ABSTRACT
In the age of digitalisation, forms of self-tracking are increasingly finding their way into everyday life. Using integrated functions in smartphones, body-related parameters in particular are automatically recorded and visualised in a seductively simple way by using apps. There is still relatively little research into how these technological developments affect people with specific mental disorders. Using partial results from the study “The Measured Life”, a psychoanalytic approach will be used to show how women with bulimic symptoms develop specific object relations with “self-tracking”. A psychodynamic typical of bulimia oscillates between desires for symbiosis and separation as well as fears of dependency. The results lead to two differentiable modes on the manifest level: On the one hand, a certain vulnerable susceptibility to self-tracking manifests itself, in which ambivalent-active, partly enthusiastic, but also self-destructive practices are characteristic. On the other hand, there are strategies of intentional distancing from an experience generated by self-tracking, which is characterised by fears of loss of control, emotional overload and dependency. Using the example of self-tracking, this chapter shows the relevant contribution that psychoanalytic research into digital phenomena and their effects can make.
