Mediatized Syndromes
Description
IPA/FLZ:
“Disturbances shaped by screen culture, algorithmic influence, and cinematic imagery — and urges clinicians to consider how media environments infiltrate the unconscious.”
Discussion
Reclaiming the Unconscious in a Mediatized Age
"In today’s world, the screen has evolved far beyond a mere communication tool – it is now a dominant ideological apparatus shaping our very desires and fears. Media culture, spanning cinema, television, and social networks, has penetrated into the deepest layers of the psyche, directly reconstructing unconscious processes that Freud once mapped through dreams and slips. Where Freud described the “royal road” of the dream and Lacan the “symbolic gap” of language, we now face an algorithmic and cinematic colonization of those spaces. This report, building on the initial IPA/FLŽ strategy document, calls for a comprehensive psychoanalytic intervention against what we term mediatized syndromes – the perverse psychological formations arising from our immersion in screen-driven culture. It is an urgent manifesto for analysis-oriented psychotherapists, cultural critics, and activists to reclaim the unconscious from the clutches of media’s spectacle and algorithmic control.
Mediatized syndromes refer to the new array of psychological disturbances and personality formations cultivated by continuous exposure to media images and narratives. Under the mediatized regime, the unconscious is no longer given space to speak through symbols or absence; instead, it is bombarded and “re-programmed” by externally imposed images and ready-made fantasies. In effect, the media acts as a colonial force on the psyche, aestheticizing symptoms, normalizing constant exposure, and commodifying even our most intimate fantasies. What was once the private realm of dreams and desires has been occupied by the public stage of screens, causing profound effects on mental health at both individual and collective levels.
Crucially, this strategy report zeroes in on two intertwined cultural forces that have been weaponized in the mediatized age: cinematic culture and feminism."