might be altered or radically reframed when experiences of self-harm are centred rather than marginalised, opening up broader questions regarding how Literary and Cultural Studies might draw on experiential knowledge in interpreting and assessing the function and impact of fiction.

In doing so, the paper employs an innovative, interdisciplinary methodology to interweave Literary and Sociological approaches, drawing on a close reading of the HBO miniseries Sharp Objects (2018), and 16 qualitative interviews with people with experience of self-harm. By centring their perspectives, the paper will critique assumptions regarding what is a ‘good’ depiction of self-harm, and the tendency to limit what ‘counts’ as a happy ending to recovery and the cessation of self-harm. Instead the paper will offer alternate views and forms of conclusion which centre the complex, uncertain temporalities of experiences of self-harm.

First, I will explore participants’ frustration that embodied after-effects of self-harm, specifically scars, are often written out of fictional narratives, erasing the ways that self-harm lingers and extends through time in complex ways. I will connect this to participants’ desires for alternative forms of chronicity, and for textual genres or forms that might represent ongoingness or resist containment through totalising conclusion. Thus, the paper brings together aesthetic and social concerns to explore what it might mean to want or resist an ending in the context of self-harm, both in fiction and in life. In doing so it demonstrates one (among many) possible way that Psychosocial Studies might learn from experience.