Thanks to social media, the adolescent is experimenting with his relation to others and himself. Sometimes these expressions of identity through images go too far. Even though the content shared by adolescents may shock, hypothesizing that this is all “deviance” has its limits. On the Internet, what differentiates psychical suffering from a typical adolescent posting would be the young person’s ability to inscribe him or herself afterwards between narcissistic and objectal, within a desire for “extimacy.”

Adolescence, 2016, 34, 4, 843-852.