by Mike Langlois, LICSW 

Many years ago, at a public school I worked at, a Latino student came to see me quiet and fearful. He had just had an encounter in the classroom with his teacher for something he had done in class, which rose to the level of annoyance and distraction, not safety. As I tried to ascertain what had happened, he told me that the teacher had grabbed him, and showed me visible scratch marks on his arm. The teacher corroborated what they had done, and I let the principal know that I needed to file a report for suspected child abuse.

The next day, I was asked to come down to our Central Administration office, where I was told that if I ever did that again I would be fired. Even though the teacher ended up taking leave, my position in that school was not renewed and I was transferred. I had several months of worry before I was rehired by the school system. I was young and naïve and in shock when this happened, but I never forgot it.

I worked in public schools for years, and found it meaningful and powerful work. Over several decades I had the privilege of working with excellent educators and administrators, dedicated, intelligent, overworked. This is to say that I do not think that all school staff are abusive, just that all human beings are imperfect. Working with children and adolescents, is in my opinion, both a sacred trust and in the eyes of many a thankless task.

Over the past several months I have watched school after school enact smartphone bans. The rationale is always the same, even though the research is sketchy and biased: Kids are missing out on social skills, they are becoming distracted and inattentive, they are “addicted” to screens. The metanalysis of this research shows it comes from a handful of journals that are clearly on a mission to fuel moral panic in many ways. But I want to ask us all not to go there for a second, and focus on something else that smartphones can do: They allow the individual to surveil institutions, and provide a degree of balance and transparency.

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To understand why this matters so deeply, I want to turn to Winnicott’s 1963 paper “Communicating and Not Communicating.” Winnicott begins by describing object-relating and then moves to the subject of communicating, and in doing so he establishes what I would consider an existential right: the right to not communicate. He describes this as “a protest from the core of me to the frightening fantasy of being infinitely exploited” and “the fantasy of being eaten or swallowed up.” In the back of your mind, keep this idea of exploitation, because I will want us to consider this in terms of capitalism and the institutional demand for compliance and productivity. Another more benign, less Kleinian way of describing it is the fantasy of being found. There is a connection between being exploited and surveillance that I think we overlook at our peril.

Winnicott states that communication is bound up with the relating to objects, a complex phenomenon that is more than simply maturational processes. Maturation is necessary but not sufficient for relating to objects, and maturation itself requires and depends on the quality of the facilitating environment. The object at first is the subjective phenomenon—I cry and make the breast appear for me. As Winnicott puts it, “A good object is no good unless created by the infant.” At this early stage, the facilitating environment gives the infant the experience of omnipotence, including a creative aspect. Over time the subjective object becomes an object objectively perceived. Only after a considerable degree of maturity has been reached can we train the infant to adapt to the reality principle. 

When the infant experiences aggression it begins to place the object, then placing the object separate from itself insofar as the infant has begun to emerge as an entity. Hating the object carries within it the belief that the object has the potential to be satisfying at some point, while recognizing that at the moment the object is behaving unsatisfactorily. Think of that the next time an adolescent is berating you. There is an intermediate stage in healthy development in which the most important experience in relation to the good or potentially satisfying object is the refusal of it.

This brings us to communication itself. As long as the object is subjective, communication is unnecessary. Once the object becomes objectively perceived, there are two types of communication: explicit communication, which is the individual’s use and enjoyment of communicating, and what Winnicott calls “dumbness”—the individual’s non-communicating self, the personal core or true isolate. The parent can be either or both what I call an enviro-parent and what Winnicott calls an object-parent. The enviro-parent is human, and the object-parent is a thing, although also a part of the parent. Communication, Winnicott tells us, is brought into existence by the unreliability of the environment. When the environment is reliable the infant communicates simply by going on being.

