L’amour fusionnel des adolescents libanais à l’ère des moyens virtuels (Étude de cas de Gaïa)

Abstract

Virtual communication applications are highly used by teenagers in today's world. These tools have an important impact on relationships and breakups. Our doctoral research in the field of clinical psychology and psychopathology is based on a qualitative study of six, 16- to 18-year-old, Lebanese teenagers (three boys and three girls) who had previously established romantic relationships and breakups through “chat” on “WhatsApp”. The main objective of this research is to prove that breaking up through virtual communication tools is a way of avoiding psychic pain and abandonment anxiety. In addition, this hypothesis is verified by administrating three clinical interviews and two other interviews that involve passing projective tests such as the TAT and the TSEA. This article which follows our research, will highlight and show that those teenagers have also difficulties to detach from their partners during the relationship and communicate mostly through virtual tools. However, this problematic wasn’t examined enough in our research, therefore we decided to explore it in this article. We will present the case study of Gaia, which exhibits the aspects of the abandonment anxiety, and the difficulty of separation from the partner.