Sometimes it seems to me that the entire history of human closeness can be contained in a single movement—from the mouth toward the gaze, from the warmth of skin toward the cold light of the screen. “From the Pacifier to the Screen – A Psychoanalysis of Digital Neurosis” is born from precisely this feeling: that strange, intimate transition we make without noticing, as our solace slowly migrates from the body into the image, from maternal flesh into the unmoving glow of pixels. And I write this text as an entry in the diary of a deeper transformation—one that does not begin with technology, but much earlier, in the darkness of childhood memory, where the first cry was already the first call for meaning.
It is difficult to say when exactly it all began—whether in the moment when the infant relaxes its fingers around the pacifier and the world briefly becomes bearable; or when the adult opens the phone in the middle of the night to feel the same deceptive softness of “someone there,” someone who might respond. From the mouth to the eye—this is our invisible mythology. And when I follow its thread, I begin to understand that digital neurosis is not an illness but a kind of stretched-out memory, in which the body continues to seek that first, absolute wholeness known only to the child in its mother’s arms.
When I describe the screen as the new mother, I do not do it with condemnation but with tenderness—the quiet, slightly painful tenderness we feel when we realize we have replaced something sacred with something convenient. The screen looks at us without seeing us; it comforts us without touching us. It promises presence, yet it remains weightless, dissolved into electric light. And still, we return to it, just as the infant returns to the breast to steady its breathing. In this repetition there is a rhythm—almost sacred, almost prayer-like. When the finger glides downward across the glass, it is as if repeating the first sucking impulse. A circle that never fully closes.
In these pages, which I call my personal confession, I try to capture the connections that remain unseen. In psychoanalysis there are always underground currents—dark, warm, elusive—that move us without our awareness. The instinct for contact, once expressed as a cry for an embrace, now transforms into a need for a notification, for a sound that whispers: I’m here. Notifications are the new cries—each “ping” a brief reassurance, a promise that the world still notices we exist. This is the “digital milk”—a sustenance that never satisfies but maintains the illusion of connection.
Sometimes at night, I feel the strange sadness of this new human existence. Silence now frightens us. Moments in which the screen does not shine resemble an empty space, a breath missing. When silence feels like death, it means connectedness has become not just a habit but an ontological need—like air, like faith, like God, who sometimes is silent but remains. Today, the gods fall silent through switched-off phones.
And yet, when I see the thumb moving in its near-ritual rhythm across the glass, I realize something important: our digital neurosis is not a deviation but a return. A return to that primal closeness, to that unconditionality no adult life can offer. But what do we do when we can neither return to the mother’s body nor fully remain in the world? Then we create light, illusions, screens—second wombs that protect and suffocate at once.
As I write, I ask myself what exactly we are searching for in the endless expanse of the digital. Perhaps we seek what was once a given: the continuum of presence, the uninterrupted warmth, the certainty that the world is whole and we belong to it. Every image we upload is a new version of the Narcissus myth—not because we are vain, but because we are desperately trying to see ourselves reflected, reaching for that lost image of wholeness that once shaped us. The selfie is the new icon—a gaze at the self that both prays and dissolves.
The screen is a mirror, but one that answers with quiet electricity instead of living breath. When we look into it, we seek a witness—someone to say: “Yes, you exist. I see you.” And the more we look, the more we blur into the image itself. The hunger for visibility becomes an endless appetite. The eye becomes a mouth, feeding on pictures.
Sometimes I wonder whether we have not relocated the soul into this light. Whether we have entrusted it to algorithms that know us more as habits than as feelings. The algorithms are the new unconscious—an external system that learns our desires and returns them to us in softened, yet stricter form. They offer the world as a sequence of predicted choices, as a well-calculated destiny. Sometimes, as I scroll, I feel that it is not I who chooses, but something else that chooses for me—gently, invisibly, inevitably.
And yet this is not a lament. Not a tragedy. I’ve learned to see digital neurosis as a new spiritual symptom, not an illness but a call. A prayer spoken with fingers instead of words. We have been alone in this world so many times that perhaps we need a screen that at least pretends to understand us. There is something deeply human—painfully human—in this fabricated closeness.
But one cannot remain forever in the light. Eventually the body begins to cry for itself. For its rhythm, for its breath, for its flesh that cannot be replaced by pixels. And then comes the question that hangs like a thin thread over the whole book: how do we return to the body without denying the world in which we live? How do we remain spiritual without dismissing the human? How do we overcome dependence without isolating ourselves from what connects us?
In the final pages of this inner diary, I begin to believe that it is not about rejection but about transformation. About a deeper, more attentive presence. Something like a modern spiritual discipline—the ability to meet the screen’s light with awareness, not impulse. To hear the signals not as commands but as whispers we may accept or let pass.
I’ve begun practicing this bridge-like sensitivity myself—between glass and skin, between the quiet drifting of thoughts and the even quieter prayer of the heart. The rehabilitation of the body does not mean discarding devices but remembering we are more than them. Placing a hand upon the chest and sensing the pulse no screen can imitate. Stepping outside and letting the air touch us in ways no notification can. Learning to pause, to exhale, to be still.
Perhaps this is the new spirituality—to live in the world without dissolving into its images; to touch the light without becoming its shadow. To accept digital neurosis not as an enemy but as a teacher. It shows us how thirsty we are for love, for attention, for meaning. And precisely because it is so human, we can begin from it and gently move toward something deeper.
As I close this entry, I am left with a quiet, almost prayerful sense: that before we are users, we are souls, and before we are connected, we breathe. And perhaps breath—this most primal, most bodily gesture—is the bridge between the two worlds: the one into which we were born, and the one we have created. And as we learn to move between them, we slowly learn how to be whole.