There are two opposites of communication that matter here. The first is simple not-communicating, a state in its own right, like resting, which passes over into communication and reappears just as naturally. The second is a not-communicating that is active and reactive. In the split that occurs, one half of the infant relates to the presenting object with a false or compliant self, while the other half relates to a subjective object—rocking, for instance, is the subjective object rocking me. This split, and the compliant self it produces, is precisely what concerns me when we talk about institutional surveillance of adolescents.

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Winnicott postulates that in the healthy, “maturely” object relating person there is a need for something that corresponds to the state of the split person, in whom one part communicates silently with subjective objects. A sovereign state of the self in my words.

He suggests that there is a healthy use of non-communication in the establishment of the feeling of reality. He goes on to point out that culture, as the adult equivalent of transitional phenomenon, requires of the artist and the spiritual to have an inviolate transitional space that contains the paradoxical “urgent need to communicate and the still more urgent need not to be found.” We accept this of artists and mystics far more easily than we do of adolescence, perhaps because we have in some ways “institutionalized” the idea of such space in the creative and mystical “occupations,” and yet I want to suggest that part of what Winnicott is talking about is not just the need of the core self for silence, but also secrecy. 

He links this core self to Freud’s concept of psychic reality and the unconscious that can never become conscious, as well as Klein’s idea of the silent communication and inner experiences, without which play and play therapy would simply not be possible. But earlier than what Klein means when she describes the “internal” is what Winnicott is getting at when he describes “inner, [which] only means personal, and personal in so far as the individual is a person with a self in process of becoming evolved.”

With mystics, we accept their withdrawal into a personal inner world of sophisticated introjects, which I would expand to include their icons, texts, art and meditational objects. With adolescents we condemn such withdrawal into their inner world and transitional space of smartphones, memes and games, as sullenness, addiction, depression and deviance. We do not allow them their secrets, we do not let them have places where they are silent and concealed, but force them into the place Rilke describes in the poem “Archaic Torso of Apollo,” where he writes, “for here there is no place/ that does not see you. You must change your life.”

Leading into adolescence, if not a part of it, is this situation then, which Winnicott sums up when he says, “it is a joy to be hidden but disaster not to be found.” 

The messages institutions give us and parents for violating that joyful hiddenness are myriad. It threatens their safety. It distracts them from what is (according to authority) important. It impacts, read as damages, their brains and their performance. It prevents them from having relationships that have a determined shape in terms of “healthy.” We simultaneously expect the adolescent self to communicate everything to the adults in their lives so they “can help” while at the same time introduce to marginalized groups the culture of invisibility and not taking up too much space.

Surveilling adolescents is not a facilitating environment, and therefore it does not enable maturation. It does not help adolescents learn to self-regulate. Winnicott suggests, “that in health there is a core to the personality that corresponds to the true self of the [earlier] split personality, [and suggests] that this core never communicates with the world of perceived objects, and that the individual person knows that it must never be communicated with or be influenced by external reality.” He considers healthy persons to both communicate and enjoy communicating with others, but states that the “other fact is equally true, that each individual is an isolate, permanently non-communicating, permanently unknown, in fact unfound.”

This is one if not the main reason why I consider surveillance such a high stakes issue for psychotherapists and our adolescent patients. Like Winnicott, I believe that “at the centre of each person is an incommunicado element” which is “sacred and worthy of preservation.” Winnicott is quite vivid and violent in his language when he describes this “violation of the self’s core,” comparing it as less than rape or being devoured by cannibals. He links it with the idea of it being a developmental achievement to be alone in the presence of someone. He suggests that in the best possible circumstances growth takes place where the child and then adolescent now “possesses three lines of communication: communication that is forever silent, communication that is explicit, indirect and pleasurable, and [a] third or intermediate form of communication that slides out of playing into cultural experience of every kind.”

Does our work with patients allow for them to communicate that they are not communicating? Do we let them signal “I have secrets,” or to use the words of the legendary Gandalf the Grey, “You shall not pass!”? I want to suggest that we may pathologize/label as neurodivergent such isolate states that do not conform to therapist, parent or institutional expectations.

