We see that the Internet offers many choices of pleasure and therefore many phenomena of addiction. For example: compulsive shopping online, compulsion to online games, compulsion to chat, compulsion to cybersex, compulsive search for information, compulsion to follow the stock market price, etc...
With the internet there are 2 possible ways:
1- A compulsion based and structured on the search for pleasure. It is a "perverse" compulsion. Perversion is the diversion of an object from its function to a pleasure:
- compulsive shopping,
- game,
- sex,
- online business
2 - A compulsion structured on the search for control and therefore based on fear. It is an obsessive-compulsive disorder :
- online trading,
- compulsive search for information
All obsessive-compulsive disorders are rooted in fear. Faced with anxieties, faced with fears, we put in place attempts at solutions which can be avoidance, control or asking for help. Generally people who have long studies, who have very structured activities requiring a lot of concentration all have a slightly obsessive tendency, and will tend to want to control everything.
Very often we find a mixture of perversion/obsession = Pleasure/Fear (control). The person absolutely wants to control the world around them. But control is an illusion because the person can seek and find information but cannot intervene on it.
Strategies for taming addiction
1 - For shopping, e-commerce
The person is usually asked to spend €5 a day, but not a penny more or a penny less. The person will tend to laugh at this prescription. But it is a prescription that will very quickly become boring because the practitioner takes control of the pleasure and imposes it on the patient. And an imposed pleasure is never a pleasure. The person will calculate every day what he can buy for exactly €5. It's a job without pleasure for her. So we are going to distort the pleasure by making it forced. We do almost the same thing for online discussions (for example “Chatter” 3 times a day for 1 hour) as well as for dependencies related to the recording and control of information or information overload: (we will ask the person to go online for 5 minutes every hour to read the news to check if anything has changed. So by prescribing the compulsion we take control of it. But the person can say no.
2 - For cybersex
- We can ask the person to write a letter (to his mother for example) to confess his perversion, to be sent only if we exceed the imposed limit of daily navigation (for example 1 hour.)
- At the same time, every day one can ask to make eye contact with his colleagues, support and lower him, and then look again, smiling.
- For some cases, inserting a little 'real into the virtual' or encouraging frequent 'real' meetings between the two virtual lovers. And the real will change every day because everything that is of the order of fantasy in relation to this virtual life lived on the internet will be confronted with the real and therefore will change the game of the virtual.