The adultification of children, contemporary anxiety, and psychoanalysis in the digital age

the violence of the adult gaze and the collapse of symbolic boundaries

Abstract

This study takes as its starting point a contemporary empirical trigger, exemplified by a video by the influencer Felca (2025), which highlights manifestations of the phenomenon of adultification in digital culture. The methodology adopted consists of a theoretical-conceptual review, drawing on classical psychoanalytic authors such as Freud regarding childhood sexuality and the subjective constitution of the subject, and Ferenczi regarding language confusion. It also draws on Dolto, a post-Freudian psychoanalyst, regarding the child as a subject of language. In addition to contemporary thinkers such as Neil Postman, who investigates the erosion of boundaries between the adult and child worlds in The Disappearance of Childhood, and works such as The Burnout Society by Byung-Chul Han, The Subject in Contemporary Times by Joel Birman, and Electronic Intoxications by Julieta Jerusalinsky. The text analyzes the violence—and its consequences—perpetrated by adults who, in conjunction with algorithmic logic, transform childhood into a commodity, a spectacle, and an object of the social gaze’s enjoyment. It is concluded that the psychoanalytic clinic must sustain itself as a space of resistance, listening, and alterity through the reinstatement of lack and subjective time in the face of the prevailing dehumanization facilitated by the digital age.