New forms of self and psychic suffering today and their implications for psychoanalysis

We are excited to announce that two new papers from CICSI research have been published, exploring new forms of self and psychic suffering today as a result of our highly competitive and pressurized social world.

Both articles are available via our publications tab.

In the first of these articles, we draw on a few vignettes from a psychoanalytic clinic to show how fragmented, exhausted selves struggle to maintain coherence amidst relentless demands for productivity and self-optimisation, often presenting a split between outward functionality and inner turmoil. Individuals start relying on external scaffolding like addictions or social media validation to hold themselves together.

We examine how Freud encapsulated the dynamics at the base of the self of his era in terms of ‘sublimation’; and Marcuse characterised his as based in ‘repressive desublimation’, before asking, how we shall describe the main dynamics forming the self in our own era.

Our propsal is to use ‘depressive delimination’ to denote the struggles of fragmented, exhausted selves desperately seeking to maintain coherence, both experiencing the dissolution of internal psychic structures under pressure and attempting to delimit themselves artificially, with technical or chemical crutches. We call this external prostheses — dating apps, antidepressants, productivity systems, therapeutic regimens, that one deploys in an attempt to support psychic functioning.

‘Depressive delimination’ describes the self’s desperate act of attempting to delimit itself and retain some coherence because it is no longer able to achieve and find meaning through sublimation. This new term indicates our drawing of artificial boundaries (the ‘delimination’ part); as well as an acknowledgment, of insufficiency and the psychic suffering that comes with it (the ‘depressive’ part).

Does this resonate with you? Does ‘depressive delimination’ make sense to you as a term? Does it seem apt to describe the phenomenon we sketch above?

Your thoughts and comments are very welcome.

We exploring the topic of psychic suffering and its social contexts further at our summer school in September – please find more details here: https://www.cicsi-uni.org/summer-school-2025