I would be remiss in describing, just as we all would be remiss in not addressing with our patients, the sociopolitical dimensions of surveillance and what Nadhera Shalhoub-Kevorkian describes as security theology. Sadly, we can apply many aspects of settler colonialism to the way we treat adolescents: dehumanizing them in the way I have even done in this presentation, as one lump of identifications, struggles and pathologies or traits; establishing as given institutions needs and rights to surveil them in a unidirectional manner a la Panopticon under the guise of safety, and the creation of a culture of real and imagined fears that are used by schools and parents to justify their management of adolescents and use of various force strategies to achieve adolescent compliance. 

Why does this asymmetry of surveillance matter? Think George Floyd, and more particularly think Darnella Frazier, the woman who filmed the police brutality and murder of him. It is quite arguable that she and her surveillance allowed the murder to remain visible and legible to a shocked and saddened nation, who didn’t want to believe it. Think now about how police departments have instituted bodycams which act as surveillance and deterrence of violence. Most of us tend to be on our best behavior when we are aware we are being watched. Surveillance is not just a tool of fascism and authoritarianism, unless we cede that to others. And as Ruha Benjamin demonstrates, this ceded surveillance technology always disproportionately impacts BIPOC people.

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Recently I became aware that my community has instituted a smartphone ban, for all the usual reasons. A week later I became aware that the school was having a motivational speaker, someone who identifies as “Speaker | Man of God” and is on public social media posting several Instas urging that “Christian Women Submit.” So much for separation of church and state. Does this person have the right to his opinion? Sure. Should he be speaking in our local public school to all of the youth? Not so sure. Does it make me uneasy that if he says anything similar in his public speaking there will be no opportunity for students to record and protest this use of their time, resources and attention? Absolutely.

Winnicott said, and I agree, that compliance is a form of psychiatric illness. Many of us agree when we have a certain emotional and occupational distance from the institution asking us to comply. We mostly root for the rebels in Star Wars, or even closer to home Neoliberals are inclined to urge us all to resist fascism. And yet when it comes to institutions like schools we balk. Parents groan and commiserate with their kids about the new policy, but encourage compliance. Nobody wants to raise a ruckus.

And at the same time, many activists and liberals alike deplore surveillance when they are being surveilled, demonizing the technology while overlooking the fact that they have the power to surveil as well, if we do not give it up. We have seen this power being used by them to great effect in Portland and Minneapolis. Why is it that we hate Big Data, Big AI and the Big Other for watching us? Because we know it is a use and sometimes abuse of power. We know that authorities and institutions, even well-intentioned ones, can use surveillance to harm or mislead us. That, I would suggest, is all the more reason not to give up our own ability to surveil, our own access to technology and power easily.

Hindsight is 20/20: I doubt anyone would say today that Darnella Frazier should have trusted police to do the right thing, that she was being “divisive” and “extremist.” And yet I imagine that many people who are intimately acquainted with schools, clinics and other social settings that care for youth will want to criticize my bringing this up. “We always partner with our students and community,” they will say. “You are promoting an adversarial relationship with school staff and you aren’t making our jobs easier.”

As a former proud member of several school systems staff, I understand the work. I know how hard it is; how overworked and underfunded public schools especially are. And yet that does not take away from the fact that we need to understand how institutions, including schools, work. Like you, I care about our children. But I want to advocate for our youth to do what they do best: Rebel. Resist compliance with bans, question them, get into good trouble with them. Will this make me unpopular with some educators and therapists? You bet. Am I being a rabble rouser? Yes indeed.

Technology amplifies lots of things: conflict, support, power, information and misinformation. Do you really want to trust institutions blindly and cede your or your child’s ability to surveil and remain the observed? I don’t. I want people that work with my child and my community’s adolescents to be “on the record” at all times. That doesn’t assume they are all evil, but it is naïve to assume that complying with all authority figures is a good idea either. I am not sure how you can be against authoritarianism in general but have a special carve out where children and adolescents are concerned. The phrase we hear all the time is “think outside the box,” so I hope people will think long and hard about the power we are giving up when they ask youth to put their smartphones in a box at the start of the school day, making what goes on in the school institution a black box where surveillance goes one way. Smartphones are not only a distraction, they are a surveillance tool. Surveillance is only a bad thing when one group has the monopoly on it. Banning smartphones is a form of silencing youth and preventing them from having the power to bear witness. Respectfully, I dissent.

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Institutions usually want us compliant, as it makes it easier for them to function effectively as industrial projects. This includes educational, mental health, medical, and other institutions, which therapists are often located partly in if not embedded in.

In Playing and Reality, Winnicott states the following:

It is creative apperception more than anything else that makes the individual feel that life is work living. Contrasted with this is a relationship to external reality which is one of compliance, the world and its details being recognized but only as something to be fitted in with or demanding adaptation. Compliance carries with it a sense of futility for the individual and is associated with the idea that nothing matters and that life is not worth living. In a tantalizing way many individuals have experienced just enough creative living to recognize that for most of their time they are living uncreatively, as if caught up in the creativity of someone else, or of a machine… living creatively is a healthy state, and.. compliance is a sick basis for life.

Notice that Winnicott says “a relationship to external reality” and not “the relationship” or more to our point “the only relationship.”

This compliance, like all forms of occupation and colonization, requires the sacrifice of individual freedoms, creativity, rebelliousness, quirkiness, difference, sexualities, racial, class and gender identities, physical and intellectual differences, in order to reduce life to order and productivity and establish a hegemony that remains largely invisible and intergenerationally transmitted by adults in the ways that Alice Miller has described in The Drama Of The Gifted Child.

I would like to start a conversation with psychotherapists going forward with the alarming but necessary thought that we are all to some extent complicit in this. As adults entangled in the capitalist system of the U.S. to some extent, we serve at the pleasure of the anxious elites, in many cases parents, agencies, school settings and institutions which are also embedded in a model that requires monies to continue, and therefore often emphasizes maximum productivity in minimum time. Whether measured by session rates, grades, treatment plans, insurance panels, rap sheets, office space rentals, clicks, likes or referrals, we are all embedded in this system even as we perhaps struggle to thrive in it. How can we be facilitating environments for adolescents in this moment in history? How can we do better by them than we were done to? I want to suggest that we need to provide them a therapy that allows them to remain hidden, recognized and honored simultaneously and paradoxically; a therapy that is playful, radical, transgressive, and therefore uncomfortable for therapists and parents. How is that done? Well, that is where we all come in and together at this point. Let’s begin.

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Mike Langlois received his BA from Connecticut College in 1991, and his MSW from Smith College School for Social Work in 1994.  He has 30 years of experience counseling adults and families. He started out working in public school and clinical settings to advance the access of students with differing abilities and learning challenges.  Mike identified the crucial role of emerging technologies for equity and health.  His work includes treating patients who use video games from a gamer-affirmative stance, and his theoretical background combines psychodynamic theory, contemporary cognitive and learning theory with emerging technologies.  He is currently a Teaching Associate in Psychiatry at Harvard Medical School, where he supervises interns and clinicians.  He also served on the Massachusetts Commission for LGBTQ Youth. He was appointed to the Massachusetts Commission for GLBT Youth, & serves in an advisory capacity to the NASW on issues including youth suicide prevention. Currently Mike serves as a resource on digital literacy & social justice issues such as dismantling racism, LGBTQIA awareness & safety, disability awareness, & cultural awareness. Mike is licensed in CA, CT, DC, IL, MA, ME, NY, OR, RI, & VT.Mike is the author of Reset: Video Games & Psychotherapy.

To learn more about Mike’s clinical work, publications and other offerings visit: https://mikelanglois.com/